10 Part-Timers Who Screwed With The WWE Roster
8. The Return Of The Prodigal Son
Bret Hart's interminable grudge match with Vince McMahon at WrestleMania XXVI - if you can call that farrago a 'match' at all - lasted for only eleven minutes, but with entrances and introductions, that expanded to twenty. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that those twenty minutes seemed to last twice as long, if not more, the match was a monumental waste of time. Hart couldn't work: he was physically and legally incapable of wrestling even the most basic of matches, let alone the intense kind of brawling showdown that the feud was calling for. The story of the match also included cameo performances from the Hitman's dysfunctional family - who, for the most part, the crowd didn't know and didn't care about.
Meanwhile, the plan was that Vince intended the sustained, one-sided dull-as-dishwater clobbering from Hart to turn him babyface: that it would deliberately go on a little too long, and shift audience perceptions in his favour. The problem was that the Mr. McMahon character had acted like such an a-hole throughout the course of the angle that he couldn't have turned babyface if hed literally transformed into a giant baby in the centre of the ring.
This is the match that McMahon chose as one of the tentpole bouts of his annual sports entertainment extravaganza: a poorly conceived, poorly paced, poorly executed glorified RAW beatdown segment with two non-wrestlers and a string of non-entities which dragged on too long on purpose.
Meanwhile, everyone else on the card was marginalised to make room. Ten men took part in that year's Money in the Bank ladder match, at least three too many, making it a hopelessly muddled, contrived mess. Twenty-six WWE superstars competed in a jobber-level eight minute dark battle royal. CM Punk's grudge match against Rey Mysterio got six minutes. The tag team title match got three minutes. Even Triple H only managed to scrape twelve minutes for his own grudge match with Sheamus. The result was that the roster left WrestleMania XXVI shortchanged to the point of robbery.