10 Reasons 2022 Was Wrestling's WILDEST Year Ever

8. Mandy Rose Fired For Subscription Page

Cody Rhodes
WWE.com

Call it unfortunate, a shame, short-sighted or hypocritical, but the December release of former NXT Women’s Champion Mandy Rose just hours after she hastily dropped her title was a terrible coda to the year.

Rose, who was one of WWE’s better reclamation projects by sending her to NXT to reinvent herself, was canned after NXT higher-ups became increasingly concerned about the adult-themed content of her subscription page. Her 413-day title reign came to an end when Roxanne Perez cashed in her Iron Survivor Challenge title match immediately rather than waiting until New Year’s Evil in January.

What made this particularly galling was that NXT had spent more than a year selling Rose and her Toxic Attraction cohorts Jacy Jayne & Gigi Dolin as sexed-up vixens, having them parade around half-naked on television every week, very clearly putting their physical attributes on display for the horny sexagenarian audience.

The release basically said that WWE/NXT could make money off Rose’s body, but she could not. Throw in that Shawn Michaels, who once posed for Playgirl, made the decision to quickly take the NXT Women’s Championship off her and release her makes this even worse.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.