3. Kevin Owens Isn't Mick Foley, So Don't Put Him Through A Foley-Style WWE Grind
Do note that before Mick Foley deservedly became WWE Champion in 1999, he'd lost an ear, willfully thrown himself onto concrete floors, wrestled in matches with barbed wire and C-4 explosives, accidentally lit a fan on fire, wrestled a match in a boiler room, and fallen three times both off a through an enclosed steel cage that was 15-20 feet above the ring. While Kevin Owens isn't a hardcore wrestler, in Vince McMahon's WWE where physical oddballs with charisma and innate talent are forced to consistently prove their worth as performers, Kevin Owens may be the technical wrestling version of Mankind. After all, Owens has wrestled John Cena on three occasions and beaten him once, wrestled Finn Balor in a main event level match in Tokyo, Japan, and all of this after a decade of night in and night out defending his reputation of literally being once of the most iconic independent wrestlers of his generation. Maybe if this weren't Vince McMahon's WWE, he'd have been rewarded for getting over and taking the company's most iconic modern performer to the limit and beyond with the United States Championship.
Besides having been an independent professional wrestling manager for a decade, Marcus Dowling is a Washington, DC-based writer who has contributed to a plethora of online and print magazines and newspapers writing about music and popular culture over the past 15 years.