10 Terrible Wrestling Moments (Saved With One Genius Fix)
From the ridiculous to the sublime - starring Vince McMahon, Sting, and more...
Certain wrestling moments are irredeemable.
There's no genius fix with which to salvage something like the Shockmaster's infamously humiliating debut. A rotund oaf in a glittery stormtrooper fell flat on his fooking arse. If he doesn't fall over, he's still Ole Anderson with his very specific voice modulation kink.
Nor is there any genius retrospective fix with which to correct the simultaneous death of the Fiend and the babyface Seth Rollins character. True, they could have simply put the Fiend over first time, but it was The Fiend and WWE is WWE. They were always going to feed him to Goldberg, treating Wyatt's lore like a parent would treat their child's first short story before going through the budget and deciding how the real money is spent.
The Katie Vick angle too was beyond saving, even if Triple H did not actually have sexual intercourse with a corpse. He pretended to shaft a mannequin mocked up to be a corpse. This supposedly disgusting moment however was less repulsive than sitting through his match with Booker T. That was the real bout of necrophilia: Trips buried the corpse and bonked it senseless at WrestleMania XIX, and the one-pump chump only took 23 seconds. Sick freak.
However, despite seemingly overwhelming odds, there are in fact ways of rescuing the following professional wrestling atrocities...
10. Bayley's Horrendous Main Roster Face Run
The terrible moment:
Bayley wasn't a UWF-i or RINGS super-fan.
She was a WWE super-fan and thus had to know she'd be expected to wield a kendo stick at some point or other. One is used in one in every four matches, for f*ck's sake. From a character perspective - and a "Why in the f*ck would you do that to somebody you expect the audience to get behind?" perspective - the decision to book Bayley as an ostensible pacifist was just mental. The 2017 programme with Alexa Bliss killed her character dead. She never really recovered until 2020, during which she finally discovered her confidence and used it to inject some sorely-needed improvised feeling to a dismal, dismal pandemic product.
An act that magical should never have turned.
The genius fix:
If WWE couldn't sanction or even understand a nice-hearted character in tune with her innocence, use the storyline to reinvent Bayley as a vengeful, weapon-wielding ass-kicker capable of dishing out just harrowing, awesome beatings, possibly with the guidance of Mick Foley.
Adapt (or Americanise) the core appeal of joshi almost by using the dissonance of pigtails and bloodshed to get Bayley over as killer all the cooler for how atypical she looks.
Anything except have her allude to fancying Corey Graves. That's the last thing anybody wants to see.