10 Things I Hate About The Undertaker

Everyone knows that Mark Calaway is old school through and through. For the most part, he’s still maintaining as much kayfabe as possible in this era of smartphones and Twitter: he doesn’t do out-of-character interviews and he’s not had a volume of memoirs published yet.

And as everyone knows, the old school professional wrestling mentality says that an outgoing top guy uses his final years to give the rub to up-and-comers, like Mick Foley did with the final few big matches on his bump card, or like Jericho’s doing now.

And then there’s Bray Wyatt, the man that everyone expected would be positioned as the successor to the Undertaker’s weird ‘phenom’ monster/legend character. That guy with the magnetic aura who (as a heel) would be the WWE’s top dragon to slay, or (as a babyface) the dragon-slayer.

It turns out that we were right about that, however, backstage scuttlebutt (like gossip with a no-selling gimmick) is that Vince McMahon believes that he’s already created his new Undertaker in Bray Wyatt and his Family!

Leaving aside for the moment how idiotic it is that McMahon would believe that Windham Rotunda could get over like Mark Calaway did without any of the office protection for his gimmick, his finish or his storylines that The Undertaker received for all those years… Bray Wyatt has faced The Undertaker in two major storylines in 2015 alone, and been utterly wiped out in both of them.

At WrestleMania 31, it was in a distinctly average one-on-one match - the underwhelming build-up for which Wyatt handled entirely on his own, as the Undertaker’s actual return was saved for the big event itself. Towards the end of the year, it looked like a resurgent Wyatt had taken the upper hand when, this time with the Family in tow, he claimed to have taken the souls of both the Undertaker and Kane, and stripped their power from them for himself.

Of course, everyone knows how that ended up, in a worthless loss near the top of the worst Survivor Series card in years, where The Undertaker celebrated exactly twenty-five years in the company by going over in a ten minute tag team match that made none of the participants look good, and actively made Wyatt himself look like a useless putz.

Calaway’s a smart guy and he must have known how ridiculous and shortsighted this was. He also has the backstage stroke to have had the match made more dramatic, or to have reversed the win. To at least give his supposed successor something.

The fact that he didn’t do any of that doesn’t reflect well on him.