10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE In 2012
7. The End Of An Era
Billed with the above phrasing, Triple H's dramatic WrestleMania 28 Hell In A Cell clash with The Undertaker was designed to be something of a sendoff for their generation. With Shawn Michaels as the man in the middle (himself only two years post-retirement), the central premise was that the future was now and their time was then.
This was rendered b*llocks over and over again of course, not least when a real Era came to a tragic conclusion in June 2012.
Having hilariously failed to get any of the titular Redemption that supposedly underpinned the final season, wrestlers and fans alike said goodbye to the original and accursed version of NXT.
Triple H takes some sh*t on these pages, but fair f*cks to him for getting three more letters almost as over as his own initials. Especially in 2012, when they were mud. Your writer has a deep affection for the misfit toys vibe of NXT Season 5 (carried mostly by the misadventures of Johnny Curtis, Maxine, Derrick Bateman and Kaitlyn) but the move to Full Sail University was the first of several major steps in rethinking the organisation's fatally flawed developmental system.