10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE In 2014
8. The Early Days Of Rusev
2014 may seem too late in the day to have been prattling on with the foreign menace gimmick, but the original version of the Rusev gimmick served 'The Bulgarian Brute' well before WWE ultimately tired of it a year later.
However, a story bubbled under during his first few months that the company couldn't do much to push back by the time the damage was already done. As a representative of the cartoonish 1980s vision of Russia (think Rocky IV squashed into the politics of Vladimir Putin), Rusev ploughed through Xavier Woods, Kofi Kingston, R-Truth and and Big E in short order, before setting his sights on Mark Henry.
It wasn't just wrestling fans quick to notice that most (and nearly all - Zack Ryder was a rule-proving exception) of his targets were black. Big E tweeted-and-deleted a joke about several of his colleagues knocking up a Nation Of Domination to tackle the new star (more on that elsewhere), while The Atlantic covered it in more detail as part of a wider point about racism in wrestling.
From the outside, it appeared as though WWE simply ignored the comments until moving Rusev away from exclusive anti-African American violence.