10 Times Vince McMahon Got Tired Of Playing With His New Toys

Imagine, as a kid, you're getting excited about the holiday season. All year long, you beg and holler for your parents (or Santa) to get you that one gift. And then the fateful day arrives. You shred the wrapping paper. You hold the present in all of its glory between your palms. You jump up and down in excitement, and maybe for the only time that year, you thank your parents. Then within a few months, you move onto the next thing and completely forget about whatever it was that whoever got you.

Now imagine you could relive such a childish moment every single day of your life. You'd be living the life of Vincent Kennedy McMahon.

Unfortunately, McMahon's toys aren't made of plastic. They're human beings, and at times he's playing with their careers as professional wrestlers.

Almost every year, fans witness numerous superstars come in with a rocket push only to be cooled down and reduced to a mid-carder or jobber. Or sometimes, to be released altogether. Every so often, a superstar gets a second chance (or third), but by large, when Vinnie Mac gets done playing with ya, he's done playing with ya...

It started with technical difficulties. Then the generator was on fire. The weeks following, a clandestine group started invading both Raw and SmackDown, but not so much the PPV events (apparently, they took Sundays off). At one point, there were 6 billion members. Then there were five.

Fans were leery about RETRIBUTION, especially after it seemed as though WWE stretched out their arrival aimlessly. After weeks of showing up, breaking stuff, and ruining good matches, the faction accomplished next to nothing. However, WWE kept pushing the group, so perhaps RETRIBUTION would turn into something big, right?

No, not at all. Not yet, at least.

RETRIBUTION arrived as a formal group, although their ring names left much to be desired (and SlapJack just sounded dirty), and spoke about how WWE was evil and held people like them back without too much elaboration. Then they lost their debut match.

When WWE added Mustafa Ali as the sixth member and leader of RETRIBUTION in a 2020 October edition of Raw, it brought some hope that there was a general direction for the group, but Retribution kept losing. The Fiend even dismantled the group by himself.

The layers WWE added to RETRIBUTION, such as a random act of possession, have done little to give the group some weight. And the reason the members have WWE contracts in the first place was clearly an idea scribbled down on a beef burrito wrapper moments before the promo was written.