10 Times Wrestling Opened The Forbidden Door
1. NXT Embraces The Indie Scene
It was effectively forbidden.
To WWE, the independent scene was teeming with indulgent, pale, short geeks who didn't know how to work. If they had buzz, they got signed, but they were resented, and they had to go to developmental to un-learn every bad habit they had picked up. This was all very insane - it wasn't as if, when OVW went to sh*t, WWE had much of an alternative - but that's WWE for you. Daniel Bryan looked so little like a traditional WWE star - the little f*cker wouldn't even self-tan, much less magically grow an extra foot - that Michael Cole, on a 2010 episode of NXT, referred to him as "deformed". This, in addition to variations of "vegan nerd" "with no charisma".
The vegan nerd with no charisma dwarfed the returning self-tanned Batista in popularity in 2014, and this development unfolded in parallel with a new NXT mirroring the super indies in its vision. There was no going back to the weird territory emulation model. Everybody moved the same and hardly anybody got over.
With the door flung open, Triple H soon started glad-handing the very guys he'd have buried by a monitor a decade prior. Did they learn to work the WWE style in - checks notes - the grenade-lobbing confines of PWG?
Or were they hot enough to make him look cool?