10 Times WWE Repeated History
Dumb luck or careful planning? These historic WWE moments had a familiar feeling...
What is "wrestling history", exactly?
As fans, we hear about it all the time. So and so could "make history" by doing such a thing. Wrestler X is was the first in "history" to win Prize Y from Wrestler Z. "History" will piss itself laughing if it ever revisits "Slapjack". And so on.
What we do know - and this is less than ideal - is that it's unreliable. The only facts are in the stats, and they're often the preserve of the boring, the bored or worse, the manipulative. In wrestling history, there's lots of implication, but increasingly less verification. The vaunted (and only occasionally literal) history books are written by the winners of wars, resulting in generations of fans buying into a monopolised narrative with such conviction that the prospect of seeing it challenged brings about civil unrest the likes of which hasn't been seen since the mid-1990s.
It's subsequently got less gravitas than the promoters and performers themselves would have you believe. It can be rewritten, or reimagined. Wrestlers or bookers can use the present to repurpose somebody's past, or mine that past to inform the future.
Back when he was more enlightening than lightning rod, Jim Cornette used to say you had to wait seven years to rebadge something old. Like his temper and range of influence, that has gotten much shorter in recent years...
10. The Ultimate Opportunist
It was harder to fail than succeed with the original Money In The Bank cash-in. Bona fide firsts in wrestling are always so cool, holder Edge had never worn the company's top prize, and John Cena was becoming a figure of such disdain that f*cking 2001 X-Pac would have got a pop for beating him.
The responsibility of the shock-and-awe moment being given back to the original perpetrator was a tremendous solution to an unexpected problem when the third 'Mr Money In The Bank' Mr Kennedy was shelved for a period everybody believed would take him past the expiry date.
The less said about his Unlucky Alf year the better (suffice to say, Kennedy was back less than two months after an injury that had initially been thought to take him out for a year), but 'The Rated-R Superstar' was a sublime sh*thouse choice to take his place.
A beaten and battered Undertaker was a long way from the loathed Cena, too - everything about Edge's sensational second bite was crueler than the first.