10 Wrestlers Who Defeated The WWE Machine
7. Brock Lesnar
Brock Lesnar descended into alcoholism and painkiller addiction having been decimated by WWE's brutal travel schedule. He bought a private plan to ease it. When that didn't work, he requested a reduced schedule. This was an unthinkable request, given the paradigm of 2004 and his relative juniority. He was and is McMahon's platonic ideal of a WWE star. But the precedent, then, was unbreakable. He left. The machine had broken him.
The intervening years were kinder to WWE than they were to him; his fellow OVW graduates John Cena and Batista quickly emerged as bonafide headliners in his absence. Lesnar, meanwhile, failed in his quest to become an NFL star and entered apathetic wrestling performances in Japan. That apathy was infectious; he barely moved the needle over there.
He did move the needle in UFC. And then some: Lesnar in the pre-Conor McGregor era was the biggest draw in that company's history, regularly generating seven figure PPV buys. In parallel, WWE singularly failed to elevate anybody to Cena and Batista's level. Lesnar became a household name - such a powerful entity and massive star that, even if belatedly, WWE cowed to his demands. And then some. These events conflated into stupid, stupid, cash.
Lesnar returned to WWE in 2012 for a vast sum of money and precious few dates - and in doing so became the recipient of the most flattering booking ever bestowed upon a WWE talent. He also became the first talent ever allowed to don the logos of his own sponsors on his WWE attire.