10 Wrestlers Who Saved Promotions From Ruin
Hulk Hogan gets to be on TV, sadly, because he saved TWO promotions.
WWE, buoyed by gigantic rights fees, is ruin-proof in 2021.
This is a robust principle that the company, apparently, likes to test via several rigorous scenarios. Is RAW masquerading as a TV show when, in reality, it is an investor prospectus?
Invest in the low-risk WWE!
Secure your future and your family's future by making a guaranteed return! See how we turn state-of-the-art workhorses into corny prankster geeks with excruciating patter! Watch as we programme together two detestable heels in a feud premised on how detestable they each are! Nobody can possibly like this, but you, somehow, can turn a profit!
Same matches? No problem!
We literally do not have to try. We can just pump out the same old churn, and our base of consumers will lap it up because they have been brainwashed into defending this dreck! Better yet, if something good and fresh happens elsewhere, their defensive resolve is strengthened! The competition makes them bound and determined to like us more! A better alternative that makes significantly more effort is automatically bad, whatever they do!
WWE doesn't need a saviour. For now, the days of a top guy are as antiquated as Gorgeous George showboating on a black and white television.
The industry has changed from these times...
10. The Young Bucks
To measure the impact that the Young Bucks made on Ring Of Honor, one need only look at the before and after.
Before the Bucks popped the territory in the mid-2010s, that territory had relinquished its cool underground vibe. In a strange and hypocritical trend, given his scathing assessment of WWE's hyper over-production, Jim Cornette went full Bill Watts with his antiquated edicts over the ring style. He banned the piledriver years and years after its deadly stigma had faded, which was omni-pointless. It in theory deprived the base of the action they bought tickets for, but the ban didn't inform a purer, stripped-back big match approach. The long matches of the early 2010s were indulgent to a parodic extent.
After the Bucks left, in 2018, ROH suffered badly. Inexplicable, piss-poor decisions saw a strapped-up Matt Taven preside over a promotion that became a meme for blue dots on the pre-sale seat maps.
One can also of course cite the truth of the numbers.
The Bucks drew what was, at the time, ROH's record gate at Supercard of Honor XI in 2017 (3,500), after which, buoyed by peak era Being The Elite's elegant storytelling, the company routinely sold out buildings it had outgrown.
The Bucks' demented in-ring approach proved exactly why the piledriver ban was such a passé gimmick: the fans wanted delirious, twisting all-action, and Matt and Nick Jackson popped their t*ts off in every town.