10 Wrestlers Who Stopped Trying (But WWE Pushed Anyway)
3. Brock Lesnar - 2016
His headspace dominated by the lure of the Octagon, 2016 marked a grim reversal of form for the Beast.
Given how awesome the act was in 2015—Lesnar was framed as and wrestled like a Lovecraftian horror surfacing, famished, from the void—this development was especially depressing. We expected more. We expected nothing less than a spiritual sequel to the greatest WWF match ever promoted. We expected Lesnar to gruesomely annihilate Dean Ambrose at WrestleMania 32, only for Ambrose to emerge as a player after displaying his ripped-out heart on his sleeve.
That didn’t happen; instead, we bore witness to the decay of Suplex City. Stripped of the SummerSlam 2014 novelty and the untouchable, focused 2015 form, Lesnar reduced the act to its primitive elements. The thing hardly moved. Where before, the sight of Lesnar recovering from a table spot was like a kraken honing in on a canoe, now—and on too many occasions since—he just ambled about, bouncing up and down as if Heyman was stood next to him.
He simply threw a few German suplexes with zero enthusiasm in a match that did less than nothing for the opponent most thought was in for the match of his life.