10 Wrestlers You Didn’t Realise Were Vitally Important To Their Promotions
9. Pat Patterson
WWE is bad at a lot, if not literally everything in 2020, but Christ alive those match finishes are unacceptably awful.
WWE don't beat their babyfaces. Oh, they take a rolling pin and tenderise the living sh*t out of them, but they don't book them to lose cleanly. It would upset the children that pester Grandad to turn RAW off if they did.
Instead, it's f*ckery all of the time, with very little in the way of repercussions beyond a rematch in which the heel is unable to cheat, which, if the officials were halfway competent, would be the case all the while. There is no order to anything. That which aims to protect the babyfaces makes them look as dumb as all hell.
Irony coats everything - much like Triple H's highly effective special sword spray!
Pat Patterson, a match finish genius, was called upon whenever the end of a chapter was set to bleed into the next. He wasn't merely the man who invented the Royal Rumble. Consider the chef's kiss elegance of the SummerSlam 1997 main event finish; with one deft booking manoeuvre, he protected the Undertaker with a killer chair shot, created a conflict in the medium term, before 'Taker's long-term programme arrived in the form of Kane, and furthered Bret Hart's long-term programme with Shawn Michaels. Patterson was the man who hid from the audience WWE's maddening no finish policy for years.
He made bullsh*t smell like roses.