10 Wrestling Moments You Felt Totally Guilty For Laughing At
5. Zack Ryder's Bad Karma
Poor Zack Ryder. He exists now as a cautionary tale: don't bother meeting your remit as an independent contractor. Don't get over by yourself. This will happen to you.
"This" was an angle in which he was cucked by his best friend - who didn't turn heel! - after he was friendzoned by the love of his life. Brokenhearted, Kane added injury to insult through a wave of attacks that left Ryder confined to a wheelchair. Ryder could not have looked more like a geek, wheeling himself around the place with a perennial hangdog expression on his face.
Well, he could: in an intensely powerful moment of schadenfreude, on the February 12, 2013 RAW, Kane sent Ryder straight to hell. You could practically see Vince McMahon's watermark on the screen, so spiteful was it. Spiteful and painful; Ryder had to absorb a sharp shock to the coccyx. This was WWE's equivalent of Ralph Wiggum's broken heart: you could pause at the precise moment - the point at which the momentum of the wheel bounce caused his face to splatter against the concrete - and determine when exactly his career followed a similar, irreversible trajectory.
As if this wasn't a self-evident rib, WWE a few weeks later scripted its top babyface to note that Ryder had "fallen off the face of the earth", which actually seemed like a less painful proposition, adding insult to injury to insult.
Adding yet more layers to the equation, WWE booked this angle the day before Valentine's!
Roses are red / After they grow / We're pushing you off the stage in a wheelchair, pal! / Yes we are serious, bro.