10 WWE Tag Team Wrestlers Who Held Their Partners Back
Mixed Doubles.
In spite of Vince McMahon's tastes and tightness, tag team wrestling is - and should always be - a treasured and fundamental tenet of every wrestling show.
The dynamic from a singles match differs just enough. Comebacks don't build to a fight from underneath but to fire from the fresh man, a pantheon of pops for the hot tag recipient as he or she runs wild on the fiendish heels that had cut the ring in half for the bulk of the battle. Unlike so much in professional wrestling, it follows a strict science to forge sensation and scintillation, rather than safety. Formulaic for fun, rather than to a fault.
It also allows half-finished professional wrestlers a chance to look like the total package. The likes of The Hart Foundation, The Outsiders and Team Hell No were so successful together because each partner offered an extremely different proposition that together made two halves whole. A good doubles division doesn't just reward exceptional workrate, nor can it rely on exclusively giant men doing exclusively giant things.
It allows for the best of both worlds - it allows for two men to pull the wagon in their own way for the betterment of their union. That is unless one partner can't quite hold up their end of the agreement...
10. Bray Wyatt (Matt Hardy)
Bray Wyatt's recent remergence as The Fiend has done well to erase almost every humiliating misstep from the character’s completely miserable main roster existence, but ‘The Eater Of Worlds’ final failure before his 2018 disappearance somehow managed to find misfortune in one of wrestling’s lucky charms.
With the advent of his Broken Universe In Impact Wrestling, Matt Hardy managed not only to transform his own career but drag with him the lost wrestling lives of others. His flailing brother Jeff was reimagined as ‘Brother Nero’, redefining The Hardy Boyz as a tag team and securing a path throughout all of wrestling that led them to an instantly iconic WWE comeback at WrestleMania 33. Tired acts such as The Rock 'n' Roll Express were welcomed to the Hardy Compound for paydays that put them back amongst the wrestling zeitgeist. Shane Helms’ swim in the Lake Of Reincarnation birthed new interest in his old Hurricane gimmick to the point where he too was rehired by WWE.
Magic. Weird, wonderful, working magic.
As f*cking usual, magic didn’t work for Bray Wyatt. Despite a big comeback pop during the WrestleMania 34 pre-show, the ‘Deleters Of Worlds’ we’re comedy acts akin to The B-Team or the Braun Strowman/Nicholas pairing the second they had the Raw Tag Championships.
Bad matches and risible comedy marked the end of the original Bray Wyatt incarnation. It felt as fitting as it was futile.