18 Biggest Wrestling Stories Of 2017
10. May - Jinder Mahal Reaches The Summit
How quickly the landscape of wrestling can change. Just a month after WrestleMania, The Undertaker was a spectre of the past, and perennial jobber Jinder Mahal had become the de facto top dog in WWE. Incredulity doesn't even begin to describe it.
Though there was a certain novelty value to seeing the 'Modern Day Maharaja' hoist the coveted strap plus the fact it put a merciful end to the execrable Randy Orton/Bray Wyatt nonsense, it was difficult to get too excited about Mahal's Backlash title victory. The cynicism behind the switch was overwhelmingly evident, as WWE had seemingly scoured a Wikipedia list of nations sorted by population and cherry picked the crowded India as their next target audience.
The company's way of promoting Jinder undermined him from the start: Instead of being presented as a modern day emblem of mixed ethnicity, he adopted the most regressive 'foreign heel' schtick imaginable. Some hero.
The sudden rise from jobber to jubilation - and the business reasons which motivated it - could probably have been forgiven if Mahal was at least half-decent between the ropes. Instead, his ascension kicked off five months of top title tedium, until the inevitable slide in SmackDown ratings finally saw the interminable reign thankfully terminated courtesy of AJ Style's forearm.