3 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Hall Of Fame 2024 (Results & Review)

4. A Meandering Sermon

Thunderbolt Patterson clearly inspired generations of wrestlers, both in his promos and his mannerisms, so he clearly is a deserving inductee into the WWE Hall of Fame.

But his speech, which came near the end of a long ceremony, was excruciating. Thunderbolt elected not to talk about his storied career, or challenges he overcame, but to pray and speak of “spiritual warfare” and to urge people to “stop playing the race card” and stop killing one another. And that’s his right – it’s his acceptance speech.

That doesn’t mean it was a good speech. For a wrestling audience that was approaching five hours of televised programming, it had to be difficult to not chant “What?” after every couple words.

You just wish that he could have been briefer or at least tied more of his remarks to the reason he was being honored in the first place.

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Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.