4 Ups And 4 Downs From WWE Hall Of Fame 2023

1. Quality Control

It’s definitely getting tougher to identify living legends to induct into the Hall of Fame. The past few years have seen more recent stars like Kane, Undertaker, Goldberg and now Rey Mysterio inducted, but that well is going to eventually dry out.

Consider the secondary inductees the past couple years: Queen Sharmell, Stacy Keibler, the Great Khali, Tim White, and the Great Muta and Andy Kaufman (who never worked in WWE). There’s nothing wrong with any of them as performers, but consider the second tier of inductees for 2013, when Bruno Sammartino headlined: Mick Foley, Trish Stratus, Bob Backlund and Booker T. That’s quite the class.

Once you get past The Rock, John Cena, Batista, Triple H and a couple others, you’re then looking at currently active wrestlers and waiting for them to retire or at least return to the WWE fold before being inducted (like Rey this year).

It really felt this year like they were just trying to check boxes (headliner, woman, celebrity, Warrior Award recipient). While WWE did a decent job overall of selling these performers’ accomplishments, it was tough to feel like this was a prestigious night overall.

It didn’t help that most of the inductors were adequate at best. Aside from Konnan’s phenomenal speech and Mick Foley & Torrie Wilson’s solid remarks, no one else really delivered, and some where outright bad. If not for the Judgment Day/Rey stuff, this might have been a pretty drab event.