5 Early Successes Of Triple H's Run As Head Of WWE Creative (And 5 Failures)

Sometimes, the lowest hanging fruit is often the sweetest.

One of Vince McMahon's strangest quirks in the latter stages of his WWE stewardship was the ridiculous idea to remove first or last names from his superstars, rendering them as one-name characters.

Mustafa Ali became Ali. Angel Garza became Angel. Riddle. Theory. Ciampa.

It was a baffling display of control, one which undercut the competitors ability to connect with an audience who, in 2022, want their wrestlers to feel more like people than they ever did before. Yes, at one point single names like Edge and Batista worked, but naming your future stars as Riddle or Theory seemed like a bad joke.

Fans hated it, and they clamoured for the names to be returned because... well... why not? Considering all of these competitors had been on TV with those full names, it was an open goal for the Game, who already had a lot of goodwill in the bank with fans based on his previous work with NXT and also just not being Vincent Kennedy McMahon.

Over the past few weeks, the likes of Riddle, Theory and Ciampa have all had their first names officially returned to them, which is a strange sentence to even write, which shows how asinine it was to remove them in the first place.