6 Promising Wrestling Talents RUINED By Backstage Politics
3. The Nexus
This one might be tenuous. Let’s consider the actual promise held by the individual members of the Nexus:
Darren Young: Generic as humanly possible between the ropes, a hardly unique issue in an era during which virtually every new WWE wrestler was trained by the same coach in the same school under the same playbook.
David Otunga: More clumsy than Darren Young. Actively bad even by the standards of a developmental promotion, in fact. A look, and nothing else.
Heath Slater: An obvious buffoon-type character who didn’t fit the profile of a disruptor group at all.
Justin Gabriel: His high-flying ability set him apart, at least, but he was only relatively and marginally “spectacular”.
Michael Tarver: The greenest of the lot.
Skip Sheffield: Striking look, dumbass face, a quasi-effective goon.
Wade Barrett: He was considered a future WrestleMania headliner, but the bleak and star-bereft era in which he emerged meant that fans were more desperate than discerning when fantasy booking. Still, WWE did not have the luxury to, you know, massacre one of the very few guys who might be worthy of the spot.
The group worked as a hivemind with a single objective. People bought into the vision of the group through its M.O. and the graphene strength of the iconic formation angle. Nobody reasonably thought that Tarver was going to headline WrestleMania. The Nexus, at the time, were not perceived in the same way the Shield were a year later - but as a vehicle for Barrett and that alone, the Nexus should have been protected. The group was not protected.
To the infamous disgust of Edge and Chris Jericho, who registered their disbelief on the Talk Is Jericho podcast, John Cena purportedly lobbied to beat the Nexus at SummerSlam 2010. At the finish of the Nexus Vs. Team WWE seven-man tag main event, Cena recovered from a DDT to exposed concrete in under two minutes to defeat both Gabriel and Barrett in a handicap scenario. The Nexus cooled down significantly. The audience retained their belief in Barrett, purely out of hope, rather than expectation and real belief, but he was defeated by John Cena to end the whole deal at TLC.
If you take a less histrionic look at Barrett’s subsequent WWE career, you might revise one of the day’s most fervent controversies. Barrett was the umpteenth victim of the dirt-worst booking imaginable, but he didn’t excel in spite of it. Still, the stigma that calcified probably ruined him forever.