6 Promising Wrestling Talents RUINED By Backstage Politics

People forget how good and how innovative Shane Douglas was in ECW. Did you ever wonder when the entire vernacular of pro wrestling changed? 

Wrestling in the United States mainstream is long past the era of an entirely fictional morality play, in which exaggerated characters commit violent acts warranting vengeance to drive the plot forward. Now, the wrestlers operate as self-aware in the business of it all. They don’t question one another’s guts or balls, but rather their ability to carry the brand. How did we arrive at a point at which almost every big match build is a volleyed exchange of worked-shoot insults? A point at which plot doesn’t really exist, replaced by a wordy game of meta oneupmanship? 

It probably all started when Shane Douglas threw the NWA World’s Heavyweight title to the ground and buried its ancient, past-it lineage of holders before starting a one-sided grudge programme with “Dick” Flair. 

Douglas was never a super-worker, but he was smart enough to portray himself as the more pure wrestler in the garbage promotion, carrying a sort of relative elegance. When this bit was exposed - the man was fixated with adding several useless minutes to his matches - he was confident enough to reclaim his aura with his incandescent promo skills. The man had convinced himself he was the best thing going; sometimes, that’s enough. Shane Douglas was lumbered with an awful, failed gimmick during his massively ill-fated WWF run of 1995. But then, so was Steve Austin. Douglas might have overcome that, had he not run into the Kliq. 

Douglas has buried the Kliq several times over the years on the shoot interview circuit. Douglas claims that Razor Ramon, upset that he wasn’t going over clean, sandbagged Douglas in one of his first WWF matches. Razor, Shane claims, also played a dirty game where he’d tell Shane he could lay his punches in one night before saying “not that stiff, mate” the next. Shane also reckons that Shawn Michaels would deliberately call the opposite spot seconds after Douglas, who was leading, called his, leading to “choppy” matches that made the new guy look like he couldn’t make the step up. After all, the Kliq members could have great matches with everybody else. Shane is also firm in his belief that Shawn Michaels overstated the effects of the infamous concussion he suffered in Syracuse in order to get out of dropping the Intercontinental title to him. 

It might scan as idiotic, in 2026, to state that Shawn Michaels was threatened by Dean Douglas - but Shane Douglas put ECW on the map, and the Kliq basically spent years urging Vince McMahon to shift the WWF into a more ECW-leaning direction. It is also impossible to look at Triple H in 1999 and not see a silhouette of Shane Douglas.