Remember when Curtis Axel was a Paul Heyman guy? Remember how the son of Curt Hennig won the prestigious Intercontinental Championship on Fathers Day? Well, the announcers clearly have. Axel, having been knocked out of the Royal Rumble match without ever entering it, stormed to the ring Monday and raised the issue that he could have won the Rumble and that he should get a shot at going to WrestleMania. So how did the announcers treat a wrestler wanting to be World Champion? They snickered and mocked him. Then they rejoiced when Dean Ambrose knocked him out of the ring and beat him up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc-kMt1Cn4Y Sure, Axel is far from a main event talent, but the announcers treating him like a joke makes fans treat him like a joke. It makes it impossible to view him as anything more than a jobber. Regardless of whether he is a jobber, dumbing down your talent in fans eyes helps absolutely no one. Period. Worse, there was a ready-made mini-feud here. Axel could have easily challenged the man who knocked him out of Rumble, but maybe that just made too much sense. Which brings us to
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.
