7 Wrestlers Who Made Vince McMahon Their BITCH!
5. Brock Lesnar
Vince McMahon was instantly besotted with Brock Lesnar. Vince was always going to push a guy who looked like that - the most beastly looking dude in the history of the industry - all the way to the top as quickly as possible.
Brock defined the post-Attitude Era landscape. He won King Of The Ring. He went over the Rock, Hulk Hogan, and the Undertaker cleanly in his first full year; were it not for his refusal, Stone Cold Steve Austin was almost added to that list. The problem was that Lesnar hated the schedule and the travelling lifestyle, so much so that he quit on the eve of WrestleMania 20. Lesnar’s attempts to play in the NFL and phone it in for NJPW were ill-fated and undermined by legal action. He fell off the radar until the two parties reached a confidential settlement in 2006. Then, two years later, Lesnar embarked on a new career path. His brief but very successful stint in the UFC, where he reigned with the Heavyweight title, effectively turned him into the single most coveted Vince McMahon guy of all time. He already occupied that title, but now, he was something close to a mainstream celebrity. If you could build Vince McMahon’s daddy from the ground up, he’d look like Brock Lesnar.
When Lesnar finally returned to WWE in 2012, this unprecedented level of credibility was very weirdly under-sold - Lesnar lost his return match to John Cena and dropped a match to Triple H in their pay-per-view trilogy - but after he was reheated through breaking the Undertaker’s streak at WrestleMania 30, that was it. Lesnar enjoyed leverage the likes of which no other wrestler ever held over Vince McMahon. Lesnar turned up whenever he wanted, which wasn’t very often, and held the Universal title in spite of this. Vince didn’t care; he’d rather have Lesnar occasionally, at the cost of a small fortune, than a functioning WWE Raw show with stakes and purpose.
The infatuation was so intense that everybody else on the roster was depicted as a hapless murder victim, whether they were Ricochet or even Randy Orton, who sacrificed his brain to get Lesnar even more over as an unstoppable mercenary who didn’t even watch Raw, much less wrestle on it.