This is a tough thing to count as a down, but it bears mentioning somewhere in this column. The hardway cut Samoa Joe suffered in the opening moments of the NXT Championship match was a pretty good illustration of just how much WWE has changed as a company over the past decade. The sight of a wrestler wearing a crimson mask in a televised bout was not uncommon for several years, with competitors like Shawn Michaels, John Cena, Triple H and even Vince McMahon being covered in blood at some point. The departure from this (and the prohibition against blading) is not what is being questioned here. But watching the referee stop the title match numerous times so doctors could work (unsuccessfully) on stopping Joes bleeding really was, as the fans put it, bullsh**. Sure, you should try to stop the bleeding and occasionally wipe the cut and face clean, but after the third stoppage in the match, it called to mind other big money matches that involved blood and how different things would have been if the ref had stopped the bout several times so a ringside doc could try to superglue the cut shut. Again, tough to criticize, but still, something needed to be said about the difference.
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.
