9 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE Money In The Bank 2021
5. Rewarding An Addictive Problem
We don’t want to be too preachy here or condemn a man who has an illness. But rewarding Jimmy Uso with the SmackDown Tag Team Championship just a couple weeks after he was arrested again for DUI is just bad form.
More than 10,000 people are killed by drunk drivers in the US alone each year, so this isn’t just some moralizing point. Uso was arrested earlier this month for his second DUI in two years, which indicates that this is a problem, not a one-time accident. But rather than take him off TV (as WWE has done multiple times when a superstar runs into trouble), the company has left him involved in SmackDown’s top angles.
Additionally, Jimmy picked up the pinfall during the Money in the Bank kickoff show to capture the tag titles Sunday. Let’s not forget that in addition to suspending wrestlers when they’ve been arrested, they once released Emma when she was accused of shoplifting, so leaving Uso on TV and then giving him a title is pretty unusual. And afterward, Roman Reigns made a passing reference to Jimmy’s troubles, almost as a joke.
But hey, ratings are ratings, and storylines have to continue, real world be damned.