9 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE SummerSlam 2021

Downs...

7. WWE Homogeny On Display

Summerslam 2021
WWE.com

Before the Big E/Baron Corbin kickoff show match, it was announced that a fan had won a TikTok contest to be a guest ring announcer at SummerSlam.

While this isn’t a knock against the winner herself – she did a really nice job – it’s worth noting that she clearly was given a crash course by WWE on how to do the announcing. And thus, she sounded like every other ring announcer in WWE. A one-shot guest announcer should be distinguishable, but if you closed your eyes and someone told you it was Kayla Braxton (who used to do ring announcing in NXT) or Alicia Taylor (NXT’s current ring announcer), you’d believe them.

That’s more of an indictment of WWE’s system, which values homogeny among its performers over bringing uniqueness and authenticity to the product. It really is a miracle they haven’t toned Pat McAfee down yet and turned him into a nonsense-spouting WWE factory.

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Contributor
Contributor

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.