If WWE Was Being Honest About Bobby Lashley

The supernatural gimmick, resulting from Bray Wyatt’s death via a thousand cuts, was considered a relic of wrestling’s past. Over the course of three minutes, Lashley contrived to terrify WWE fans with his tales of childhood abandonment. This, of course, wasn’t the intention; though Lashley’s abysmal, wooden acting skills implied that he had killed his three sisters in retaliation, we were meant to infer that Bobby was a wholesome family man. Even if this had translated, this aspect of his persona was a non-starter. Great Balls of Fire: we are no longer in the 1950s.

The following week, Lashley was booed out of London. On the same RAW broadcast, Sami Zayn threatened to “expose the truth about” Bobby.

This point is worth lingering over, because what followed was planned at least a week in advance. What followed was an atrocity of a segment unbelievably terrible even by the worst of WWE’s fantastically unfunny standards. On this week’s RAW, Sami Zayn trotted out three independent wrestlers in drag to play the roles of Bobby’s sisters.

Even before the three “actors” acted considerably worse than Lashley (!), the audience fell into a hush of complete acceptance. They knew that they were about to witness the Gooker Award in the flesh.

“Cathy” delivered a rancid line reading, which the actor naturally stumbled over. Throughout her childhood, she used the broom to “swat that snarling little menace away from me,” he said, as everybody watching died inside. This was the opposite of life-affirming. “Frances” “carried that helmet” in a mahogany line reading, because Bobby would take his knuckle and hit her over the head with it. Pure humiliation was etched all over that poor bathturd’s face, mirroring the crowd. Re-watching this for the purposes of transcription and research, an article that wrote itself in an apoplectic rage slowed to a soul-destroying halt. The whole thing was as uninspiring as it was a creative writer’s fresh sh*t transmogrified into an onscreen segment because what else is there to write? This was so clearly the work of either Vince McMahon himself, or a cynical, snivelling writer who knew exactly how to pop him, that we can only despair. This wasn’t just the worst thing to happen in WWE for an age. It was never going to be anything other than pure, unadulterated garbage.

This became even clearer as Bobby, no-selling the whole thing with a beaming smile because let’s make everybody John Cena all the time, emerged, with some irony, to laugh it off. Woefully miscast as Cena’s 67th successor, he looked as uneasy out there as he did in the woods as a small child. He bravely fought off the four-on-one onslaught before, and how the hell did this get any worse, fumbling through a physical comedy routine straight out of an ancient three-camera sitcom. He a snapped a towel over his sister’s a*se and then rubbed the taint of another with, I hate writing these words, a broomstick.

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