The Disturbing Truth Behind WWE's Biggest Winners
It's a problem far from exclusive to just Shinsuke Nakamura or Asuka, and more's the pity.
Seth Rollins won the Royal Rumble in 2019, but one of the many revelations from his enlightening 365 Network special highlighted how hollow the result felt compared to expectations. Was his subconscious foreshadowing the year he'd have? His loss to Bray Wyatt in October was the beginning of the end of 'The Fiend's usefulness as a genuinely mortifying character. A rotten Hell In A Cell match a few weeks prior had done significant damage to Wyatt's new creation, but only the millions of dollars rushing into his bank account made amends for the rotten merchandise and creative turning his character from upscaled 1993 heel Doink to...upscaled 1993 babyface Doink.
Charlotte Flair gets undue grief by sections of the fanbase just for being pushed, despite the fact that between 2016 and 2018 she was arguably the most consistent performer on the main roster. Ronda Rousey shouldered all sorts of sh*te for being gifted her unbeaten run for having the temerity to have mastered pro wrestling quicker than most of the Performance Center graduates. Kofi Kingston earned the biggest win of his career at WrestleMania and continued to win for the remainder of the year until he came up against rule-proving exception Brock Lesnar. Then, his tenure at the top was reduced to less than nothing and he now looks to be in a worse spot than this time last year by orders of magnitude. It remains to be seen if the end of his title reign was better or worse than Rollins' aforementioned catastrophe.
'The Monday Night Messiah' loved Bret Hart, loved what it meant to be a Champion just like Bret Hart, and tweeted with aspirations as big and fanciful as Bret Hart's timeless "...Is/Was/Ever Will Be..." mantra. But he never really stood a chance - WWE had deigned him their biggest winner, and the disturbing truth behind that decision manifested itself in his career's annus horribilis. It should spook everybody not named Brock Lesnar as long as the process for attempting to make new stars in a very un-Bret Hart way remains in tact. Fans will continue to find new things to invest their time and money in, and the longer that trend continues, the more disturbing and devastating that truth will prove to be.