The Lost Magic Of WWE's REAL Golden Era (And How To Bring It Back)

Using Arrival as a template for a two/three hour special he'd call TakeOver, Triple H set about nailing the TV-to-supercard formula right as some of the best talents in the Performance Center were experiencing new peaks as talents. The hourly television shows weren't always the most captivating, but the characters themselves were. Ground-up investment will do that, and as buzz swelled in 2014, the likes of Sasha Banks, Sami Zayn, Bayley, Enzo & Cass and others were becoming genuinely beloved figures. Starved of having projects like this that were actually seen all the way through, WWE fans turned towards NXT instead of the exit gates even though the call was coming from inside the house.

Gimmicks sell t-shirts, but characters sell tickets, and the shows had done such a good job of presenting both that the events migrated to bigger buildings starting with the epic TakeOver: Brooklyn in the summer of 2015. The volume stayed up as matches attempted to top one another to historic effect. The only one that couldn't follow what had just electrified the audience was the main event. An amazing Finn Bálor/Kevin Owens ladder match couldn't top a best-of-all-time showing between Banks and Bayley. The impact of that on North American women's wrestling alone was seismic, but what it did for the brand was nearly as big.

It was almost non-Full Sail from there. It had to be - there was too much money to be made and as a developmental territory, NXT was still supposed to be prepping its talent for eventual promotion. Like the product for a spell, the events were as close to perfection as mainstream wrestling had been in a long time. Five or six matches over a tight timeframe, all with reasons to be, with action that stood up for itself and (usually) cards that peaked right as they neared their conclusion.

The alchemy felt perfect until 2015 became 2016-2020 and the talents routinely failed the second they left the protective bubble of NXT for the grim reality of the main roster. TakeOvers were still peerless, but only as standalone events. The hope of a brighter future had been stubbed out by too many failed pushes on Raw and SmackDown, the golden era replaced by a silver one that, whilst shinier, was reliant on slightly cheaper pops. The world changed a hundred times over between then and Triple H getting the opportunity to reload his last save in Vince McMahon's old chair, but he set to work fixing what had been broken first time around.

It'd be SummerSlam 2022 in the immediate aftermath of McMahon's departure before anything on the main roster felt quite as much like that "anything is possible" era. A Cardiff, Wales B-Show the next month was where some reasonable expectations became probable too.

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