The WORST Wrestling Moment Every Year (1989 - 2025)
9. 2017 | Bayley: This Is Your Life
Bayley worked in NXT because she radiated a wholesome charm, but also because she was a secret badass. She was nice, and she loved wrestling, and you loved her for loving wrestling. The “super-fan” bit was inspired, because fans identified with her.
She wrestled fairly and did not get pissed off until it was justified. This was the glorious thread of her immortal feud with Sasha Banks in 2015. It was the peak of her career. Under Vince McMahon, it was never going to get any better.
In fact, things got worse, and to a significant extent. Bayley, responsible for some of the best wrestling of 2015, was given the worst in 2017. This encapsulated Vince’s braindead approach to promoting talents, and it was felt especially in Bayley’s case because she was so un-f*ck-up-able.
Vince f*cked it all up.
Bayley was cast as an inept and scared geek who would not use a kendo stick in a match because she felt it was wrong. Well, get yourself a time machine and go to the UWF-i, because in WWE, of which you’re meant to be a super-fan, there’s a plunder match every other week.
Because Bayley was “wholesome”, Vince, being awful, confused this with “Nobody would ever want to shag her in a million years, except possibly her dad” - which was the comedic thrust of the infamous ‘This Is Your Life’ segment hosted by Alexa Bliss. Every joke failed to land, everybody in the crowd was utterly miserable, and with no exaggeration, a babyface’s career died that night, never to recover.