Why Vince McMahon Won’t Push Luke Harper
And, for a time, he featured heavily on WWE television, as a Wyatt Family henchman, and starred in that fantastic six-man tag against the Shield at Elimination Chamber 2014. His jaw-dropping suicide dive sparked deafening chants of ‘Holy sh*t!’ because Harper had no physical right to do it. He looked like a new, incredible breed of pro wrestling performer in that classic war.
And then he didn’t. The very nature of the 2014 break-up was telling. Virtually every faction split materialises in at least one feud designed to put over the designated breakout singles star. This did not happen with the Wyatt family. Bray simply set them “free” in a bizarre development, following which Harper was repackaged, almost, and targeted Dolph Ziggler’s Intercontinental Championship through a strange series of vignettes. Harper’s eyes multiplied across the screen. He had his eyes on a mystery target, you see, which indicted how much thought went into it.
This was a Deliverance-style bit, in which Harper targeted the purdy Dolph Ziggler, but perhaps a more fitting film reference is ’Stand By Me’. “A pile of sh*t has a thousand eyes,” said Teddy Duchamp, and that is precisely what Vince McMahon made of his southern accent.
Subjectively, it wasn’t terrible. Objectively, it’s never remembered as anything iconically bad, like Triple H’s French or Kofi Kingston’s Jamaican. Regardless, Vince hated it, and hated it with a baffling long-term resentment.
A nominal promotion, not that the Intercontinental Title amounts to much more than an experiment, his feud with Dolph Ziggler went 50/50, but Harper’s brutal, menacing work in their punishing TLC Ladder match didn’t go unnoticed. He subsequently feuded with Dean Ambrose in a fun and violent programme, before his career became defined by inconsistency. He was reunited with the Wyatt Family, but the stable never again threatened to reach its potential. His role in the Bray Wyatt Vs. Randy Orton feud was so popular that faint hopes of a WWE Championship Triple Threat match reached online fantasy booking circles, but that was never the plan.
There never was much of a plan for a performer marked for an apparent inability to sports entertain.
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