The 10 Dumbest Things in Modern Wrestling

Normally I try to wring something positive out of my pieces on modern wrestling, even this means I end up writing fan pieces about how great Dean Ambrose is.  However, we have to face facts.  Wrestling is getting dumber.  Sure, you might think of the dying days of WCW, and WWE's Attitude Era, as being wrestling's true dumbest days, the former characterised by terrible booking, the latter by puerile toilet humour.  However, both WWE and TNA have outdone themselves in recent years with a number of questionable angles and ridiculous ideas and appalling performances.  So here's a run down of ten things that should never have happened.  Some are one-off events, but others have dragged on into infamy.

10. Samoa Joe's ninja kidnap

In 2010, Samoa Joe was bundled into the back of a van by masked ninjas during an edition of Impact.  This felt like it could be potentially juicy story.  Who were these guys?  Were they working for Eric Bischoff?  What did they want from Joe?

So, I tuned in the following week expecting answers.  Had a ransom demand been received?  What was Dixie Carter doing to rescue one of her main assets?  But, no, no mention was made of the whole affair, nor the next week or the week after that.   Three months later, Joe re-appeared, without saying anything about his horrific ordeal.  In fact, he looked surprisingly lacking in any signs of trauma at all.  The kidnapping was never mentioned again, but I still live in hope that one day the true story will be revealed.

Basically, this was a prime example of Vince Russo's inept booking.  He quickly lost interest in ideas he was bored with, and he seemed to assume fans would forget loose ends that had been left dangling.  However, even by his standards, this was absurd; the angle was literally over in a matter of minutes.  Joe was later interviewed about it all, and had some scathing comments about Russo's career as TNA head booker:  "He has the audacity to blame all of his silliness on other people. And by the way wrestlers, pro wrestlers all over the world and people in the business, stop whoring yourself out to shoot interviews. This man couldn't write his way out of a kidnapping. That's how much respect he had for the product, how much respect he had for the fans and that is indicative of his style of what he did.".  Harsh but fair words.  Joe did reveal one upside though: he had a very enjoyable three month paid vacation.....

9. The Anonymous Raw GM

This selection is mostly to do with how it was eventually wrapped up, really.  The initial gimmick wasn't too bad, I suppose.  The set-up was this: in 2010 a new general manager for Raw had been appointed, but had demanded that his or her identity be kept secret.  No reason for this, but maybe it's still arguably a credible arrangement.  Anyway, the Anonymous Raw GM issued edicts via e-mails sent to Michael Cole's laptop.  Every week, Cole would faithfully read out the orders which showed this mysterious authority figure to be deeply mischievous, often overturning results or placing wrestlers in unfair handicap matches.  Who could this be?  Had Vickie Guerrero taken on the role and decided that her power was best exercised at a distance?  Maybe Teddy Long had turned heel and....actually, no, I can't remember the Anonymous Raw GM arranging random tag team matches on a regular basis, so this couldn't be him.

However, there was no real storyline.  This new GM just acted capriciously to annoy both faces and heels week after week without rhyme or reason.  Furthermore, the credibility of this was undermined by badly-chosen camera angles that revealed that Cole was actually reading from sheets of paper placed on top of the laptop.  There was a flicker of interest when Edge, announcing a 'war on stupidity', started feuding with the GM, memorably destroying the laptop in a fit of anger.  This led to the Canadian star being picked on, suffering losses due to interference arranged by the still-unmasked GM.  But this fizzled out after Edge was traded to Smackdown.

In 2011, over a year after it began, the angle was quietly dropped with HHH becoming the de facto boss of Raw.  The identity of the Anonymous Raw GM was still not revealed.  Yet in 2012, suddenly Cole's laptop pinged back into action during an episode of Raw.  As he read out the new instruction, the area under the ring was searched by Santino and the true culprit was at last unveiled as.....Hornswoggle.   Yes, apparently, an inconsequential joke character had been running wild in the role.   No reasons were given for his reign of terror, and the whole thing was basically laughed off.  This was a tremendous anti-climax, the unfunny punchline to a joke everyone had already become tired of.

8. Michael Cole turns heel

During the first season of NXT in 2010, Cole, a long-time play-by-play announcer on Raw, turned heel in order to become a sarcastic color commentator.  This became a truly weird move, as clearly Cole had been told by Vince McMahon to trash the show completely.  In particular, during the first season, he relentlessly picked on former Ring of Honor star Daniel Bryan, castigating him as an 'internet darling' who wouldn't be able to cope with the 'big leagues' of the WWE.   The same happened the following year with Low-Ki (named Kaval for his brief WWE career). This already breaks two golden rules of television:  don't, under any circumstances, talk down your product and don't insult your audience.  This felt like Vince pointlessly trying to settle a grudge with cooler indie wrestling cultures and followers.  Also, the show itself was deeply awful, full of childish party games disguised as 'challenges'.  A whole compendium of dumb, then, and nothing like the excellent HHH-helmed reboot of NXT that currently airs.


This heel run continued onto Raw, where fresh problems emerged, some of which I've already covered above.   Overall, the commentary dynamic was now all wrong, given that he was again working as a play-by-play guy.  Now this role basically requires the commentator to be the friend of the audience, calling the action straight while displaying babyface sympathies.  Only the color commentator should be an antagonist, but of course, Lawler was performing that role as a face.

Things got worse when the two commentators starting feuding in an immensely childish way.  This reached a nadir when Cole insulted Lawler's dead mother.  Stay classy, WWE.  Once again this ignored time-tested rules: the commentators should report on the story, they shouldn't be the story.  The feud culminated in a terrible, waste-of-time match at Wrestemania XXVII, which was even repeated at two separate minor PPVs.   The heel run continued into September 2012, when Jerry Lawler suffered a heart attack during a live Raw.  Cole deservedly drew praise for how he handled a stressful situation with calmness and professionalism.  After that, the heel persona seemed inappropriate, and he reverted to his old style.

Even so, the entire run was misconceived and badly executed for over two years, in which several rules of how to run a wrestling show where totally ignored and flouted.

7. Piggie James

I'm afraid I can't find any humour here.   In the words of good ol' JR, this whole angle was 'bowling shoe ugly' and clear evidence of deeply-entrenched sexism in WWE.  Mickie James, playing babyface, was constantly taunted by the heel partnership of Layla and Michelle McCool ('Laycool') who likened her to a pig.  Basically, this was Vince's way of telling James (who was far from fat, and had a perfectly normal figure) to ,lose weight, so that she could have the figure of a Kelly Kelly or an Eve Torres.  He wanted to humiliate her in public.   The whole angle made a clear mockery of WWE's anti-bullying campaign which was running at the time.

As well as being disgusting, Laycool were an absolute carbon copy of TNA's Beautiful People faction.  At times, both Layla and McCool (neither of whom have ever been comfortable as heels) actually seemed to be copying the mannerisms of Angelina Love and Velvet Sky, reproducing that mixture of cruelty and vacuity.  Although not even TNA's pair of mean girls would sink as low as this. An absolutely horrible storyline.

The only good thing about this is that it seemed to persuade Mickie that she was better off elsewhere.  She moved on to TNA, where she found love in real life with Magnus.  Earlier this year, the English wrestler became the proud father of her first child.  Don't you love a happy ending?  Meanwhile, Magnus is up next....

6.  Magnus' convoluted title defence

TNA has often been criticised for needlessly overbooked angles and matches, and this criticism was certainly valid during Magnus' title reign in late 2013 / early 2014.  Magnus was unfortunately booked as a 'paper champion', whose reign was only possible due to the baneful influence of heel boss Dixie Carter and her associates Ethan Carter III and Rockstar Spud.

Whatever, Magnus became the first British star to be champion of a televised US wrestling organisation in December 2013, by winning the 'Dixie-land' match against Jeff Hardy.  This curious confection was a combination of a cage match and a ladder match.  Basically, you had to escape the cage and then collect the belt using a ladder positioned on top of the ramp.  The match was, despite this gimmicky approach, still watchable, partly because of Jeff Hardy's willingness to take spectacular bumps.

However, when it came to Magnus' first defence, against AJ Styles, the booking was spectacularly awful.  It started with a couple of minutes of stalling from the champion, who plainly was in no mood to face his experienced opponent.  When they did finally start to grapple, the ring was immediately invaded by EC3 and Spud, who were perfectly entitled to do that as the bout was fought under no-DQ rules.  Ring invasions are a valid tool in the booking armoury, but should be used sparingly and should never occur this early in a fight.  Anyway, Sting then emerged to counter the heels (he had a beef with EC3, so there was a semblance of logic here).  Then the Bro-Mans joined in, despite having no connection with the main event feud at all.  By the time Bad Influence arrived, I started to wonder if the entire TNA roster was going to appear in the match.....

Eventually, after the over-populated ring was finally cleared of surplus personnel, Magnus got the pin over Styles to retain.  However, it almost felt like he only had a cameo role in his most important match to date due to the number of guest spots crowding him out.  AJ Styles is one of the best technical wrestlers in the world, while Magnus' improvement in the ring has been impressive during his time in TNA.  It was a real wasted opportunity; an interference-free match could have been one of the matches of the year.

Ironically, the best match of Magnus' title run was the match in he dropped the belt to Eric Young.  This was a gimmick-free straightforward match in which both men looked good.  See, TNA, you can book a simple fight if you really want to...

5. Divas play musical chairs

One of my favourite wrestling memes shows a bunch of bored-looking WWE divas playing musical chairs on Raw in 2013.  The text reads, "Move Raw to three hours, they said.  It'll be fun, they said...."

As the meme points out, the expanded running time for Raw has led to a lot of filler being aired, but surely nothing as inane as this was ever booked again.  As a song by Florida-Georgia Line played, divas gathered round the chairs and played a game designed for five-year-old children.  This being Raw, everything broke down eventually into a mass brawl full of shrieking and hair-pulling.  Not just dumb, but very predictable....

At least it was over quickly.  I always smile when people claim that WWE is the best wrestling promotion because it is the biggest.  The fact is, there isn't a single other wrestling company on the planet that would book anything like this patronising nonsense.  WWE may be big, but it's also extremely complacent when it comes to quality control.

4. Raw is Springer

As I've argued before, the whole 'guest host' strategy for Raw was deeply flawed.  For every hit (Bob Barker, Hugh Jackman, William Shatner) there were twenty misses.  Who can forget boxer Ricky Hatton resembling a deer caught in a car's headlights, or right-wing 'humorist' Dennis Miller getting the silent treatment from the crowd?

But the most awful edition was surely Jerry Springer's turn to be guest host in 2010.  The low-brow king of trash television promised to reveal WWE's most intimate secrets, as superstars turned up to tell-all live on Raw, just like on the Springer Show.  So we learned all about Kelly Kelly's sex-life (some things just should stay in the bedroom) before she started brawling with Eve.  Oh, and apparently one of the Bella Twins is actually a man.  Once again, the humour just consisted of puerile sex jokes, because that is what Vince thinks is funny.  In fact, they barely counted as jokes.   Incredibly dumb stuff; I felt my IQ dropping rapidly as I watched it.

But there was a twist, right at the end the WWE stars turned the tables on Springer by revealing his secret love: Mae Young!  Oh God.....at least Mae got a payday that night.

Nor could Jerry Springer stay away; he returned to Raw in 2014.  See entry number two below for details....

3. Claire Lynch

I seriously considered making this my number one choice, and only put it down to three as I could create a case for saying it wasn't totally without worth (I'll come to my reasons later). Anyway, TNA has one even bigger skeleton in its well-stocked closet (see number one before).  It was still one of the most painful and nonsensical angles ever.  It all started in 2012 with Christopher Daniels and Kazarian embarrassing AJ Styles by showing candid photos taken of Styles entering a motel room with Dixie Carter, the implication being that they were having an affair.

However, Styles and Carter, playing face roles, had a convincing explanation.  They were actuallly helping out a mutual friend, named Claire Lynch, who was a pregnant addict.  It's at this point that the story went south badly.  Lynch turned up in person, and soon allied herself with Kazarian and Daniels (why, given that Dixie and AJ are her friends?  We were never told.).  Unfortunately, as portrayed by actress Julia Reilly, Lynch was simply painful to watch.  She was not what you'd ever call subtle, with her exaggerated facial gestures and loud piercing voice.  It was like watching a high-pitched female American version of Brian Blessed (without the beard), particularly when she started shouting for effect.  But she had a shock for Styles, as she claimed he was the father of her unborn child.  At one point she even showed a photo of herself lying on bed besides AJ (who had clearly passed out; it was an obviously staged pic).

A few weeks of awful promos from Lynch followed.  Severe eardrum damage was reported by TNA fans across the world.  Then, all of a sudden, the angle ended.  A man purporting to be Lynch's lawyer read out a prepared statement admitting that it was all a scam concocted by the the two heels, and she wasn't even pregnant.  Wait, what?

And that was it.  What caused this abrupt ending was the simple fact that Julia Reilly had walked out.  She wasn't used to a wrestling crowd which is very vociferous and opinionated, and found the whole thing stressful.  She also wasn't very experienced as an actress (she had actually been spotted by TNA in her role as Olive Oyl at the Orlando theme park where Impact was then being filmed) and feared that the negative reaction was harming her career.

So what are the good things about this feud?  Well, to start with, though the material was poor, it successfully established the heel team of Kazarian and Daniels, who developed stable personae at last.  In particular, Kaz had been drifting between a series of face and heel turns that no-one cared about previously.  The two had clear chemistry (it helps that they are best friends who know each other inside out), and performed a number of memorable promos and matches under the name Bad Influence.  They now work together in Ring of Honor as The Addiction.   The other mitigating factor was a terrific last man standing match between Styles and Daniels at Destination X in the middle of this feud, possibly the best match staged in TNA so far this decade.  That almost made the storyline feel justified.  Almost.

2. The Bella Twins in: Twin Malice

Despite having distinctly average in-ring skills and below-average acting ability, the Bella Twins currently have the biggest storyline given to any female wrestlers in years.  They've even main-evented Raw once.  Basically, they are extremely good-looking, and that is basically all Vince looks for in his female wrestlers. He is known to favour the sisters from Arizona above all the other Divas.

The angle started when the twins, both portraying face roles, fell foul of the Authority.  This led to Brie quitting the company, just as she was about to be fired, while Nikki, the remaining twin, was relentlessly bullied by Steph in retaliation for her sister's perceived sins.  A few weeks later Brie re-appeared at ringside and had an altercation with Stephanie McMahon.  As a result, Brie filed a complaint, and police led Steph away in handcuffs to spend a night in the cells.  This was the first sign that this was not going to feature much in the way of logical scriptwriting.  If police were always willing to act in this way, the cells would be full of heel wrestlers every Monday night.

At the next Raw, Brie somehow re-appeared in the ring, despite no longer being a WWE wrestler (she even got her music played, which is strange for someone no longer on the roster).  She offered a deal to Steph; she would drop all charges if she were reinstated and  given a Wrestlemania match against the Billionaire Princess.   Steph agreed, and the match was on. To promote the fight, a series of promo segments appeared on Raw, and it became clear that there was gaping chasm between Steph and the Bellas in terms of promo abilities.  Steph has improved a lot on the mic, hitting a confident tone of insincere patronising, and was carrying these segments.

The Wrestlemania match was, to be fair, better than expected and ended with Steph picking up a victory. But the real swerve was Nikki's sudden turn, foreseen by the entire audience (it was very obvious that Nikki would turn heel on her sister at the end; I even correctly anticipated the exact moment it was going to happen).   As Brie reeled in horror at the betrayal, Nikki walked away.

At the following night's Raw, we found out why.  At this point the story was past the point of no return, because nothing made any sense at all.   We learned that throughout her entire life Nikki has resented Brie, who she feels has always held her back in everything she's done.  She cut a series of filmed promos, entitled Growing Up Bella, where she outlined how awful Brie had been to her throughout her life.  For example, Brie once took Nikki's car out for a ride and totalled it.  She handed police Nikki's driving licence when arrested, so  Nikki claimed.  At the end of each segment, she pathetically whined, 'But I never told anyone.'

Several problems here.  For several years, the Bellas were inseparable allies as both faces and heels.  Everything they did, they did together.  We are now asked to believe that Nikki was only acting here, and was working 24/7 with someone she actually despised. Every victory celebration, every tearful embrace, was entirely fake.  I realise that wrestling contains a lot of suspension of disbelief, but I couldn't buy this for a second.  Secondly, you've got the Growing Up Bella nonsense.  By supplying a litany of Brie's many sins, Nikki was unintentionally coming across as a face here, which felt a little weird.  Finally, Nikki blamed Brie for her mistreatment by the Authority, saying nonsensically that it wouldn't have happened if her sister hadn't quit.  This is why she was now allied with, er, the very people who were directly mistreating her.   In which bizarro world does any of this add up?

It got worse.  Their screaming promos intensified as they covered each other with badly-acted bile, and often Steph wasn't even there to help carry them.   This reached absurd levels when Jerry Springer (him again!) arrived to stage an intervention between the warring sisters.  Of course, he failed and after a further display of atrocious acting, a mass brawl broke out (on a WWE show? really?) and it ended in chaos.  Springer was legitimately injured when he was knocked over by the brawling twins and had to be stretchered off.  It was that kind of night.  Another time Nikki invoked the ghost of Claire Lynch by presenting a woman who she claimed had slept with Daniel Bryan (Brie's real life husband).  Thankfully that was soon dropped.

This is so much more painful because, unlike the Claire Lynch stuff, it's seemingly endless.  The latest development is that Brie is now forced to work as Nikki's personal servant for 30 days.  So, that's a repetitive stage of this tanking storyline that will drag on for a whole month.  Deep joy....

1. Victory Road 2011

While I'm just going to concentrate on the main event for understandable reasons, it should be pointed out that the entire event was riddled with problems, and overall this disastrous TNA PPV deserves its reputation as one of the worst wrestling shows of all time even before the jaw-dropping conclusion.  Search out Botchamania 164 for a round-up of the the full horror.  An incredibly sloppy Knockouts tag match is a particularly highlight of low quality. Rosita stands over Winter waiting to hit her with a title belt.   Unfortunately, Velvet Sky, who was supposed to make the babyface save, completely missed her cue, so Rosita just stood there, poised with belt as if paralysed. for a number of agonising seconds. Eventually, the tardy New Yorker finally runs in to thwart Rosita's assault on Winter. It's horrible....

Anyway, onto the most pathetic excuse for a main event ever staged.  It lasted 88 seconds in total, simply because Jeff Hardy was too drunk and/or stoned to perform.  He was slated to face Sting in a kind of facepaint vs facepaint contest, but it was clear something was up when Hardy's music rang on and no-one initially ran out into the dry ice billowing into the arena.  Eventually, Hardy just, well, stumbled out and made unsteady progress towards the ring, half-heartedly shaking hands with ringside fans.  Eventually, as he climbed into the ring, Eric Bischoff also arrived, purportedly to announce a new stipulation for the match.  In truth, he was actually telling everyone to wrap things up quickly.   The match started with Hardy stalling before throwing his t-shirt out to the crowd.  Pathetically, he didn't even have the co-ordination to chuck the shirt out of the ring.  Eventually, Sting covered Jeff Hardy after his first serious piece of offence and held him down shoot style for the three-count before exiting the ring in disgust.  Even in the aftermath, TNA couldn't catch a break.  As the shout chanted "that was bullshit", the camera catches a furious-looking Sting yelling 'I agree!"

Now while the ultimate blame must lie with Hardy himself, TNA's conduct here was mystifying.  Hardy was clearly in no fit state and should not have been sent out at all.  A better compromise would have been to send out another wrestler to take his place, even if that meant someone working a double shift.  Someone like Bobby Roode would have been able to improvise an acceptable match with a veteran like Sting.  Not ideal, but better than what transpired.  But it goes back further than that.  Given Hardy's reputation, surely TNA should have been keeping an eye on him to ensure he was still sober during that evening.  Leaving him to his own devices as they did was severely negligent.

The aftermath was depressing.  Jeff Hardy wasn't sacked, mostly because he shifts more merchandise than any other TNA star, but he was suspended indefinitely and written out of all storylines.  Meanwhile a penitent TNA offered six months' free use of the company's on-demand library to anyone who had purchased this awful event.   During his suspension, Hardy was sentenced to ten days in prison after being convicted on drugs charges.  On exiting prison in September 2011, he returned to Impact Wrestling by apologising to his fellow wrestlers for his dreadful state at Victory Road.  He has, to be fair, performed with apparent professionalism ever since. But, for his disgraceful performance on 3 March 2011, he deserves to be crowned the dumbest wrestler of recent times.