2 weeks Ago
Wrestling is uniquely placed in that it requires performers to be brutally selfish at the expense of their friends and colleagues while trusting the exact same peers and colleagues with their bodies and lives when the bell rings. For as long as its been the market leader (and perhaps even more so in the few years where it wasn't), WWE may as well be have been an office with one of those cheesy "You don't have to be [insert adjective] to work here, but it helps" signs hanging on the wall, but with "ruthless" inserted in the middle. The company was the place to juggle respect and contempt for your peers in equal measure, as instructed from the top down.
Burials, by their nature, are counterproductive because the exist more to kill potential stars than make the existing ones, but they represent the side of the game that nearly every tippy-top talent likes to pretend they don't engage in. At time of writing, even notoriously unselfish headliner The Rock has started getting sucked into the vanity of it all, but he was - until 2024 at very least - a rule-proving exception due to his absolute certainty in the safety of his spot. He didn't have that little insecure voice in his head.
Unlike...
Very much a case of quality of burials over quantity, Brock Lesnar was more than happy to do business when the mood struck, and indeed kept himself over by knowing when to lose, how to lose, and who to lose to. But it was fairly obvious when that didn't mean much to him. In one case, it was even confirmed by his high profile opponent.
TAFKA Dean Ambrose was gritting his teeth through an awkward 2016 interview with Stone Cold Steve Austin when he revealed that Lesnar wasn't particularly receptive to many of his ideas going into their uneven WrestleMania 32 brawl, explaining away the disappointing bout in the process. Truthfully, the contest only really even makes any sense when you consider Lesnar nope'ing stuff beforehand. Elsewhere, Braun Strowman repeatedly got a patronisingly short shrift from 'The Beast'.
Was he conscious of 'The Monster Among Men' being somebody that could steal his spot when they assembled a criminally disappointing dud at No Mercy 2017? Or was he foreshadowing their 2018 matches where he had to tag Strowman for real and squash him at Royal Rumble and Crown Jewel respectively? Lesnar can just count himself lucky a few attempts to get a certain feud off the ground never materialised. What on earth would have done to secure himself against the muscle and might of..
. Shane McMahon was so shamelessly and brazenly self-serving in his post-2016 return that it's easy to forget just how effective he once was as the physical maniac of the McMahon family. Positioned perfectly as lucky enough to steal a win or two over X-Pac (and carried through said victories by the almost peerless Sean Waltman), McMahon was fortuitous as a heel and gutsy as a babyface, but fundamentally was a "Boy Wonder" in a man's world in 1999-2001.
He curated a vibe around himself that explained the monster pops and boosts to ticket sales he generated for his WrestleMania 32 return, but it was as if those early reactions went to his head the longer he stuck around. He went blow for blow with The Undertaker in Dallas, and proceeded to become the mirror man against whomever he faced. He could out-wrestle AJ Styles, he could out-stare (!) Brock Lesnar, and he could out-cheat The Miz.
He became the common denominator in his programmes rather than an occasional feature, so much so that by 2022 he was fired by his own father for campaigning to dominate and win the Royal Rumble. Takin' souls and diggin' holes might have been the gimmick for 'The Deadman' for the bulk of his iconic WWE run, but he knew his way around a shoot burial if the booking wasn't doing quite enough to protect the integrity of a character he felt he'd worked too long and hard for. In defence of the man who you could label Mark with or without the capital "M", he'd endured a lot during some of WWE's leanest years in the 90s, but his matches had at times been so lousy that it felt at very least like a score draw.
Said lack of quality didn't justify how little he gave Kurt Angle (twice!) in 2000, how he dared to put Chris Jericho in his place shortly after cutting an infamously terrible promo , and the lengths he went to but Diamond Dallas Page and the rest of the potential WCW breakouts in their places during a fatally flawed Invasion storyline. It extended into 2002 when he was the first person Brock Lesnar couldn't plough through at Unforgiven, but he did at least do business the right way in a Cell match the following month. At his mid-00s working peak, he was as game as he'd ever been to get others over while staying that way himself but for too many, his reputation as "judge", jury and executioner of midcarders was already secure.
On his 1996/97 rise and then again at his peak shortly afterwards, Stone Cold Steve Austin had such fabulous instincts for his character that he was able to reshape most of WWE around his vibe and carry it back to industry dominance and mainstream supremacy. Vince McMahon considered 'The Rattlesnake' the most challenging talent he ever worked with, but the former easily justified the latter during the unexpected turn-of-the-century boom. That boom came to an end with an alarming thud following WrestleMania X-Seven, but Austin's influence remained at large.
This resulted in almost every WCW talent kowtowing to his megalomaniacal persona in 2001, and a host of wrestlers struggling to get past him when the bloom was completely off the rose by 2002. His insecurity increased following his 2003 retirement. Once an invaluable character in WWE, he became something of a bully babyface in his role as an on-screen authority figure.
Physically destroying everybody in sight had been passable creative when he was still able to give the victims a bit of shine in matches, but a generation of talent were plowed through in preserving the pops after the glass smashed. John Cena's inhuman work ethic inadvertently buried hundreds of wrestlers when so few could live up to the almost-impossible standards he set as WWE's top star during the brand-first era - and the paradoxical notion of that role. Not least when he flatly refused to sell the losses he did take during his lengthy stay on top.
In a more direct manner though, he seemed to have a real problem doing right by The Miz. Was it insecurity in that, though nowhere near as popular, Miz embodied enough of the cookie cutter qualities 'The Champ' had that he could have been the one to replace him in a different timeline? Was it that he saw that the 'A-Lister' had, if nothing else, a similar drive to do and say just about anything the company asked of him? Whatever it was, he just seemed to love cutting Miz off at the knees or simply not giving him the leg up in the first place. A near-20 years on WWE television suggests that he didn't quite get it done, and that he wasn't wrong about his rival's staying power.
He also really, really should have done business for The Nexus at SummerSlam 2010. They still might have died on the vine soon after, but that first win would have at least allowed them to live a little longer. Disliked by the majority of his peers for how little care he seemed to take with their bodies, and hated by many following his retirement for how little respect he seemingly had for all that was done to get him to the position he briefly peaked at, the Ultimate Warrior was a single issue wrestler.
The single issue was the status of the Ultimate Warrior. Bobby Heenan luxuriated in telling the story of Andre The Giant smashing him in the face after one too many nights absorbing Warrior's recklessness, probably because he himself was hurt during a WrestleMania V post-match assault. Warrior was a squash guy on the way up and never gave a thought to anybody or anything on the way down.
Often literally. The wildness was a key part of what got him - and indeed the very idea of pro wrestling - over with generations of fans (your writer included), but in contrast to the way people spoke of working a Hogan town for the payoff or a Hart match for the protection, Warrior felt drastically short of the talismanic figures he slotted in between. From failing to live up to expectations as a top draw, to requiring great wrestlers to make him look good and to over-estimating his own worth pre-and-post retirement, Warrior Jim's tunnel vision was his undoing.
In the end, Warrior buried no-one harder than himself. Absolutely notorious for how they directly and indirectly scythed through careers with malice and ease, The Kliq have been lionised in modern wrestling discussion because four of them were doing some of the industry's most transcendent work at the time and Triple H was also there. Controlling the discussion in the modern age because 'The Game' and Shawn Michaels control so much of WWE's creative present and future, Michaels, Diesel, Razor Ramon, The 1-2-3 Kid and Hunter Hearst Helmsley looked after their own at the expense of almost everybody else because in their minds they were totally justified in doing so.
Nothing was popping the territory for the company, but the core four did at least bring mixes of quality, charisma and realism to a product desperately in need of some. So went every tale told ever since, if you got on their bad side, you were doomed, and there's ample evidence that played out on screen to back it up. Only Bret Hart and The Undertaker appeared immune from their control between late-1994 and the 1996 exits of Scott Hall and Kevin Nash for WCW, and even then, look at what both were doing in the meantime.
Hart went through the ringer of a dire WWE undercard and still made chicken salad most of the time, while The Undertaker basically got distracted with The Corporation in a year-long time-filling urn chase. The Kliq, meanwhile, worked overtime to get each other over, and 'The Hitman' revealed in his book that upon becoming WWE Champion, Michaels had every intention of keeping it that way at the top of the card before plans - and the entire industry - changed. The sheer scale and power of a Hulk Hogan burial is such that there are ways to reference careers falling apart in front of you simply by calling back to one of the many times he put a thumb on a colleague's forehead.
See an established star take a win from a guy who needed it more? "That doesn't work for me, brother" bounces around your brain in the voice of the veteran who stole the W. Chris Jericho rocking up to kill your favourite new hand in AEW? Expect a post on social media with a clip of 'The Hulkster's TNA music, expertly calling back to a time his every idea made that show worse and worse. A belt starting to lose its value? Cue up 1993 Hogan calling the WWE Championship a "toy" or "trinket" despite him politicking Bret Hart out of it at WrestleMania IX.
The Ultimate Warrior rematch at Halloween Havoc was an all-time turkerino, but there was parity to be restored after an eight-year wait! The less said about Sting's Starrcade '97 tan, the better. Naturally, the somewhat reasonable argument for Hogan's self-preservation was that in his prime years, his success was generating monster payouts for everybody else he worked alongside or against. A golden goose headliner in two separate runs, he never felt he stopped producing even when the eggs he'd lay were all rotten.
Only then do the burials sting - when you can't do business, you should do business . A lesson often avoided by..
. Realistically the single greatest politician in wrestling history, Triple H made a life and career for himself by being just fine at most things in front of the camera and just exceptional at backstage chess when the red light was off. He smartly picked the best friend group in 1995 when offering to be the sober hand at the wheel (both steering and suitcase) for The Kliq, got his voice heard in creative sessions as business boomed under real stars Steve Austin and The Rock, kept it there when he married into the McMahon family, and positioned himself as unstoppable when there was neither stars nor audience investment to stop him in a mid-2000s reign of terror.
It is unfair to say he didn't breifly make the mountain top on merit, but his decades-long deification is betrayed by actually sitting down to watch the majority of his prime years between the ropes. 2000 upto his first quad tear in May 2001 was the peak, but undeniable brilliance for 18 months has been overstated ad infinitum thanks to longer periods where he simply won to indifference or gobbled up hours and hours of pay-per-view time in defeat. The losses others suffered were compounded by his power too - nobody got to be cooler, funnier or harder than Triple H even if he was somewhere between a four and a six out of ten at portraying all those roles.
It's ironic, as a booker, his fantastic creative between 2022 and 2024 resulted in WWE introducing a graphic on screen to track the decibel levels in the building. In his time atop the company as a wrestler twenty years earlier, you'd need even stronger equipment just to find a pulse. It took all the above master politicians to keep themselves in positions of power, but nobody could have made those moves without a facilitator quite like Vince McMahon at the top of wrestling's tree for as long as resided there.
Ahead of him resigning in disgrace (twice), McMahon was an autocrat to a damaging, abusive and increasingly horrific fault. And when he wasn't presiding over a company that adhered to his mantras for better and worse, he was actively and directly destroying pushes with his miserable creative. In the aftermath of his departure and almost-immediate creative upturn, it's getting easier and easier to wave away just about 20 years of shoddy work between 2002 and 2022, but there are specifically steep drop-offs in standards around the 2009 guest host era of Monday Night Raw, and again in 2018 when WWE became more financially reliant on television money than customer takings for the first time.
Pick your favourite wrestler and unless its John Cena, McMahon's directions did something to harm their trajectory. If anything, it tempered the best of the burial artists - nothing they could do in front of the camera was as devastating as what the former Chairman was able to "craft" behind the scenes..
