Opinionated: WWE Need to Make New Stars!
Okay, so it’s WrestleMania season, which wrestling fans will know as the time when pro-wrestling hits a high and every promotion in the world provides even more content to devour. Also, nowadays, it’s often a time when WWE bring back names from the past in order to sell this big event to lapsed or casual fans, a way to get a big ole buy-rate and a sell-out in the arena. For many of us long-time and permanent fans, this can be a bit (or a lot) frustrating. We want to see the men and women who are kicking bum on a weekly basis given a chance to shine at WrestleMania, and not guys who were in their prime twenty years ago.
This year we have both main WWE titles held by Brock Lesnar and Goldberg, the latter of whom has hardly wrestled in the past fifteen years or longer and when he does it’s a clumsy and awkward mess. He isn’t capable anymore, but WWE want the ratings, so they book him. He went on to defeat Bray Wyatt, a character who should have been protected much better.
We will also be seeing The Undertaker, a legend in the wrestling business, a guy who has so much respect from fans around the globe, coming back to face AJ Styles at this years Mania. Now… I’ve always been a fan of The Undertaker, he’s been around since the day I started watching pro-wrestling in 1992, some 28 years ago. He is no longer able to have matches like he used to. That’s not a surprise, he’s older, he’s been through the wringer, and no-one should be able to do what they could do in their youth. Still, he’s coming back, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
We will also see John Cena, a man who hasn’t wrestled much for WWE in the past couple of years, coming back to face Bray Wyatt. While not as alarming and annoying as Goldberg being the WWE Universal Champion, it’s still not potentially going to be a good thing for Wyatt or the future of WWE. On top of this we’ve seen the wonderful return of Edge to WWE, but unlike Goldberg and ‘Taker, Edge appears to be in great shape and able to do what he could do prior to his retirement.
WrestleMania, then, will feature a whole bunch of old names, guys who were stars fifteen, twenty or even thirty years ago, and the emphasis is firmly on these guys. It’s going to be a hard day when there are no stars left to bring back, because right now WWE just aren’t building new stars. We’ve had flashes of it, times when it looked like guys were going to hit the roof, blow through it and become full-time main event level stars for WWE. Daniel Bryan was the most popular babyface in WWE for a long time, and now he’s in mid-card matches. Seth Rollins hovers around the main event scene, but without a title around his waist, or more protection of his character, he doesn’t come off like the star that guys like Steve Austin, The Rock, Triple H, The Undertaker or Mick Foley did back in the day. He’s talented enough for it, but isn’t booked or written well enough.
Recently we’ve seen Bray Wyatt and his Fiend character become massively popular, bringing an eerie and cool energy to promos and storylines. Well, that was until WWE’s lacklustre writing caused the character to flounder, and his loss to Goldberg has only made the character seem weaker. Goldberg is 53 years old, is incapable of working match longer than five minutes, and he consistently botches moves. I mean… why would a monster character, a young talented guy in his prime, lose to a guy like that? It’s not helpful and does nothing to promote the future. It just plain sucks.
WWE could have a whole array of mega-stars at the top of their shows right now. Organically the crowds have embraced so many men and women over the years and WWE have done nothing with them. Remember Rusev Day? The guy was over with the fans huge. They did nothing with him. Remember fans taking “Cesaro Section” signs into the crowd and chanting for him? I do. Nothing happened. Kevin Owens, Daniel Byran, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe… I could keep listing names. The thing is, these guys aren’t all young whippersnappers, they’ve been working for over a decade themselves, yet they’re taking a backseat to talent who should have hung up the boots and knee-pads years ago.
It’s important that WWE change things and begin to make new stars and not just temporarily until WrestleMania rolls around again. They need to focus on pushing and promoting their full-time talent and treating them like stars. They need to protect their talent and stop changing their minds every two-minutes on who they want to push. They need to let talent talk from their hearts, working from bullet-points rather than reading off scripts written by other people. Things need to change, because there will become a time when The Undertaker, Brock Lesnar, Triple H, Kane, Big Show, Edge, Goldberg and John Cena aren’t able or willing to come back for “another run”. There will be a time where the past won’t be there to call on anymore, and then WWE will struggle, because who will the bring back for that big buy-rate in a few years when no stars have been made?
Come on WWE, you’ve done it before, your roster is jam-packed with the most talented men and women in the business, you just need to alter your ways and build up the greatest roster you’ve ever assembled. Enough Goldberg, enough Undertaker, enough.
