Pro wrestling, and specifically the WWE, has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. One of the earliest memories I have at all is my older brother renting WrestleMania 6 – the one in Toronto with Hulk Hogan facing the Ultimate Warrior in the main event – and watching it at home. That isn’t to say I have watched WWE for as long as I can remember, though.
The Ultimate Warrior is who drew me into wrestling, Bret Hart kept me around through the 90s, and the Attitude Era made WWE and WCW impossible to ignore. Once the mid-2000s rolled around, though, my interest waned. I’m not sure if it was the product itself or not, but I was getting towards the end of my fourth year of university, and it just became unimportant. From 2007 through the early 2010s, it was only the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania that would catch my attention.
In 2013, a friend that I watched wrestling with back in my university days and had similarly stopped watching called me and said I needed to start watching Raw again. There was this team called ‘The Shield’ that had the appearance of the new nWo, but with young stars rather than established veterans. He was right; I was hooked on WWE again.
That time in WWE coincided with the rise of Daniel Bryan, but it wasn’t something I was overly interested in. Just watching the product weekly was a recent development and a personal relationship with Bryan’s emergence, bolstered by his run in the independent companies, didn’t resonate. ‘The Shield’ was great, and I still go back to watch their matches, but they were made men. They were on the way to the main event, and nothing could stop that. Combine all this with John Cena’s turn into a PG superhero and I needed to find a reason to keep watching.
It’s a funny thing, to love an entertainment product that you don’t particularly enjoy. It’s like being a real sports fan; a lot of time is spent watching the people you root for lose and fail. Part of it is also nostalgia, harkening back to the days when your biggest concern was securing a TV to watch WWF Superstars at 11 AM on a Saturday morning. But when you don’t get enjoyment out of it, it leaves you in a sort of limbo. You’re rooting for it; you want to see the magic that they have created in the past. But it doesn’t happen, and you wonder why you’re still there. (In fairness, the Bryan ‘Yes’ story was phenomenal – it just caught me at the wrong time as I was getting back into things.)
But then Bray Wyatt and his Wyatt Family came in as foils for Bryan, Cena, and The Shield and, taking his group from Duck Dynasty look-a-likes to something out of the first season of True Detective. You could see it in real time. From the muted reactions to thousands of cell phones in the air in homage to Wyatt during his entrance, it took no time for the creative wizard to get over with the crowd. His personal feud with Cena and the Family’s feud with The Shield cemented him as a star, and the Wyatts/Shield 3-on-3 matches remain among the best of the era. It also elevated his stable mate Luke Harper a.k.a. Brodie Lee, who also tragically died nearly three years ago.
Turning his character into The Fiend later in his WWE run created the best character the company has done since The Undertaker. Every on-screen talent is a character to some degree, but this was a complete transformation of a person playing a cult figure to a monster out of a Wes Craven movie. The entrance, the music, the accessories, all of it. There was nothing about his presentation or in-ring work that wasn’t near-perfect. From the swampy cult, to the Eater of Worlds, to the Fiend, the constant evolution of the character felt like a natural progression of the person behind the character. It is what made him magnetic to watch; everything we saw on screen came out of his mind and that helped blur the line between reality and fantasy, even with a character such as this.
Wyatt’s second feud with Bryan remains one of the best WWE has managed in the last decade. The way they played off each other with Wyatt as the menacing but convincing villain and Bryan the object of a cult-like surge in popularity years earlier, was a perfect pairing of two of the best pro wrestlers on the planet. It was Wyatt’s last major feud before the pandemic started, which means it remains basically his last great feud.
Back in 2013, one team got me re-invested into something that has been part of my life for 33 out of my 37 years. But it was one man that kept me invested for years to come, and it was one of the most brilliant minds of the modern wrestling era. If he hadn’t been as good as he was, it’s unlikely that my interest in wrestling would be sustained. It would have been easy to check out by the mid-2010s, but he was a reason to watch every week right up until 2020.
This sucks. There is no way around it. His death hurts a lot of people and thoughts are with his family and friends. I didn’t know him personally, but I love pro wrestling, and he’ll always be one of the most impactful pro wrestlers I have ever watched. The grappling world is a much less creative one today than it was yesterday.
Cliffy's hell-hole 