Let’s get into a powerhouse Ruthless Aggression era wrestler who is best known for his reigns as WWE Intercontinental champion as well as the last champion on the ECW brand. It’s Ezekiel Jackson in this “Wrestling Salvage Yard”.
Jackson’s WWE Career
On the one hand, this should be an easy salvage because WWE tried with Jackson. Then again, the guy was with WWE for six whole years—which it didn’t feel like. Then again, it’s not unusual for WWE to have a bunch of superstars who are just…on the roster.
They do B-shows and house shows—hell, they might even show up to get spanked on the flagships—but they’re not high on creative’s priority list. In Jackson’s case, that’s weird because WWE made an attempt with him at first. The guy was muscular, over 6 feet tall, and had a charm to him despite not having the chops on the mic.
WWE had hopes for Ezekiel Jackson. These were Ahmed Johnson-sized hopes but still hopes. He just looked like a superstar project for the company. So, after some time in Florida Championship Wrestling, WWE brought him up as Brian Kendrick’s bodyguard over on SmackDown.
The bodyguard route is a tried and true method of making a main event star dating back to Diesel and up until Jackson’s debut, Batista. If a wrestler is big and imposing enough, being a smaller talent’s goon is a good career path to start out.
After SD, Jackson moved over to the ECW brand where he had an early run as a singles competitor before hooking up with Regal and Vladimir Kozlov as The Ruthless Roundtable—which was a cool name for a faction that I didn’t know existed. Seriously, I just figured that the three of them just teamed up to harass Christian and try to take his ECW Championship.
Speaking of ECW Championship, Jackson would win that title and the brand would end in February 2010 with the powerhouse as the final champion.
This is just two years on the main roster with a couple of months on an A-show. With ECW done, instead of sending him back to FCW for some polishing—because Jackson was both green and basic—he returned to SD, got injured, and was drafted to RAW…then traded back to SD at the end of 2010.
On SmackDown, he was a member of the Corre, a group of young talent that went through the original NXT and formed the Nexus. That would be short-lived as factions tend to eat themselves alive and he became a feud with the Corre.
This was Ezekiel Jackson’s first actual run as a singles competitor. You know, seeing how he handles being the focus in his own story before regulating him to faction support and tag teams. Jackson performed well enough that he got at Corre leader Wade Barrett’s IC title but came up short the first time.
Another shot at WWE Capitol Punishment was fruitful and he gained his second singles title—only for Cody Rhodes to take it two weeks later. His two years in WWE were punctuated by a losing streak and an injury that took him out for the bulk of his remaining career in the company. While he returned for WrestleMania Axxess in 2013, he was pretty much done with WWE and released in early 2014.
Salvaging Ezekiel Jackson
That’s Jackson’s WWE career: six years, two singles championships, a few injuries, and a few feuds. Given what could be seen in him and how long he was with WWE, I’d say that this was a failed project. WWE would rack up a bunch of those before and after Ezekiel Jackson.
The company definitely tried to make Ezekiel work and as a face, fans were taking to him a bit but perhaps WWE could see where the road stopped with him after six years. I mean, he wasn’t going to get Mark Henry treatment where the company continues to try to make a wrestler a thing for over a decade.
No, the company said “OK, we’ve seen enough—we’ve seen enough” and released him. During that time, he didn’t really improve but he didn’t get worse. It was a mediocre consistency where that could pass for a smaller wrestler without the superstar look or menace to spare but not a big strapping wrestler with both a superstar look and some menace.
So, was he salvageable? As a tag team performer, most likely. WWE just needed to find someone who complimented Ezekiel Jackson and someone who could help him improve. The end goal is to make Jackson a singles star.
He might be a floater at best—someone in the upper reaches of the midcard who could be a main eventer if someone’s out injured or suspended—but he would definitely be around the U.S and IC title pictures. He might even pick up a King of the Ring win or get the most eliminations in a rumble.
I believe that the key here wasn’t to ping-pong trade him post-ECW but to leave him on SmackDown. This was the brand that WWE would test-run younger superstars for a run on RAW. Just keep him on SD slow build him, and let the guy get some personality from his battles and teams on SD before ascending him over time.
It just seemed like WWE was in a mad dash to produce a new monster or powerhouse that it did speedruns on heavyweight careers after developmental and the ECW brand. They can do that now with the NXT system being established and a new focus.
However, in the late 2000s, the developmental system wasn’t built for speedrunning superstars to the main roster and into high-pressure card positions.
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