Numerous times in WWE, it feels like WWE is simply ignoring a star who is right there. We have seen this with Rusev most recently, with crowds of fans chanting ‘Rusev Day’ as they became the most popular act in the company. Despite this, they weren’t even able to win the Smackdown Tag Team titles and were broken up in disappointing fashion. They weren’t meant to be stars, therefore WWE was not going to treat them like so. Perhaps the biggest example of this in recent memory comes from Zack Ryder in 2011. After starting up the Z! True Long Island Story YouTube channel to boost his popularity, this undercard talent became a massive star over the span of a few quick weeks. Despite this, he was instead humiliated on TV by WWE, snuffing out this popularity. The effect is still felt many years later, as Curt Hawkins reveals this is when WWE stopped telling people to ‘grab the brass ring’.
Curt Hawkins Noticed A Change After Zack Ryder’s Unintended Success
While speaking with Chris Jericho on the Talk Is Jericho podcast, Curt Hawkins would talk about this. “Every year, as long as I was in WWE, the Raw after Mania we had this BS company….everyone there at TV meeting where they say, ‘The brass ring is there, it’s yours, it’s a fresh year. Who is gonna get it?’ Ever since Long Island Iced Z, they don’t even bother with that meeting anymore because they know it’s not true. Even if you grab the brass ring, you’re gonna get your hand smacked. If they don’t want you to have it, you’re not going to have it,”. You would assume that a company that often has trouble building stars would relish in the fact that sometimes things organically work out this way, but WWE is such a machine that that simply will not do. Zack Ryder became a star for them, and he was put into a program with Kane & John Cena, which saw Ryder pushed off the stage while he was in a wheelchair, then having his storyline friend in Cena steal his on-screen girlfriend.
Backed Up By Chris Jericho
Chris Jericho also weighed in on this, saying the following from the same interview with Hawkins. “There is a strange resentment where, if Vince doesn’t think of it, it’s not valid or real. The same thing happened with Daniel Bryan when he first came in. He got over because he knows how to get over, but they resisted it for so long until they didn’t have a choice. I feel the same thing happened with Zack Ryder.”
This is one issue that might never be fixed with WWE, and is why having alternatives like All Elite Wrestling rising up is so important for the industry. NXT also shows a changing tide, with people often coming in with their previously established characters and gimmicks and maintaining their popularity because of this. Do you think RAW & Smackdown will ever follow this trend? Let us know what you think in the comment section down below.
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