10 New Era Superstars who had to come up the hard way
WWE is considered to be the grandest stage of pro wrestling where the entertainment value of a performer is on an equal footing with their in-ring abilities. While making it to the top comes at an immoderate price, ensuring one’s stay involves satisfying several criteria that the company as a product demands.
These transcend the performer’s ability to wrestle by often focusing around his marketability as a potential investment in the mean world of “sports entertainment”. Such relentlessness affords its participants little ground to slip, irrespective of their experience inside a ring. However, circumstances have begun to change for the better.
With the advent of the New Era, there has been an influx of talent onto the main roster. Negotiations with a technologically advanced and ceaselessly critical audience have introduced a transparency in the industry, whereby superstars’ histories are as important as their run inside the company. Due to this shift in interest, wrestlers from the independent scenes are flooding WWE’s developmental brand, while experienced superstars are getting their deserved title pushes.
The emphasis on talent and opportunity has come as a result of a massive change in the product’s antiquarian hiring policies. Needless to say, crowd favorites are taking center stage, making their stimulating stories all the more reassuring of their current glory.
The following are ten WWE Superstars who have had to stake a claim on nothing but their mettle and talent while eking a way up the ladder:
Zack Ryder
Woo to the vanquished
From his one match appearance on SmackDown! as a jobber against Matt Morgan in 2005 to achieving his Wrestlemania moment in 2015, Ryder has come a long way. He had been repackaged numerous times by the WWE, sometimes along with a tag team partner and sometimes beside a superstar like Edge. Yet none of them could ensure the recognition that he deserved within the company.
Feeling underutilized, Ryder took to the internet with a YouTube series called “Z! True Long Island Story” and won himself a strong following, thus initiating the Ryder Revolution.
Although a one-time Intercontinental Champion, a one-time United States Champion, and a one-time WWE Tag Team Champion, Ryder had seen a trough in his career until successfully plucking the IC Title at Wrestlemania 32.
Despite that, his push was short lived. For an industry veteran who is so over, Ryder has been seeing the worse end of the stick for some time. It is unlikely that his recent tag team venture with Mojo Rawley in mid card matches will sail him out of the doldrums.