Bray Wyatt: From messiah to misfire
In my humble opinion, Bray Wyatt is one of the most intriguing characters in the entire landscape of professional wrestling today and should be positioned as such by headlining PPVs and competing for the top titles.
At least that has been my opinion until recently. Since Wyatt’s debut just over three years ago, he has been one of the first performers I think about when tuning into a Raw or Smackdown and I’m intrigued as to what is next for “The Eater of World’s”. However, this past week on Smackdown, when Bray was cutting his ‘Sermon for the Serpent’ promo on Randy Orton, I found myself uninterested and underwhelmed by what he was saying.
It got me to thinking. Is it down to the man behind the character under performing or is it due to the unimaginative and short-sighted booking of WWE’s creative team over the last couple of years?
When The Wyatt Family burst onto the scene in July 2013, they captivated the audience and looked set to inject some life into what was a monotonous and stale product in WWE at the time. They did at first with a debuting feud with Kane followed by working memorable programs against established top tier talents in Daniel Bryan and John Cena, that put the family, and Bray, in particular, on the map. It signified to the audience that these were men that were to be taken seriously going forward.
But now here we are in 2016 and the aforementioned Cena and Bryan feuds are still Bray Wyatt’s most significant contributions to date. It has been a slow decline for Wyatt since this time and I believe it all started at WrestleMania 30 when he lost his marquee match against John Cena.
A victory against WWE’s biggest star of the last decade would have solidified Wyatt as a premier talent and would have elevated not just Bray, but anyone that he feuded with thereafter. Instead, we got the predictable John Cena victory which set Wyatt back and pushed him down the card. You could argue that he didn’t reach the current level again until the following year’s WrestleMania when he challenged The Undertaker and he would lose again.
A win against The Undertaker would have been seen as a passing of the torch from Taker to Bray, but that didn’t materialise, which was understandable as Undertaker was coming back from his shocking, streak-ending defeat at WrestleMania the previous year. However, when the two reignited their feud for a tag match at 2015’s Survivor Series with Bray coming up short yet again, his big match losses would begin to gain significance and his wonder and mystique would start to fade.
Survivor Series felt like it should have been Bray’s crowning moment and his loss genuinely mystified me as it did nothing for Undertaker & Kane and significantly hurt Wyatt’s legitimacy as a top heel in the company. For me, it marks the biggest missed opportunity by WWE to give Bray his career-defining win.
It is since this loss that Wyatt has lost his way, his promos don’t pack the same punch as they used to and his overall aura has slowly diminished.
So where does he go from here? The recent brand split appeared as though it could give him a new lease of life but thus far he has been a bit-part player while the likes of Dean Ambrose and AJ Styles have been pushed as Smackdown Live’s biggest stars.
Bray Wyatt needs a clear direction, a goal for him to work towards. It is frankly baffling that someone of his calibre of talent is still yet to have won a championship during his WWE career and maybe that could be the direction he should go next. The other avenue is an overhaul of his character. Perhaps after a face turn, he could veer away from his ‘cult leader’ persona and become more of a vigilante and target Smackdown’s top heels, the likes of AJ Styles.
A fresh approach to the booking of Bray Wyatt needs to happen soon and he is a character that must be protected in order for him to reach his full potential. From the moment he first appeared on our screens as Bray Wyatt, he looked set for a ‘Hall of Fame’ worthy career. However, if he continues down the path he is currently on, he will not reach the heights that we all hoped and expected he would and we’ll be left wondering what might have been.