WWE should Stop Depending on The Rock for better business

While it was great to see The Rock return to the WWE on Raw this week, it isn’t quite great to read reports that he might be facing someone or the other at Wrestlemania. It doesn’t matter if that someone is Triple H or Brock Lesnar or Roman Reigns or Rusev. Why? Because the man is past his prime. It would have been great if he could still wrestle, even if he was a shadow of his former self. But in almost all of the matches that he’s competed in except the tag match at Survivor Series 2011, he looks gassed down. It doesn’t look like his heavyweight body can carry the weight of wrestling a 30 minute match which people expect to be a classic.

Gracing the Universe with his Iconic Presence

It is always great to see him return when he’s not advertised at all. The aura he has is something unearthly. When Wrestlemania 30 kicked off with Hulk Hogan, Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Great One being face to face in the same ring, it was something unprecedented and an iconic moment. It was just surreal for a hardcore wrestling audience.

The Brooklyn crowd responded in much the same way when the Brahma Bull returned and nobody saw that coming. What followed was a very expected route that the WWE will take. Rock came out there and went about talking gibberish but being who he is, everything sounds awesome. Rusev had some breakout moments too. One of them was when he called the 42 year old ‘American piece of garbage’.

It was the first in a long time that Rusev made an effort to speak in a language the audience in the arena understood. But most of that segment was about The Rock and his iconic presence. That was enough for many to start talking about how he and the WWE are back on the same page and how they’ll continue to do business together.

The Young and The Restless

Over the past few weeks, if there’s anything that WWE should have learned is to learn to depend on its present talent and make a long term investment on them. There can’t just be just a ‘chosen’ one. They instilled quite a lot of trust in Reigns just like they did on Ryback but did not find the right way to utilise3 what they had created.

The company now have to depend on Rollins and Ambrose, which before the injury to Reigns was an upper mid card feud. Daniel Bryan and Roman Reigns’ injuries and Brock Lesnar’s part time status has brought more spotlight to a newer breed of talent.

Now, they say that Randy Orton has made a part time agreement as well. That means less involvement from the veteran set of superstars.

The crowd reactions are quite ambiguous; John Cena can’t carry the company alone. He needs a good opponent. He needs a good feud. But unlike the Bray Wyatt feud, it shouldn’t do good to just John Cena and all the harm to a . That’s the biggest challenge with his recent feud against Dean Ambrose. The feud will be successful if Ambrose is built to be a threat to Cena’s invincibility in a way that WWE can depend on this feud in the long run. There is a spark in this feud which is predominantly absent if Cena was set to face Rollins. But it all depends on how their match at Hell In a Cell is booked.

That Old Saying

To come back to the point, WWE needs to put more emphasis on how to use their present crop of talent insetead of depending on The Rock or other part time wrestlers. As trite as this sounds, it has to be done. We never saw wrestlers from the Golden Era coming about in the Attitude Era. That’s when names like Stone Cold Steve Austin, Rock, Jericho, Kurt Angle et al became famous.

They might not get the ratings immediately but as we all know, slow and steady wins the race.