100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 6 - Bray Wyatt vs. Randy Orton
WWE Championship - Wrestlemania 33
Truly, we should have known this was destined to fail as soon as we all saw the Randy Orton sperm snake.
This would not be the most embarrassing thing presented by WWE on this night.
There is a good chance that if something in wrestling involves supernatural powers, I will not enjoy it. I’ve never made it a secret that I am not a Bray Wyatt fan either. It’s a shame because the creepy cult leader was a gimmick with potential as Bray had enough charisma to carry that. At a certain point though, WWE decided that they wanted Bray to be their new Undertaker (I would argue a better comparison is probably Papa Shango), and eventually started giving him all sorts of magical powers.
Given that in the process of the previous 93 entries I have derided lame supernatural powers in wrestling, it should come as no surprise to see one of its more embarrassing examples land in such a high spot. After all, this is the WWE Championship match at Wrestlemania. If you find yourself surprised to see this as high as it is - to question if this was so bad it deserves a number 6 spot on this list, above the likes of Cole vs Lawler, Bret vs Vince, or Steiner vs HHH - then consider this. This is, in theory, one of the biggest matches of the entire year. There is an inherent prestige to the WWE Championship match at Wrestlemania due to its history and legacy. There’s been some bad matches for the WWE Championship at Wrestlemania, but very few of them felt out of place and none tried to implement anything close to what this match did. It was a very protected spot in the WWE calendar.
The storyline certainly had enough build to justify such a spot, as it went back over half a year. After Summerslam, Orton and Wyatt began a feud which eventually saw them main event the No Mercy pay-per-view in a standard, mediocre match. After losing, Orton decided to join the Wyatt family. Unlike when Daniel Bryan was unnecessarily entered into the family, Orton benefited greatly from this because it gave a new intriguing edge to an otherwise stale character. Here was an established main event wrestler acting almost like a lackey for Wyatt. Orton and Bray even won the SmackDown Tag Team Titles together. Slowly but surely, Orton gained Bray’s trust, with Luke Harper remaining sceptical at every turn. Harper was intertwined in much of this storyline, and many believe to this day that the Wrestlemania match should have been a triple threat.
When Randy Orton won the 2017 Royal Rumble, it was all part of his master plan. This is, for those counting at home, the second time that Randy Orton won a Royal Rumble as part of an elaborate master revenge plan that required the other guy to win the WWE Championship in an Elimination Chamber the following month to proceed. Imagine if Triple H or Bray Wyatt never won the WWE Championship following Orton’s Rumble win. He’d have looked like a right tit.
Anyway, he vowed not to challenge Bray Wyatt who won the WWE Championship at the aforementioned Elimination Chamber. Orton would even go as far as to give up that title match he earned from winning the Rumble. This was the final step in his plan to manipulate Wyatt to show him the location of the Wyatt compound and the burial site of Sister Abigail. After AJ Styles won a number 1 contender’s match, Orton would reveal that everything he did was to get close to Wyatt so he could burn the spirit of Sister Abigail. Orton got his title match back by beating AJ Styles in another spot where his master plan could have fallen apart. Regardless of the plot holes, the storyline was well done and the scene where Orton burned the compound would give us one of the all time great wrestling visuals.
When the contest starts, Orton comes out hot for about 30 seconds before Wyatt gets his first bit of offence with a clothesline. He then does his corner taunt. The camera cuts to the Wile E. Coyote cam, the lights go out, and we see a projection of maggots on the canvas. There are many words that can be used to describe this. Dumb, embarrassing, illogical, childish, gross. It is so incomprehensibly stupid just putting it in writing, and in practice is somehow even worse. Orton rolls out of the ring, but is otherwise unaffected by the projection. I’d like to imagine his character probably thought “wow that was strange”, before continuing with his life knowing that an overhead projector cannot hurt him. To put into perspective how idiotic this is, we all clown on 2000 WCW for the “mysterious red liquid falling from the ceiling please don’t call it blood” angles that would regularly leave wrestlers scared and/or paralysed. But at least that was actual, physical liquid that would have some kind of material effect (if it landed on the wrestler that is, this is WCW after all).
I cannot wrap my head around this whole thing because it is so lame. So let’s put ourselves in the deranged mind of WWE and try to go through the thought process of this. At what stage would you, the reader, say “this is stupid maybe we should scrap this”.
Let’s give Bray Wyatt spooky powers to give him the edge in his match.
Those spooky powers are the ability to project bugs onto the canvas.
Bray only uses the spooky powers when he is already in total control of the match.
Randy Orton should completely no-sell the spooky powers.
Let’s have Randy Orton immediately win after the spooky powers are used.
I would have argued this is ridiculous enough at stage 1. But even IF you are going to commit to this, surely you would want something a little bit more impactful than what can be generously described as a PowerPoint presentation. At every stage of this, the people coming up with the idea should have reconsidered. WWE is one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. Despite all the resources that go into their biggest show of the year, their big scary superpower that Bray would reveal is some stock footage of some insects. How on earth did this ever get passed? For the fucking WWE Championship match at Wrestlemania?
The commentators speculate that this is Wyatt trying to get into the head of Orton. Right. Despite the fact that the match was only about 90 seconds deep when the first projection appeared, and Orton was already on the ground when it happened.
A second clothesline and Wyatt does the corner taunt for a second time. This time we get worms, and Orton truly doesn’t sell it. Mostly because he’s busy selling the offence he’s already taken from Wyatt. This should beg the question why on earth is Wyatt wasting time using his projection when he’s already winning the match. This is my main issue with supernatural powers in wrestling - they are never used logically. If we’re to believe that Wyatt or Undertaker are these mystical entities that can teleport, shoot fire and lightning, and become impervious to pain - then why not just do that all the time? There’s no logic in it. This is all without saying that creating fire and teleporting are inherently quite decent superpowers to have. Creating a projection of bugs is at best a minor irritant to anyone providing the opponent happens to suffer from entomophobia.
“70,000+ in the arena here have no idea what to make of this” - Tom Phillips on commentary. I love comments like this. It’s a classic example of WWE commentary telling on themselves for a match that is obviously bombing. Having already been bored out of their mind by a 25 minute Triple H and Seth Rollins match (more on this in the next entry), this match was like the Dementor’s Kiss. In the interest of fairness, the fans have just sat through the HHH/Rollins match, and the majority of the live crowd have been watching this event for five and a half hours at this point (when you factor in the pre-show). If the rest of the show killed the crowd, this match was pissing on its corpse. We often talk about Triple H vs Orton or Triple H vs Jericho, but I think this is the single most heatless WWE Championship match in Wrestlemania history. The projections were an abject failure from the very beginning, and it must have been awful knowing they still had to repeat the spot two more times.
Outside of the projections, the rest of the match is disjointed. All they seem interested in is going for finisher attempts and getting in all their trademark spots. It’s at best a house show match that happens to be taking place at Wrestlemania amidst obvious idiocy. I kind of don’t blame the wrestlers because they have to work around the projections (though I am not ruling out the possibility this was an idea of one of the competitors - no idea who that could possibly be). Orton has a reputation for being a very hit and miss wrestler based on his own interest and motivation. A motivated Randy Orton can be a joy to watch, but it’s easy to tell when he does not give a shit. He is in peak “I don’t give a fuck” mode tonight. Whether it’s dissatisfaction with the gimmick of the match or something else at play, I couldn’t say. But he does not seem to care one bit about putting on an interesting match outside the stupid projections. I would say this is Orton’s worst Wrestlemania performance by some distance, and yet another in a catalogue full of mediocre Wrestlemania performances. Bray on the other hand is not a good wrestler. He needs a better worker to lead him through a match, and he needs to not have his match surrounded by bullshit. When he has a bad or unmotivated opponent and typical Wyatt nonsense, then he would regularly produce some of the worst matches of the year.
The commentators talk in hushed tones about the mind games of Wyatt and how much of a psychological genius he is. It’s worth repeating again that Randy Orton showed absolutely no effects to the projections, as he shouldn’t. There’s a massive disconnect between what we’re shown by our own eyes and what the commentary team are trying to push as the story.
They mistime a dropkick spot on the outside, but that gives Orton enough to finally get a bit of offence. Orton and Wyatt exchange a pair of finishers on the floor. Orton teases a punt, Wyatt avoids and hits another Sister Abigail for a 2 count. Wyatt does another projection (this time with flies) after the Sister Abigail. Orton is literally lying on his back. He can’t see the projection at all. He’s also already on the ground. In fact, all three projections have happened when Wyatt was already in control of the match. It’s not shocking Orton, or disrupting his momentum. Literally, the only thing this achieves is to give Orton time to recover. It’s monumentally stupid in concept as much as in execution.
Seconds after the third projection, Orton hits an RKO for the anticlimactic out-of-nowhere win. It is outrageously abrupt. This might be my favourite finish in wrestling. Specifically, the “Bray Wyatt does something spooky and immediately loses”. It’s objectively a terrible finish, and I would hate it if it were done to a wrestler I enjoyed. But as someone who thoroughly dislikes what Bray Wyatt became, it is both satisfying and hilarious. Hell, Orton and Wyatt even re-ran a similar finish in their Wrestlemania 37 match and it was just as funny then too.
The hilarity of this - bearing in mind this is the WWE Championship match at Wrestlemania - is that Orton’s celebrations are short lived. Instead they decide to skip over any sort of post-match celebration, hopefully out of sheer embarrassment.
Thankfully, Goldberg and Brock Lesnar would be back to inject some life into a show that desperately needed it.
This match is the story of Bray Wyatt’s career. There’s some intrigue in the story. The company provides him with some new magic powers, this time the power of an overhead projector. Rather than these powers helping him win the match, instead he gets Vegeta’d by losing almost immediately after revealing his most recent power-up. Not that I mind, as I have long since said - supernatural things in wrestling are pretty much the worst thing ever. But it is awful storytelling to introduce a power and not have it work in any meaningful way. It’s worse still that the power is so monumentally stupid that a fucking 5 year old would have been embarrassed to come up with.
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