Wrestling fans love using the word ‘buried’. We throw it around like it’s nothing (including me). However, most of the time we use it in the wrong context.
Just because a wrestler isn’t in the main event or high up on the card challenging for titles doesn’t mean that they’re being buried. It simply means they’re being under-utilised. A prime example of this is Kairi Sane. Sane’s WWE run was good by regular standards. She won the NXT Women’s Championship once and the Women’s Tag Titles once with Asuka. Yet by her standards and our standards as fans, we would think her run should’ve been much better.
However, this doesn’t mean she was buried, this means she was under-utilised. Being buried is being booked so poorly that your credibility as a wrestler cannot be salvaged. The likes of Brodus Clay and The Great Khali were buried. These guys came to WWE as candidates to be special and started off their careers as credible heels. But over time they ended being treated as jokes and jobbers due to them consistently losing big feuds.
There are some cases in which I thought a wrestler had been buried but their career changed for the better over time and I was too quick to make assumptions of what would happen to their career. Here are two examples:
1. Bayley
Current Smackdown Women’s Champion Bayley was in a terrible spot in 2017. She had come off her terrific career in NXT, where she became a loveable character that would take NXT by storm winning the NXT Women’s Championship against Sasha Banks in one of the best women’s matches of all time. In her move to Raw, her character was completed miscommunicated and she acted like a child and she ‘didn’t want to hurt anyone,’ which made literally no sense as your job is to fight people. We had THAT feud with Alexa Bliss with the ‘This Is Your Life’ segment, and I thought she was done. But now, she’s the most interesting character in WWE along with Sasha Banks and has been carrying Raw and Smackdown through the COVID era.
2. Bray Wyatt
There are two occasions where I thought that Bray’s career in WWE was done, the first being after losing his trilogy feud to John Cena in 2014 and the second being after losing the WWE Championship to Randy Orton at Wrestlemania 33. Now, Bray is a main eventer, with his brilliant work with The Firefly Fun House and The Fiend. And with Bray being allowed to book his own character, we’ve seen him have the best repackaging in WWE history in my opinion.
I think it’s key that we don’t make assumptions that someone is buried just because we want them to be higher up on the card *Cough Cough*, Aleister Black and let time take it’s due as there are so many talented wrestlers on the roster that might be priorities for now.
TheWrestlingFallacy 