Although Bray Wyatt has become a two-time Universal Champion and has mostly been presented as a top performer since debuting his alter-ego, The Fiend, in 2019, there were times when his booking was heavily panned. On the latest edition of his podcast, WWE Hall of Famer Arn Anderson looked back on one of those times, sharing his thoughts on how his former employer allegedly made the man once known as “The Eater of Worlds” look weak through a series of pay-per-view losses.
As quoted on Tuesday by WrestlingNews.co , Anderson remarked on this week’s edition of the ARN podcast that Wyatt had one of the “most creative” gimmicks in WWE back in 2015, as he was portraying a “sliver” of his real self and turning things up for entertainment purposes. The Four Horsemen member, who currently works for AEW, added that larger wrestlers such as Wyatt need to produce results in pay-per-views in order to look credible. However, that wasn’t what happened when he ended up going “0-6 or 0-8 at some point” five years ago.
“You have to win the big one. You can go back and pull every one of those matches when he started that losing streak and get some cutaways to the audience and get some reactions from the audience during the body of the match and then get their reaction when the finish went down. Each time he got beat, it was diminished and it went down and it wasn’t a big victory.”
All in all, Anderson described Wyatt’s booking in 2015 as a “horrible crime,” given how he was a 300-pound wrestler losing lots of major matches despite having a creepy gimmick and a similarly intimidating pair of allies in Erick Rowan and Luke Harper. He explained that things got to a point where a win over the kayfabe cult leader wasn’t considered a big deal due to how weak his character had become.
On the other hand, the former WWE backstage producer hinted that Wyatt’s circa-2015 gimmick could have been saved if then-Wyatt Family members Rowan and Harper were booked to “leave people laying [sic]” in their wake, thus potentially helping their leader look more like a threat.
Despite the ostensible success of his current character, which has him switching between a Mr. Rogers-inspired children’s show host and his unhinged persona as The Fiend, Wyatt’s recent booking has not been free of criticism. In September, Rowan — who now goes by the ring name Erick Redbeard — commented that WWE “jumped the shark” when it made the decision to have Wyatt drop the Universal title to Goldberg at the Super ShowDown pay-per-view in February.