Pro wrestling is a beautiful chaotic mess, a mix of athleticism, storytelling and corporate self-sabotage.

It is a business where the fans decide who is over and sometimes the company immediately decides they are wrong.

For every star the crowd falls in love with, there is a boardroom meeting somewhere plotting to make sure this never happens again.

If you get over and the company wants you to get over, great, the sky is the limit, but

if you dare have the audacity to break out without the backing of the bookers, oh boy.

Admittedly, this isn't as big a problem today, now that we don't have to worry about

Vince McMahon, but it does

still happen occasionally. Promoters have been doing this forever, clipping wings, rewriting history,

and creative directioning wrestlers into oblivion. Sometimes it's about control, sometimes it's

eagle, and sometimes it's because a crazy billionaire woke up that morning and just didn't fancy it.

It's the only business wrestling where standing out too much can get you punished.

So today we're looking at the people who did the unthinkable.

They got popular and were immediately told to sit back down.

I'm Andy from What Culture and here are nine wrestlers, WWE band from getting over.

Number nine, Zach Ryder in pretty much every respect. The most cynical take is that Vince

McMahon only wanted people he liked to get over. It was the hot take back in the day and almost

a right of passage for any WWE fan to understand. It is also the correct take.

Dante himself could not have penned a more cruel, ironic inferno than the one that Vince McMahon

sentenced Zach Ryder to in 2012. Rider getting over was not in the plan, and while he may not

have evolved into a main event-level player with the machine behind him,

it's important to put his breakthrough into context.

The standard wasn't amazing at the time, Ryder hasn't been mythologized, though it may look that way through the lens of 2025.

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