OP
The other day, Mark Henry's salmon suit promo popped up on my radar.
It's a bloody good promo, and an impressive bait-and-switch that could have easily led to a Mark Henry title run. Of course, we all know that it didn't because Daniel Bryan beat John Cena at Summerslam that year and became WWE Champion for about two minutes, until Randy Orton cashed in. This, of course, led directly to Daniel Bryan winning the WWE title in the main event of Wrestlemania 30.
Of course, if Henry had beaten Cena at MITB, that wouldn't have happened. I mean, he couldn't have won if they were going to push Bryan, which they both were and did, but let's suppose fate dealt Bryan a bad hand before the PPV.
I like Sheamus as a wrestler, I really do. He's stiff as fuck and beats the shit out of most everyone. That's the thing though: he's really fucking stiff. He gave Christian a bad concussion in an Intercontinental title match before WM30, forcing him to retire; he gave Daniel Bryan a horrible concussion in his last match for three years, temporarily forcing him to retire, and in 2017 he kicked Jeff Hardy in the head while he was stationary, breaking his teeth. I wouldn't call him an unsafe worker - like everyone else in the company, he's overworked every year - but he works a really stiff style with the potential to fuck everything up. That's where this timeline's going.
Let's suppose that the match between Bryan and Sheamus on July 8th 2014 - a fairly unexceptional match by all accounts, earning ***¾ from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and sitting at a 7.52 on Cagematch at the time of writing - ends badly for Bryan. Sheamus gets tired and boots Bryan in the wrong spot, giving him a pretty major concussion. This alone is enough to sideline Bryan from the next two PPVs, but in the following medical checkups, the doctors discover the origin of the neck injury that sidelined him for half a year IOTL. He is forced to take the rest of the year off, which kinda fucks up the WWE's plans for fhe rest of the year. Of course, they're not completely fucked - they have a hot main event angle, an excellent main event roster, and a month to put something else together - but without a goat to bury, what can they do?
...well, in the first instance, they could take the belt off Cena.
This TL will be structured like Megafighter3's collection of wrestling TLs (https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...g-a-collection-of-wrestling-timelines.467979/). It'll run from the middle of 2013 to whenever I feel it runs its course, which'll probably be around Wrestlemania 31. Unlike my last attempt at a wrestling TL (which I promise is not dead, I just lost confidence in it and I will bring it back at some point, even if only for a little while), I won't change up the rosters or anything like that, so Sheamus isn't losing his job and replacing Devitt next year for this or whatever. Hell, Vince probably wouldn't punish Sheamus for the accident, especially since he wasn't doing much at this point anyway. That said, late 2013 without Bryan has the potential to be very different indeed, and I'm keen to see just how different it could be while making the upcoming scenarios somewhat plausable.
As with A Phenomenal Hire, updates will be inconsistent, but I'll try not to make the gaps between updates too big. I'll mostly skip Raw and Smackdown, because realistically they'll suck just as hard ITTL as they did IOTL, but if there are any significant changes, I'll mention them in the post. Otherwise, each post'll cover one PPV at a time, with a brief summary of how each match has changed, if at all. With the exception of a couple of necessary changes, I'll hopefully try and book things as Vince would have ITTL, and we'll see just what that means in a world where butterflies are already flapping like buggery.
For now, however, the point of divergence is set in stone, and Mark Henry's about to become the second black WWE Champion of not just 2013, but of all time...
It's a bloody good promo, and an impressive bait-and-switch that could have easily led to a Mark Henry title run. Of course, we all know that it didn't because Daniel Bryan beat John Cena at Summerslam that year and became WWE Champion for about two minutes, until Randy Orton cashed in. This, of course, led directly to Daniel Bryan winning the WWE title in the main event of Wrestlemania 30.
Of course, if Henry had beaten Cena at MITB, that wouldn't have happened. I mean, he couldn't have won if they were going to push Bryan, which they both were and did, but let's suppose fate dealt Bryan a bad hand before the PPV.
I like Sheamus as a wrestler, I really do. He's stiff as fuck and beats the shit out of most everyone. That's the thing though: he's really fucking stiff. He gave Christian a bad concussion in an Intercontinental title match before WM30, forcing him to retire; he gave Daniel Bryan a horrible concussion in his last match for three years, temporarily forcing him to retire, and in 2017 he kicked Jeff Hardy in the head while he was stationary, breaking his teeth. I wouldn't call him an unsafe worker - like everyone else in the company, he's overworked every year - but he works a really stiff style with the potential to fuck everything up. That's where this timeline's going.
Let's suppose that the match between Bryan and Sheamus on July 8th 2014 - a fairly unexceptional match by all accounts, earning ***¾ from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and sitting at a 7.52 on Cagematch at the time of writing - ends badly for Bryan. Sheamus gets tired and boots Bryan in the wrong spot, giving him a pretty major concussion. This alone is enough to sideline Bryan from the next two PPVs, but in the following medical checkups, the doctors discover the origin of the neck injury that sidelined him for half a year IOTL. He is forced to take the rest of the year off, which kinda fucks up the WWE's plans for fhe rest of the year. Of course, they're not completely fucked - they have a hot main event angle, an excellent main event roster, and a month to put something else together - but without a goat to bury, what can they do?
...well, in the first instance, they could take the belt off Cena.
This TL will be structured like Megafighter3's collection of wrestling TLs (https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...g-a-collection-of-wrestling-timelines.467979/). It'll run from the middle of 2013 to whenever I feel it runs its course, which'll probably be around Wrestlemania 31. Unlike my last attempt at a wrestling TL (which I promise is not dead, I just lost confidence in it and I will bring it back at some point, even if only for a little while), I won't change up the rosters or anything like that, so Sheamus isn't losing his job and replacing Devitt next year for this or whatever. Hell, Vince probably wouldn't punish Sheamus for the accident, especially since he wasn't doing much at this point anyway. That said, late 2013 without Bryan has the potential to be very different indeed, and I'm keen to see just how different it could be while making the upcoming scenarios somewhat plausable.
As with A Phenomenal Hire, updates will be inconsistent, but I'll try not to make the gaps between updates too big. I'll mostly skip Raw and Smackdown, because realistically they'll suck just as hard ITTL as they did IOTL, but if there are any significant changes, I'll mention them in the post. Otherwise, each post'll cover one PPV at a time, with a brief summary of how each match has changed, if at all. With the exception of a couple of necessary changes, I'll hopefully try and book things as Vince would have ITTL, and we'll see just what that means in a world where butterflies are already flapping like buggery.
For now, however, the point of divergence is set in stone, and Mark Henry's about to become the second black WWE Champion of not just 2013, but of all time...
