Washington's Post

The following article was written by new contributor to Tha O Show, a long time O-ster, Mike Washington. Please welcome him to the team.

Following the tradition of 'Rated O Radio'; rather than talk about Jeff Hardy's win at Armageddon and how gold Santino Marella is, I'm off on an almost unrelated topic. Recently, I read an article(I forget where) regarding an interesting theory called 'The Peter Principle'. This theory basically states that employees of a company will be promoted and promoted until they reach a level at which they are no longer able to manage, at which point they stop climbing the corporate ladder.

Which leads to the notion that we are then surrounded by two types of people: those who have reached their plateau and are thus incompitent and those who are extremely competant and haven't yet recieved their ill-fated promotion.

Before I lose everyone's interest talking about economical and psychological shit that even bores me, let's relate this to wrestling. A good example of this theory would be Matt Hardy. When The Hardy Boyz burst on the scene, they were so over it wasn't funny. They were split up and sent on seprate singles careers which was -in escence- a promotion. So Matt Hardy worked the midcard getting huge RVD-like pops as a face and created one of the most compelling heels as Matt Hardy V1.

Needless to say, Matt Hardy was excelling at his job. Since success constitutes a promotion, he was promoted to U.S. Championship gold sevral times. Being as good of a worker and as over as he was, another promotion was given to him. Which brings us up to date, with Matt Hardy as ECW Champion.

I don't think it's any secret that Matt Hardy is failing tremendously at being a compelling champion. Creative is dropping the ball and to be quite honest, Matt hasn't even tried to pick the fucker up. I know it's almost blesphemy to talk shit about a Hardy with Cham Peezy and DJB on staff, but Matt Hardy has brought nothing to the table since his switchalaz over to ECW.

Mark Henry was the strongest character he's ever been carrying the belt and the show, making it interesting week in week out. Hardy made for an exciting chase but since he got that final promotion he's been lackluster at best. He's a dope worker, he cuts a decent promo as a babyface, so why is he failing to produce?

He's hit the same brick wall so many guys before him have. I've heard it talked about numerous times, some guys are made to chase not to be champs. Some belts put wrestlers over, some wrestlers put belts over, some matches put belts over and some just make eah other stale. Matt Hardy's title reign is one of the latter. Everyone knows it's not beause a lack of following and it's definitely not a lack of work rate, it just seems Matt Hardy has found his 'Peter Point'. Fuck, that sounded gay.

The problem is that most people would rather perform poorly and even lose money before they even entertain the idea that they're failing. Without getting to self-helpy, failure isn't a negative thing... if you acknowledge it. However, WWE creative has a track record of not acknowledging its failures. Take a look at John Cena's entire babyface run.

If something isn't working, sometimes the most progressive direction isn't forward and if the E realized that, they'd put the ECW strap back on Mark Henry, take a couple steps back as a whole and we might even find ourselves in another Attitude Era.

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