During Tuesday night’s episode of Smackdown Live, WWE aired the above vignette, confirming that former Tag Team Champion Curt Hawkins has been resigned to bolster the split roster. Hopefully he’ll prove the vignette right, unlike that Shelton Benjamin teaser we saw a couple weeks back.
The vignette also hints that Hawkins will be working some sort of larger-than-life gimmick that is eerily reminiscent of those old Chuck Norris memes that swept the planet back before we knew what the word “meme” meant.
It’s also eerily reminiscent of former Giants and Dodgers closer Brian Wilson, whose own Ironic Chuck Norris schtick took over the planet back in 2010. Come on, you remember.
Yeah, that. You’re welcome.
On the surface, Curt Hawkins seems like the last person you’d think would be working this sort of larger-than-life angle, but if he’s going to be fully inept and unaware of how silly and bombastic it is, a la Matt Hardy V1 … well, then it might just be perfect. It’s certainly better than his last gimmick in WWE, which was “fake AJ Styles.” Now that the actual AJ Styles is in the fold, that’s pretty unnecessary.
Hawkins previously debuted in WWE back in 2007 on the ECW and later Smackdown brands as part of a tag team with Zack Ryder. The two began as the Major Brothers before reverting to their most well-known names as Edge’s “Edge Head” lackeys. Hawkins and Ryder split in 2009. Hawkins was part of several other teams before returning to NXT in 2014 before he was released that year.
