Are the days of the manager gone?

As most of you probably know by now, former manager for the Prime-Time Players, AW, was fired by WWE last week, with his final appearance occurring on a taped episode of Friday Night Smackdown! With him being gone, Vickie Guerrero is basically the only manager left in the company (I’m not counting Aksana, as she’s a valet).

Now, I was no fan of AW by any means. In fact, as a wrestling fan, I couldn’t stand the guy. You might say, “Well, that was the idea”, but the truth is I disliked him for the wrong reasons. I didn’t dislike him because he was a heel manager, I disliked him because, well, he quite frankly sucked at his job. He had an annoying personality, no discernible skills of any kind, and was nothing but a loudmouth with a microphone. When someone on a wrestling program talks, it’s never a good thing when you have to mute your television the entire time they’re on the air. That is the wrong kind of heat and, unfortunately for AW, that’s exactly what he had going for him.

Regardless of my personal feelings, his absence from the company begs the question I posted with the title of this article. Are wrestling managers truly a thing of the past? Currently the WWE has one. In the past, there were nearly a dozen on the roster at any given time, and they all had their place in the company. Managers used to be the backbone of a stable, portraying a total coward who could talk a big game but didn’t have the muscle to back it up, so he or she surrounded themselves with a team of wrestlers to do all the dirty work and take out the babyfaces. And, even if the team consisted of nothing but glorified jobbers, putting a manager with them made them seem more important or that they were really a threat to the other wrestlers on the roster. It gave both those wrestlers who were somewhat aimless as well as the manager something to do, and it was a great, easy way to get heat.

In other scenarios, you might have had a manager only handling one or two guys, but they were usually either top stars who just had the manager as an extra shot in the arm, or in other cases, they were guys who the company was keen on, but weren’t all that great on the microphone, so they were given a manager to do all the talking for them. Once again, everything had a place and the manager served his or her purpose.

Certainly, this is something that can still be utilized in wrestling, but for whatever reason, isn’t. Although not very good at what he did, one area AW was at least comfortable in was talking, something PTP lack completely (at least, as far as I can tell). Same with Vickie Guerrero. Although her charge, Dolph Ziggler, is a much better talker than she is, she’s one of the most over heels in the company, and because of this, so is Ziggler simply by association. With WWE wanting to make him one of their next big stars, anything extra that can be done to make the fans hate him is just icing on the cake, and Guerrero serves that purpose in spades.

There are a ton of other wrestlers on the roster right now who could benefit from a manager as well, whether as part of a faction or with the manager simply being a mouthpiece because they’re not that great of a talker yet (such as Tyson Kidd or Justin Gabriel). You still see a fair amount of managers on the independent circuit where they’re not needed nearly as much. So, why can’t WWE give it a try? There are plenty of people out there who could do the role of a manager (some already in WWE), and even more who could benefit from it.

Unfortunately, as useful as managers in WWE could be, it appears they could officially be a thing of the past, save one or two exceptions.