Legacy

One of my favorite story-lines in WWE over the past few years was the rise and fall of Legacy.  It seems a three-man team of cocky young super-stars on the rise — Randy Orton, Cody Rhodes, and Ted DiBiase, Jr. — had joined forces and were calling their gang “Legacy”.  Randy Orton was clearly the leader, unleashing his two sadists-in-training on anyone who got in his way.

All three young lions were sons and/or grandsons of former wrestling greats, all were gorgeous with the most scrubbable washboard abs and gear that looked like expensive wearable art, and each of them believed it was his right, his “Legacy” if you will,  to rule the wrestling ring.  Young cocky guys are annoying on one level, but on another level, you admire their chutzpah.  A part of  you dreads the day that society, the pain and reality of life, beats them into submission and extinguishes that flame in their hearts.  You want them to keep on feeling like they own the world, just like you felt when you were young and fresh and cocky.  This is the appeal of Legacy.  They were fast and fit and fearless, and knew all the sweetest wrestling holds, having been trained by the best since they first could fill out a pair of spandex trunks.  Soon, all the wrestlers were in fear of Orton and his two little Vipers-in-training, and I loved it.

“Legacy” is defined as an inheritance, a bequest, something handed down from an ancestor.  I think we all can agree that these three young studs were actually much more handsome than their fathers (“Cowboy Bob”, the “American Dream”, and the “Million Dollar Man”), so their looks and bodies weren’t their legacy.  Presumably their wrestling talent was their legacy assuming their fathers had talent which they must have, since they were all big timey Super-stars in the 80’s.  The term “Legacy” also has a meaning in the world of college fraternities.  A “Legacy” is a son or brother of a former member and receives automatic approval to join the Frat.  You could always tell the Legacies in the Freshmen dorm — they were the really smug, self-confident, loud-mouths on Rush Night because they knew they already had the Golden Ticket while the rest of us slobs had to work for it. I think this is the legacy for Randy, Cody, and Ted Jr. — automatic initiation into the upper ranks and inner circle of the Fraternity.  They were blessed and they made sure everybody knew it.

As often happens when a group of Alpha Males try to work together, they soon faced a power struggle in the group.  Randy believed he deserved the respect and obedience of the other two legacies because he launched their careers, but the two younger dudes felt they didn’t need his help and he was too bossy.  Also, all three had huge egos that wouldn’t fit inside their trunks even if you stretched that stretchy spandex to its stretchiest.

The break-up of Legacy was inevitable but still unfortunate, because I was really enjoying their Triple-Team tactics every week — but Double-Teaming is almost as nice, and Randy soon began receiving weekly beat-downs from his two former followers.  He was repeatedly forced to battle both of them in “Handicap Matches”, or “Three-Way” matches that turned into Handicap Matches, with Cody and Ted just ripping him limb from limb and looking so pretty and proud the whole time.  If you’re like me and you enjoy seeing two dudes permitted to work together to totally own and punish a third dude who they hate, then these were some memorable episodes of Raw for you.  I was wishing they could just keep doing that, just keep stomping poor Randy into the mat two against one, for at least a year to 18 months longer, but they soon all moved on to other gimmicks and feuds.