Wrestling / Vickie Guerrero

EXCUSE ME!!!

Vickie Lynn Benson (formerly Guerrero, née Lara, born April 16, 1968) is an American professional wrestling personality, manager, shifting authority figure and occasional wrestler under her former married name of Vickie Guerrero, which she held as the wife and widow of the late professional wrestler Eddie Guerrero.

She started off by making cameos in the feud between her then-husband and Rey Mysterio Jr. and became involved in the company full-time as a heel in 2006 after acting as the occasional peacemaker in the controversial feud between Chavo Guerrero and Mysterio. She later went on to have storylines with Edge and later LayCool . After spending some time managing for Dolph Ziggler, later becoming the managing supervisor of RAW but was fired from that position in July 2013. She then became the General Manager of Smackdown, until June 2014, when she was fired for the last time by Stephanie McMahon and left the company.

Vickie made one-off appearances with WWE in 2016 and 2018. In late 2019, she signed on with All Elite Wrestling, and appeared as a guest commentator for an AEW Dark match in December 2019. At Fight For the Fallen 2020 she revealed herself as the new manager for former Women's Champion Nyla Rose.

On a September 2020 appearance on The Lone Star Plate Podcast Vickie Guerrero shares many details of her journey and what's important to her.

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It is my pleasure to introduce to you: Tropes associated with Vickie Guerrero!

• Action Survivor: Vickie was never a wrestler but did get into the ring herself a couple of times. Women who worked with her said she understood Wrestling Psychology very well.
• Alpha Bitch: Has the personality of one, and attempts to be the biggest person of any room she walks into, but can never quite back it up. Most of the people who hang around her do so because she's in a position of authority.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • Trish Stratus, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi and Rey Mysterio Jr., among others (including Miss Piggy).
  • A.J. Lee became this sometime after Lee became Raw General Manager on Raw 1000 (July 23, 2012). Notably, this grudge has lasted in unbroken continuity ever since, regardless of either's alignment — AJ, at the time, had one foot on each side of the Heel–Face Revolving Door. She since turned full face and then became the Divas' top heel. By the time both left the company over two years later, she and Vickie as characters still could not stand each other.
• The Artifact: She's less a Diva in the modern-day sense (although she is quite attractive for her age) and more of a call-back to the old school valets/managers of yesteryear.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Whenever she's in an authority figure role and she's a heel, she thinks herself as a mastermind who's five steps ahead of everyone. This never lasts long, as her schemes are either transparent or easily foiled by the faces that she's feuding with.
• Blackmail: How John Cena managed to coerce her into entering him into the World Heavyweight Title match at WrestleMania that year. As it turned out, the week prior to the contract signing, RAW was held in Cena's hometown, and Cena just so happened to know the guy who operated the security cameras, and learned that the reason Big Show was given the title shot is because Vickie was having an affair with him behind Edge's back.
• Butt-Monkey: Verging on The Chew Toy, especially with the nuclear heel heat she gets from the crowd and John Cena and Jerry Lawler spending fifteen minutes every Raw telling fat jokes about her. Edge had to lampshade it during his retirement speech:
  Edge: I have to thank Vickie Guerrero. (crowd boos) See, she does such an awesome job that I'm thanking her from the heart, and you still boo her!
• Catchphrase: "Excuse me!" Or rather, "EXCUSE ME!" shouted as loud and as shrill as she can. Making this a catch phrase was not intentional at first; she said it the first few times to try and quiet an especially hostile crowd on an episode of SmackDown. But upon seeing how much heat the phrase got, she made it part of her repertoire.invoked
• Chewing the Scenery: Vickie's temper tantrums result in this, getting very loud and shrill.
• Demoted to Extra: Has rarely been seen on TV in 2014, thanks in large part to The Authority.
• Dirty Old Woman: While not really that old, she has a necklace with "Cougar" on it, and has had relationships with Edge, The Big Show, Eric Escobar, and Dolph Ziggler.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Stripping The Undertaker of the World Heavyweight Championship because of using the then-new submission move Hell's Gate is definitely this. A month later, Teddy Long and the WWE Board of Directors call her out on this. She also banned Edge's spear for no reason a few years later.
  • Sending her very brief Kayfabe husband Edge to a Hell in a Cell match with the Undertaker after finding out he cheated on her would be a pretty normal form of retribution. However, the Undertaker then sent Edge to Hell at the end.
  • Granted, the two have had history, which Vickie readily admits, but Vickie's reaction to A.J. Lee calling her a "grandma" leading up to the 3/24/14 was to first call AJ a "bitch" on live television... and then book her in a Divas title match at WrestleMania XXX involving every other Diva currently on the active main roster - including a couple that literally hadn't been seen anywhere on WWE programming for ages.
• The Dog Bites Back: Stephanie McMahon finally (and sadistically) fired her in 2014 via a mud wrestling match and began gloating her ass off. Vickie gave Stephanie a few seconds to realize that meant she had left her with no reason to grovel at her any more before she threw her by the hair into the mud bath.
• Even Evil Has Standards: On the 12/03/13 edition of Raw, CM Punk came to her and whined about Kane attacking him minutes ago... right after interrupting a tribute The Undertaker was doing to the late Paul Bearer. Heel!Vickie promptly put Punk in a no disqualification match with Kane for his troubles. Punk should have known better than to try to beg sympathy from the widow of a wrestler.
• Evil Cripple: At times in Kayfabe, she found herself in a wheelchair for a time. She may or may not have been faking it to garner sympathy and appear helpless. Towards the end of her first run as a heel, there were hints that Vickie (in kayfabe) was playing it up as worse than it was.
• Evil Laugh: Whenever she does an especially dastardly deed, she rattles off one of these.
• Face–Heel Turn: She started as a face, being seen as Eddie's grieving widow after his death in 2006. However, after her program with Edge, she leaned hard into being an evil General Manager and wrestling manager.
  • Heel–Face Revolving Door: In the true professional wrestling sense. While she was one of the biggest villains in WWE, she was still treated like a face in other promotions, FCW (Florida Championship Wrestling, then WWE's developmental system) being one of the more amusing examples since it is a WWE subsidiary.
    • Her issues with both CM Punk (see Even Evil Has Standards above) and Dolph Ziggler and A.J. Lee (see Woman Scorned below) seemed to have her bordering on this trope on Raw depending on how often she had to deal with them.
• Failure Is the Only Option: After being caught in the middle of a corporate family feud.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Vickie has an extremely short fuse, even by professional wrestling standards. Her Catchphrase came from her going off like a volcano at the the slightest provocation.
• Happily Married: To her first husband, the late Eddie Guerrero.
• Heel–Face Turn: On her last night in WWE no less. Stephanie McMahon had forced Vickie to beg for her job in the middle of the ring, and looked like she was going to fire Vickie regardless. Vickie's only other option was to face Stephanie in a match, which Stephanie attempted to use to humiliate Vickie further, first by saying Vickie wasn't nearly the wrestler her late husband Eddie was (true, but you can't compare the two when Vickie was always more of a backstage personality instead of a wrestler), and then forcing Vickie to wrestle Layla, Alicia Fox, and Rosa Mendes in a gross-stuff-in-a-pool match. Vickie invoked the spirit of Eddie, saying she was going to "lie, cheat and steal" her way out and entering to his theme music, but Vickie was fired anyway. The crowd, realizing this was Vickie's last match, showed its support as Vickie tossed Stephanie into the goop and shimmied her way up the ramp to "Viva la Raza".
• Hypocrite: She tried to make it look like John Cena was having an affair with A.J. Lee, which got AJ fired. John Cena points out that Vickie is not one to talk, considered she has a habit of using her position to help wrestlers she's clearly having romantic relations with in the past, including Edge who was her husband.
• Hypocritical Humour:
  • She scolds Daniel Bryan for "repeating the same old catchphrase over and over." Right after screaming "Excuse me!" as per her usual entrance.
  • She also scolds people backstage for playing with a toy WWE is promoting. As soon as they leave, she plays with the toy herself.
• Informed Attribute: Her supposed ugliness. She was played up as being rather unattractive by WWE after becoming a manager, but a lot of viewers found her quite good-looking, especially for a woman her age. Following some weight loss in 2010, she stopped being presented as an Abhorrent Admirer and instead as more of a 'cougar'.
• Leitmotif: Averted. Aside from her appearance as DLC in WWE 12, and her last night in the company, Vickie never had any entrance music.
• Likes Older Women: Edge tried to pretend to be this in order to wed Vickie in a Worked Shoot. It turns out he was just after her power as General Manager.
• Manipulative Bastard: Would frequently attempt to play people against each other for the sake of keeping her hand-picked heels at the top. The degree of success this had largely depended on how much authority she had at the time.
• Mrs. Robinson: An angle she frequently played with younger wrestlers.
• Nepotism: Her becoming a wrestling personality was more of a case of this than the usual connections found in a Wrestling Family, albeit for a pretty understandable reason: after Eddie died, Vickie was given a (rumored to be lifetime) contract with the company as appreciation for her husband's contributions, and as a way to support her and their two daughters following his passing.
• No Indoor Voice: This certainly seems to be the case. Even her non-screaming voice is pretty loud and grating.
• Power Stable: La Familia, which included Edge, Zack Ryder, Curt Hawkins, Chavo Guerrero Jr., and Bam Neely.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Her attempts at dancing.
• Progressively Prettier: In 2010, following some weight loss, she stopped being presented as an Abhorrent Admirer and instead as a 'cougar'. She also participated in a swimsuit battle royal, and it wasn't shown as Fan Disservice.
• Screaming Woman: Pretty much anytime she's less than calm. After nearly a decade of this gimmick, it's a wonder her voice works at all.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: When she was running SmackDown, she would frequently bend the rules in the favor of her hand-picked heels. This could involve putting the faces against overwhelmingly bad odds, changing matches on the fly, or even restarting matches that ended the way she didn't want them to.
• Spicy Latina: Is of French and Mexican descent, and has a very hot temper to match.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Usually when she's in a position of power. Downplayed when she became a sycophantic pawn to the McMahon Family's whims... which is Fridge Brilliance when you realize she's been fired once before and doesn't want to take a chance on it happening again.
• Villainous Breakdown: Had one on the July 8, 2013 episode of Raw when Stephanie McMahon fired her from her job as the managing supervisor of Raw.
• Wild Card: She's still a cackling, evil witch, but now her fiats have less to do with whether you're a face or a heel than they do with whether or not you personally pissed her off recently. One example of this is when The Authority forced her into a match with longtime Arch-Enemy A.J. Lee as punishment for her mismanagement of a previous show. AJ, who has been a heel for most of the year, made Vickie tap and took great relish in it (since Guerrero had stolen her job as GM earlier that year) The very following Smackdown, Vickie retaliates by placing AJ in a tornado handicap match (as in the two members of the other team don't have to tag in/out) against Cameron and Naomi.
• Woman Scorned: Towards Dolph Ziggler, ever since he left her for A.J. Lee, although that looks pretty tame compared to what she did to Edge...
• You Have Failed Me:
  • On the October 29, 2012 edition of Raw, after Beth Phoenix needed her match restarted to beat AJ, Vickie fired her backstage.
  • Essentially Stephanie Mcmahon's rationale for firing her in 2014 - she had been under strict orders from The Authority to keep Roman Reigns out of a battle royal the week before, but due to a Batman Gambit on Reigns's part, Vickie let him enter the match - and he won it, to boot. The Authority was not pleased.

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"I SAID "EXCUSE ME!!"
(BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...)