Shinsuke Nakamura has Decided to “Mail it In?” How would one even know this?

A rumor is circulating the “dirt-sheets” and other wrestling media, that Shinsuke Nakamura is enjoying life in Florida, has decided to stay put, has grown content, and has decided to just “mail it in” in his in-ring performance and character development.

How would anybody actually know this? I understand how wrestling journalism works. There are rumors, sources, and inference. I’m not too much of a skeptic here. I know some of it to be quite reliable.

But the current, rather inflammatory, Nakamura rumor seems implausible. I see two explanations here. The first a rabbit trail that leads to mind reading. Fans, journalists, and other writers see a product they do not like. Somehow, they conclude that management and creative are not responsible. This is something that could actually come from sourced material. Perhaps Nakamura has a great deal of creative control, or has been given some guidelines he must meet, before the product involving him improves. Because he has not met this benchmarks, it is assumed to be motivational in explanation.

The mind reading is problematic enough. Even worse, is that the steps toward the inference appear to be lacking evidence. As far as I have seen, nobody has offered evidence that Nakamura was given any criteria to meet. Nobody has offered evidence that management and creative have created a great Nakamura storyline that he’s not tapping into. Nobody has offered evidence that Nakamura has an unusual amount of creative control, that he’s done nothing with. Unless I have missed something, the mind reading, which is problematic on its own, is based on no premises.

The second explanation is an implausible situation of self-sabotage. If we aren’t reading minds, then Nakamura must have confided to people that he is going to “mail it in.” If the idea proposed motivation is that Nakamura and his family want to remain in the WWE so that they can stay in Florida, and that this somehow motivates him to “mail it in” (I struggle to see the logic too), wouldn’t sharing this information within the company or to journalists sabotage his career, making it unlikely that he’ll stay in the company, and thus, in Florida for long? As far as I know, no evidence for this confession has been offered either.

My advice is to not let this become the dominant narrative for why we are not getting the Nakamura product we’d like.