10 Backstage WWE Feuds That Changed Everything

The most heated rivalries of all...

Matt Hardy Edge
WWE.com

There are a lot of combustible elements in pro wrestling. Not only do larger-than-life stars compete on live TV in a display every bit as showy as a peacock mating ritual, but they also spend more time traveling together on the road than they do at home with their families.

That lifestyle is a recipe for some very close friendships - and some very bitter animosity. There is no shortage of stars who developed hard feelings toward one another, and the results are often catastrophic. Sometimes the angry parties end up trading some legitimate blows, and sometimes they don't, but as fans, we've all heard stories of the effects that some of these feuds have had on the participants and the wrestling business. This list attempts to look at some of the most significant examples of real hatred that have erupted in pro wrestling.

Just a note, before we start: there are hundreds of real-life feuds that have developed in the crazy world of pro wrestling, but for the purposes of this list, entries are restricted to only those feuds that actually ended up having an on-screen effect - the ones that really shook up the sport.

10. Mick Foley Vs. Ric Flair

Matt Hardy Edge
WWE.com

Ever since the old days of wrestling, there have been dozens of ways that top stars can get on each other's bad sides, but in the 2000s, there came a new one - criticizing one another in their autobiographies. In Mick Foley's very candid 1999 book Have a Nice Day!, he characterized Ric Flair as a bad booker. In Flair's 2003 book - in what some saw as retribution - he described Foley as a "glorified stuntman". This led to a backstage confrontation between the two, but after some bad blood, they managed to put their differences aside.

Still, the animosity became fodder for a storyline, with Flair getting Foley's goat on a 2006 episode of Raw by bringing the "glorified stuntman" line out of mothballs. This led to two dream matches between the two men - a two-out-of-three falls at Vengeance which Flair won (Foley lost the second fall by DQ) and a brutal "I Quit" match at SummerSlam which Flair won after threatening Foley's real-life friend Melina, once again blurring the lines between shoot and work.

Contributor
Contributor

Scott Fried is a Slammy Award-winning* writer living and working in New York City. He has been following/writing about professional wrestling for many years and is a graduate of Lance Storm's Storm Wrestling Academy. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/scottfried. *Best Crowd of the Year, 2013