9 Wrestlers WWE Never Turned Heel
Roman Reigns wasn't the first of his kind...
For a company obsessed with branding, marketing and neat audience manipulation, why have WWE recently made it so tough to classify this current period as anything other than the 'Banter' Era?
Labelling the organisation on output alone is a fool's errand. A recent Monday Night Raw main evented by "Attitude" Era hangers-on in place of the "New", "Reality" and 'Ruthless Aggression" ones that make up the best of the rest on the flagship show drew the lowest audience in the show's history whilst stories broke of The Rock potentially earning $20million for a single match at a Saudi Arabian supershow in 2019. There is too great a divide between evidenced cable audience indifference and the dollar bills used as napkins in Titan Tower. This is once a company that had to remove the water coolers because the booking wasn't drawing money - WWE Network execs don't even need to drink from said receptacles in order to p*ss cash as long as the streaming service stays loaded with fresh new content.
This is why so many outside WWE boo Roman Reigns and so few inside care. This is why Becky Lynch is a heel that receives vociferous support despite her storyline intentions. The metrics that matter all look good to WWE, but it's the ones that no longer that used to drive character arcs accordingly.
Good guys and bad guys used to be different. And they used to matter an awful lot...
9. Rob Van Dam
Rob Van Dam cut the promo of his WWE career when he limped out in front of a partisan Hammerstein Ballroom in 2005 to chastise the company for their treatment of him since signing in 2001. He was the only babyface in a heel Alliance back then, and remained so during the muddled references to ECW between the first and second tribute shows.
Amongst his sharpest barb on the first One Night Stand was an admittance that he was more upset to miss that event even more than WrestleMania earlier that year - that was Van Dam taking aim and shooting right between the eyes of WWE's golden goose.
He did much the same inside the ring a year later when he went to war against John Cena at a sequel designed to kick off a new era of ECW. The show didn't succeed in its stated aim, but nor did 'Mr Monday Night' as a babyface topliner. Van Dam's bile a year earlier hadn't scared Vince McMahon off of pushing him as a hero against his real hero, such was the likability of a performer The Chairman never truly understood.