10 Things I Hate About The Undertaker

10. He’s Sports Entertainment Writ Large

This is something that every ‘Taker-hater has mentioned eagerly every year that WrestleMania’s rolled around, ever since the Streak became something worth talking about: the Undertaker’s first few years in the WWF weren’t all that.

King Kong Bundy, Diesel, Psycho Sid... none of these people were much cop in the ring anyway. More importantly, Calaway was hamstrung by the character he was playing, who was still largely a no-selling snail’s-pace zombie, the walking dead.

As ‘Mean’ Mark Callous in WCW, Calaway got to throw himself about, working fast and hard while playing the big, nasty heel (a classic pro wrestling character type he’d only get to revisit once after joining the WWF, when his American Badass babyface transitioned to the vicious bully Big Evil).

As The Undertaker, for a good six years or more Calaway couldn’t bring to bear half of the tools he had as a professional wrestler. The restrictions on him were ridiculous as he did barely selling, barely bumping, barely any talking (and never in a normal register), had no facial expressions and made no fast movements.

A guy who is probably the most impressively agile big man of the era was hardly allowed off his feet.

Calaway and WWF gradually worked more and more wrestling into his character, allowed him to do more in the ring, speed up his movements, even sell a little more. By the time the Attitude Era hit, The Undertaker wasn’t a massive, sluggish revenant, he was a huge, supernaturally powerful Satanic figure, free to begin to have the kind of matches we remember him having against Mankind, Shawn Michaels and the like.

That sea change came six or seven years after his WWF debut though - and that’s a long, long seven years to struggle through, even if you’re a fan. Pitted against dead weight in a gimmick with concrete shoes, you can see why kids raised on the bloody drama of the NWA poured scorn on the Dead Man for so long.

He was everything that was risible and goofy about New York’s product, sports entertainment writ large in basic black.