25 Great Wrestlers That EVERYBODY Turned Against
WWE legends who suffered historic lows after the highest of highs
Wrestling is a fickle game ran by fickle promoters for fickle fans.
Imagine you're a pro wrestler. You wake up of a morning and your first job is to locate specifically where that pain is coming from, try to find the best way to deal with it and still function enough to get up, get out, probably get to the gym or get something (the exact right thing) to eat, and then get back to work - the place where all the pain started and will almost certainly reoccur.
Yes, this ignores the incredibly cool things that come from being a made megastar, but it's not as if those spots are in particularly high supply, and paymasters and fellow performers alike will repeatedly tell you as much. Everybody's life can be a grind, but when even your best bits come with significant caveats, it's easy to see why so many wrestlers crumble under the intense pressure or find themselves hating everything they once considered part of the dream.
The last thing you need at that point is for the aforementioned fickle promoters to shunt you down the card (or fire you!) and fickle fans to take their emotional and financial investment elsewhere. It's not for everybody, even those that know full well how people feel...
25. X-Pac
The Attitude Era moved at a frightening pace.
Driven - like everything else - by rampant competitive capitalism, Monday Night Raw's job in 1997 and 1998 was to catch up with, keep pace with and ultimately overtake WCW Monday Nitro in a ratings battle that, temporarily, benefitted both sides. By 1999, the gap widened to such a degree that the end result was never really in doubt, and WWE took a while to adjust to a world that wasn't driven primary by combat against the other side.
Before Vince McMahon even purchased WCW, Sean Waltman was one of the biggest victims of the war.
Having returned to the company with a bilious promo at Eric Bischoff's expense following an acrimonious WCW exit, X-Pac's man-of-the-people aura was the driving force behind D-Generation X's babyface turn. His matches, meanwhile, were carrying midcards as the market leader tried to make the best of a relatively shallow talent pool. For all the right reasons, he was beloved. Within a year of that though, DX had split and splintered, leaving X-Pac and Road Dogg as the loser babyface outliers in the divorce. A reunion as heels in late-1999 temporarily solved the problem, but when that frittered away in 2000, the same two couldn't buy reactions for their work on a roster that included the likes of Chris Jericho, Kurt Angle and The Radicalz.
Ambivalence meshed with anger to form a mulch of a reaction known then and in subsequent years as "X-Pac heat". There was nothing more brutal for a wrestler than being only mildly over when everybody was white hot, and the former human litmus test unfairly because a barometer of a different kind.