25 Great Wrestlers That EVERYBODY Turned Against

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.