8 Wrestling Heel Turns That Were Immediately Reversed
We immediately regret this decision.
One of the most important decisions a wrestling booker faces in their daily work is whether a given performer should be a face or a heel.
Imagine if Stone Cold Steve Austin hadn't become a good guy in 1997, for instance. WWF might never have kick-started the Attitude Era, instead losing the Monday Night Wars to ratings rivals WCW, and in turn going out of business in the early 2000s (granted, that's worst case scenario - and was never actually likely).
Here's a more recent example: imagine if WWE had spent the last three years trying to push a man who the fans absolute loathe as their next franchise player, passing up a number of presentable opportunities to turn him heel because of sheer, wrong-headed stubbornness on the part of their chairman.
In fairness to Vince, you can kind of see why he's reluctant to pull the trigger on Roman's long-awaited character shift. There have been several instances in the company's past where they've changed the alignment of a wrestler one week, only to go cold on the idea after a negative crowd response a short while later.
Here are eight examples.
8. Eugene
Moving Eugene over to wrestling's dark side never really seemed like a particularly good idea. The guy had spent the first part of his WWE run carrying a teddy bear and jumping around on bouncy castles.
To his credit, Nick Dinsmore - the once-promising indie star tasked with playing this dead-end character - actually pulled off the initial turn pretty well. Launching an unprovoked attack on former partner Jim Duggan, he genuinely looked like a man in the throes of a dramatic character transformation.
But then that was part of the problem. You couldn't really hate a guy who didn't know what was happening to him. He was the victim of a sudden burst of anger rather than a villainous double-crosser.
Anyway, none of that really mattered in the end because they dropped the angle altogether within just a couple of weeks. With no explanation, Eugene was back to being a baby-face - for about five minutes. And then he was released.