The Secret History Behind WWE's Attitude Era
What - and who - was REALLY responsible for the period of wrestling that transformed WWE forever?
WWE loves "eras" almost as much as WWE fans love assigning eras to periods of time throughout its history.
Eras are easy to market. The thinking, in the main, is that the specific time being broadcast on television is a reflection of society in that moment, with World Wrestling Entertainment effectively acting as the beating heart around which various cultural blood vessels flow. That's provably false of course, but that's precisely why WWE dine out on the "era" stuff as much as they do.
You dine out on an era and you get to claim ownership of everything within it. You dine out on an era and you get to tell people who weren't there that you were the ones taking the giant leaps as opposed to your competition, whatever that might have been at the time. You dine out on eras and you make it look as if every creative and commercial step was a carefully calculated one rather than an almighty shot in the dark that could have gone either way for the want of a nail. And when it comes to dining out on eras, there's seemingly no end to the all-you-can-eat buffets visited in the hope of putting a bow around the glorious Attitude Era.
You know the one.
Stone Cold with the beer bath! Sable, amirite?! DX with the tank! (it wasn't a tank). All yer favourites. Nobody's suggesting all that wasn't the bees knees in the moment, and in fact the footage bears it out irrefutably. You'd be hard-pressed to find a wrestling fan watching those shows back and not wanting to travel back in time to experience a slice of it in person, even if you were one of the lucky few to grab the hottest ticket in town when WWE came your way at the turn of the century. But reliving it here in the now has become more than a little tiresome as the years have passed. Especially when WWE itself tells such a sterile version of how the biggest tonal shift in the organisation's history came to be.
There's not even any shame to the real history of the Attitude Era. In fact, have you ever picked a 1998/99 edition of Monday Night Raw at random and sat through the entire thing rather than just reliving the moments you've seen on clip compilations a million times before? There's more shame in the content of the Attitude Era than the true origin story but that didn't stop WWE from constantly squeezing droplets of juice out of a rotting fruit. WWE spent decades lionising the stars and stories of a five-year period over and over again in failed efforts to make new zeitgeist denizens with the stardust of their old ones. Raw Is XXX in January 2023 was the first nostalgia show under the Paul Levesque creative regime and even the former DX leader realised that it was probably time for him and his pals to run in fear of Imperium and the late Bray Wyatt to actually get put over by The Undertaker in some capacity rather than doing the job to him in an anti-rub masquerading as good business.
The time before the era is the most interesting bit at this point. Certainly more so than the immediate aftermath. The less said about the minutiae of the post-2001 WWE, the better. Because the Attitude Era ate itself in a way most disgusting long after the time it truly peaked.
WrestleMania X-Seven's stadium aesthetic serving as the stage for Stone Cold Steve Austin to shake hands with Vince McMahon as the last wrestlers from a dead and buried World Championship Wrestling watched from the cheap seats couldn't have been a more fitting coda and tribute to the time. It afforded the company that rarest of birds too - an ending. The 52-weeks-a-year show actually had a chance to press the big restart button with a bold new direction, the all-time fantasy booking scenario in its lap for years to come, and a generation of new fans that would want to become wrestlers themselves and thus toil on independents and beyond to fight for a spot amongst the elite. Of course, none of this happened. WWE blew an invasion story with historic levels of arrogance and ignorance, proceeded to spend years signing half of the other side's stars they should have tried to lure over when jumps were hot, and wasted approximately five more years between 2002-2007 in a increasingly gross and murky holding pattern riding the era's own splaying coattails.
The endless retrospectives on the Attitude Era give you the headline moments again and again but clips packages are interspersed with snapshots of scenes almost too wild to be true. Jerry Springer-adjacent Crash TV as a leading philosophical light was good for getting everybody television time, but never had all the filters been set so low. Was it what masses of viewers wanted? Yes. Hot in the buildings? Absolutely. Built to stand up to even the thinnest scrutiny outside of its own context? Most definitely not. Nobody told Vince McMahon or his various brown-nosing associates this during the fog of post-monopoly fart-sniffing that occurred throughout much of the mid-2000s.
When Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock wound down and bona fide star-maker Mick Foley gave his body the rest it desperately needed, the up-and-comers were left with the three other biggest names from the white hot period least effective in propelling them up the card. Triple H because he wouldn't, The Undertaker and Kane because they couldn't. Actually, after 2000, Triple H couldn't either, but you weren't allowed to think that for more than ten seconds at a time on Monday Nights before the perennial World Champion was back on screen telling you over and over again that he was the one diamond in this business as his snivelling toady Ric Flair looked on and agreed with more saliva around his mouth than tears in his eyes.
Batista's rise was a rule-proving exception, but even Big Dave had to step over the corpse of a failed Randy Orton push en route to greatness. John Cena was undeniable before it was a catchphrase, but he was on top of the world less than one full year before he became a totemic figure for the company's growing separation from its audience. Recall the barrel-scraping ambulance chasing garbage that made up so much of WWE's television before an overdue shift to PG in 2008 forced them to clean up their on-screen act, if you dare. If you isolate your time exclusively on John Cena matches (avoid at least 50% of the television promos and segments), it's easy to ignore just how poor a job the - ugh - "Ruthless Agression" era (they love calling things eras!) did at creating a raft of bankable names and big stars.
Most wrestling fans find wrestling through WWE first though - such is the power of monopolies and excellent marketing - so the 2002-2007 period was responsible for plenty of people's introduction to a new hobby and potential obsession. But part of the hobby becoming an obsession is being able to reevaluate your own entry-way. Take that from a post-Hulkamania/New Generation lifer. What looks like a business in the bin to some may as well be a shrine to others - the steaming piles of trash replaced with great big love hearts, the buzzing fleas with beautiful butterflies. A whole different kind of butterfly effect, if you will, but the original phrasing can always be applied. Even wrestling's darkest creative tunnels have lights at the end of them, and every action informs every next one for better and worse.
WWE between 2002 and 2019 (!) was such a stifling environment for such a long time that talents who failed at changing when they got there it such as CM Punk or Cody Rhodes said and/or did things to change the industry outside of it. Names too many to mention made the choice to die rich within the system or live happy outside of it, making multiple wrestlers wealthier and/or healthier. This isn't to babyface years of very bad practice from Vince McMahon until he resigned in disgrace in 2022 and 2024, but human beings have the uncanny ability to adapt and thrive in many scenarios, and WWE as the market leader for pro wrestling was just another place many managed to. Bad eras begat good ones, always will do, and the cycle will repeat.
The Attitude Era, for its optics faults, was a good one. A great one. To many fans to this day, the best one. But it couldn't have existed without crucial figures, their even more crucial contributions, and a fallen empire realising the crucial difference between a carefully-branded New Generation and a legitimately actualised one. And though in the here-and-now we're never more than a few months away from yet another toast to DX's wAcKy HiJiNkS or The Rock's This Is Your Life segment, the journey from the gutter back to the stars always seems to skip more than a few big steps.
Why? The answer isn't as easy as a Peacock special might have you believe.