10 Big Misconceptions People Have About WWE's Attitude Era

3. The Wrestling Was So Much Better

For all of the criticism surrounding today's WWE product, the wrestling is as consistently good as it has ever been. It is not uncommon to tune into Raw or SmackDown and see a pay-per-view quality match between two guys further down the card than one would expect given their effort. During the Attitude Era, television matches were almost exclusively throw-away bouts and fans were never guaranteed a great match. There was far less emphasis put on the actual in-ring work than there was character development and storyline advancement. Steve Austin, thanks to limitations from his injuries and a solid understanding of the wild and chaotic brawls that fans had come to love, implemented what would become known as "main event style" matches that started as fights around ringside before settling down into more traditional matches late in the contest. The more successful that style proved, the more other main eventers leaned on it to garner the same response. Midcarders worked more traditional matches, to varying levels of success. Workrate guys such as Jeff Jarrett, Val Venis, D'Lo Brown, X-Pac and Owen Hart could be counted on to deliver good matches, at the very least, while guys with stronger characters were often pushed at their expense. It was not until WWE bought WCW and effectively ended the Attitude Era at WrestleMania X-Seven that the company began to focus primarily on the quality of the ring work and accentuated it with stories and characters, rather than the other way around.