10 Biggest Heat Magnets In WWE History

At a certain point in their careers, every single wrestler or affiliated performer is going to have heat with someone. It’s the nature of the beast: professional wrestling is a high pressure business marrying performance and physicality, and attracts some volatile folk. Indeed, some would say that if you’ve never had heat, you can’t be doing it properly.

Then there are those who seem to attract heat as naturally as brushing their teeth or changing their socks. These are the people whose personalities naturally attract ill feeling like festival toilets attract flies: the true heat magnets, in their purest form.

However, sometimes serious grudges develop because of a specific personality clash or an issue with a particular relationship or storyline. Often, it’s just inexperience that causes people to butt heads.

The fact is, unless you can find a way out without losing face, the reason for the ill will may not actually matter. In extreme cases, even becoming an inadvertent heat magnet can be so damaging that it affects whole careers.

Whether for a reason or for a season, these are the biggest heat magnets in WWE history.

When he first arrived in the WWF at the tail end of 1992, Jerry Lawler had half the locker room gunning for him. He’d been the main event in Memphis for close to twenty years and management for half that time, presiding over the kind of rabid crowds and packed houses that many wrestlers could only dream of.

However, payouts to mid and lower card wrestlers were terrible. Rumours even abounded of wrestlers being paid with food stamps. Lawler himself acknowledges that the undercard weren’t paid what they were worth, and that only rookies desperate to pick up the business or local kids that didn’t like to travel would put up with it.

Ex-CWA and USWA talent like Steve Keirn (then wrestling for Vince McMahon as the redneck alligator hunter Skinner) and, remarkably, Mark ‘the Undertaker’ Calaway took the opportunity to remind the King that Tennessee royalty wasn’t worth a dry fart in New York. In the time-honoured wrestling tradition, they did this by taking large, ungainly dumps in his crown at a show in Sacramento, leaving it in the locker room showers for Lawler to find.

From all reports, Lawler stooged the rib to management and Vince McMahon ordered his boys to stop messing with the new hire. The fact that Lawler wasn’t being brought in to steal a top spot no doubt helped to smooth things out - but of longer-term concern was the King’s predilection for young women on the road.

Lawler himself has copped to being a crappy husband, following a pattern of leaving an ageing spouse for a (much) younger replacement while constantly cheating with young wrestling groupies on the road. Par for the course in wrestling circles, unfortunately - but as he’s gotten (much) older, that pattern has degraded from ‘bad behaviour’ to ‘godd*mn creepy sh*t’.

A charge of of statutory rape and sodomy of a minor arose around the end of 1993 and caused Lawler to be pulled from commentary, being replaced by Shawn Michaels for that year’s Survivor Series pay-per-view. Although all available evidence says that the King was innocent (it transpired that the teenager concerned had fabricated the story), his history of lewd behaviour made such a story easy for many to believe.

His time behind the announce desk has provided WWE audiences with two decades of ‘drunken uncle’ style pervery, most of which seems to be just Jerry Lawler cranked up a notch. He’s also on record as believing that women should remain eye candy and not perform on the card. No wonder the women of the WWF/E have always considered him a royal pain in the aristocracy...