10 Bizarre Times WWE Stars Experimented With Their Gimmick
3. Diamond Dallas Page - Undertaker Makes Him Famous
For years either side of Scott Hall and Kevin Nash forming the New World Order alongside Hulk Hogan, WWE flatly refused to accept that WCW could make stars. This was demonstrably not the case, with Diamond Dallas Page being perhaps the most obvious example. He survived some of the outfit's darkest days as a ludicrous heel to convincingly play the singular babyface outlier refusing to lay down and die against the the nWo's dominance.
A people's champion before The Rock made it a catchphrase, Page was a made man from pro wrestling during its hottest period and still believed he had enough to offer when he elected to sacrifice his fat AOL/Time Warner deal for a crack at life as a WWE Superstar, rough with the smooth. He never got to experience the latter.
The Undertaker's wife Sara had a stalker at the time, and it was DDP. The motivation? Getting 'The Deadman's attention so that he'd be "made famous" by working with him, presumably because the millions and millions that had seen him win the World Title on the other channel weren't tuning into Raw. (That wasn't wholly incorrect actually, but we weren't to know that then). Undertaker battered him for months, Sara beat him in her one and only match, and he was using his loss to drive a doomed motivational speaker gimmick before the end of the year.
"Rough with the smooth" is one thing, but WWE's barbs severed the arteries of his run on the night he debuted.