2. Tommy Dreamer - Please, Sir, Can I Have Another?
WWE.comSome of you will know about this storyline, but if you don't this is pretty much gets the top marks from me in how to transform a wrestler from bland to beloved. Tommy Dreamer was a boring, good-looking babyface in the early days of ECW, that the crowd didn't care for very much. He was booked in a Singapore cane match with The Sandman - and subsequently 'The innovator of violence' was born. Tommy lost the match and was set to receive ten lashes of the cane from The Sandman. After each lash - which drew gasps from the crowd - he asked to receive another. He did this over and over until he had received all ten lashes. Because he asked for the lashes and took them willingly, all of a sudden the crowd loved him and saw him as a tough wrestler as opposed to the bland, mechanical babyface he was. Now, I know that WWE is PG these days, but there is still a lot of violence in some of their Pay-Per-View stipulation matches. Doing an angle like this could transform someone like, say, Zack Ryder, from a low-level wrestler to someone that the fans would believe had both mental and physical toughness and would then get behind him in an altogether different way.