10 Early Internet Wrestling Outrages
8. The WWF To WWE Name Change
We're absolutely not making this up - we'll even provide a link just to prove it - there once existed a message board forum entitled The Smart Marks Forum: TSM Forums for short. This was before we realised the folly of our aspirations, too; those early posters thought they were the coolest kids in the room.
One of them - a 'Guest eiker_ir' - was actually very prescient in his disbelief of the WWF's name change to WWE. "Now that the WWF isn't a federation," he wrote, "we can't even refer to it as 'the'". The World Wrestling Entertainment. Doesn't make any sense. We'll probably call it 'the WWE' anyway."
Most don't, but WWE's commentary team and onscreen talent do, for unfathomable reasons that remain infuriating 17 years later.
Brilliantly, the thread is named 'It's really happening'. With connotations of borderline end times, various "smart marks" raged against the name change. "Could they have made a possible worse decision?" one user wrote. Yes: if Vince Russo was still around, and he still had Vince McMahon's ear, we might be on the road to TNA WrestleMania 35. This was 2002, remember: WWE was still pushing Attitude, arguably with more Katie ConVicktion and considerably less charm.
Any entity not named 'WWF' was always going to feel like an impostor, and the old name - WWWF - was too unwieldy and too retrograde to revert back to. 'WWE' is literally the closest acronym to 'WWF', and, tied with the very astute milieu marketing campaign 'Get The F Out', it was weird, weird as sh*t - but retentive of history and recognition.
As Kurt Angle will attest, 'WWE' remains a total nightmare of pronunciation - but even if we still can't say it, we're used to it, nonetheless.
We can sympathise, even after all these years: Double Doubley WrestleMania 35 isn't the same.