10 Genius Ways WWE Wrestlers Survived “Go Away” Heat
2. X-Pac
It wouldn’t be a list about “go away” heat without including X-Pac, a man so synonymous with tired and aggravated fans that the term is also known as “X-Pac Heat”.
Despite starting off as a beloved underdog, Sean Waltman’s career sadly had a habit of attaching itself to hot stars who were at their A-game. Not only did this mean X-Pac was hard to avoid and arbitrarily a part of feuds that tended much greater than his experience, but it meant that fans got more incensed by his antics as both a member of DX and the nWo.
Furthermore, whether he was pulling his weight or not, being associated with the likes of Hallo, Nash, Michaels and Triple H just illuminated that he wasn’t in their league.
In order to escape X-Pac Heat, Waltman returned to the indies in 2011 and competed in CHIKARA. There, as the 1-2-3-Kid, he managed to escape the mob mentality of WWE and TNA’s larger audiences and reinvented himself. He worked great matches with other former-WWE stars and fresh new talent in ways that felt more like a mentorship than something designed to overshadow his opponents.
Waltman called it the most he had enjoyed wrestling in years and his repeated returns to CHIKARA helped to gain the respect of many fans. In the following years, returning to WWE for one-off appearances, X-Pac has felt a more complete package in his own right because of it.