10 Great Wrestling Careers Ruined By Bad Gimmick Changes
1. DDP Becoming A Stalker
WWE might be the most successful promotion in wrestling history, but signing for Vince McMahon’s company isn’t always what it’s made out to be. Diamond Dallas Page is living, breathing proof of that, and after becoming a star in WCW, his career ran aground in WWE.
Page was one of the few major WCW stars to actually jump ship to WWE following McMahon’s buyout in 2001. While the likes of Goldberg and Scott Steiner sat at home and waited-out their mammoth contracts, DDP was placed at the heart of the Invasion. He was immediately thrown into a huge angle with one of WWE’s biggest stars in The Undertaker, but it soon backfired.
A number of vignettes featuring an unidentified stalker harassing Taker’s wife, Sara, aired in the weeks prior to Page’s debut. His eventual unmasking went over huge, but instead of evolving DDP’s character in a more tasteful direction, WWE doubled down on his creepiness. DDP became a horrific, lecherous criminal, and The Undertaker feud soon fell off a cliff.
WWE decided it’d be a good idea to have Page lose to Sara herself, and that was the end of Page’s mainline wrestling career. He won the relatively meaningless European Championship later in his run, but DDP was let go from WWE in 2002. Page’s DDP Yoga system has been an immense credit to himself and the business since his retirement, but stalking Taker’s wife was the end of his run as a top-level wrestler.