10 Rare Awesome WWE Surprises
4. Tazz
It wasn't so much a surprise, as a well-calculated scheme to get Tazz over - and WWE were miffed when he got over, but that's a separate, paradoxical issue.
The surprise, if telegraphed, was also very effective.
There was a real creativity to the idea. Instead of pre-recorded vignettes, Tazz's symbol and colour aesthetic haunted the live show; arenas nationwide were bathed in an orange light as various wrestlers made their entrance. The idea conveyed was that Tazz, his debut imminent, was targeting everybody to foreshadow the road of destruction he was to pave.
"The mood is about to change," ran the tagline, and it did. WWF soured on Tazz, who got over, when this marketing campaign was specifically devised to get him over, as most developments booked by a pro wrestling promotion are.
He got over big in Madison Square Garden, at the Royal Rumble, because he was already over to the New York market. Also: because he ruled.
He bludgeoned Kurt Angle with a spree of the sort of dangerously-angled suplexes not seen in the WWF since the Steiner Brothers left, and for three pulsating minutes, after which Angle sold as if he'd been decimated, it felt as though the company had actually transplanted the awesome essence of an outside creation into its arena-sized scope.