10 Shocking WWE Babyface Burials You Totally Don't Remember
Those terrifying times WWE vindicated the villains and made fools out of your favourites.
It was always known - or at least speculated on with relative certainty - that Vince McMahon was constantly looking for the "next Hulk Hogan" when the first Stone Cold Steve Austin smashed the glass ceiling in 1996.
Bruce Prichard was the one to confirm as much when we started getting deeper insight into the various decisions McMahon had made all those years ago. Something To Wrestle With was a hell of a show before Prichard got some new job that kept him up all hours and stifled the best stories.
As he's wont to do, Prichard but a bit of warmth behind it. He likened McMahon to a record producer simply looking for his next hit. The gambles on the likes of Lex Luger and Diesel were just that. And just like bad follow-up songs, not enough people bought them.
History repeated itself years later when Roman Reigns did some sufferin' trying to replicate everything about the John Cena character. Nothing sh*thouses a babyface more than sucotash scripting, but the machine was behind him enough to weather that storm and many others that came the way of the 'The Big Dog' before he morphed into the 'The Tribal Chief'.
People weren't going to let him off easy for that line, nor the wink to the camera afterwards, nor the "tater tots" that followed months later. And WWE should know better - they've done this sh*t many times before...
10. Steve Austin Never Liked Billy Gunn Anyway
A&E really dropped the ball on their 2021 Stone Cold Steve Austin profile piece.
It had been a while since 'The Rattlesnake' had done one of these, and has since become known by younger fans as the perfect voice on the other side of the desk thanks to some quality interviews and podcasts over the last decade.
The insight from those was badly missing in Austin's own doc, with yet more time donated to 'The Rattlesnake' eating raw potatoes in Memphis, the birth of Austin 3:16 and everything else everybody's heard a million times before.
When the piece failed to go near the issues around the collapse of his marriage with Debra or even his unceremonious exit from WWE in 2002, it was clear there wasn't going to be a mention of 'The Bionic Redneck' ruining the fun organisation he returned to in 2000.
Chasing his hit-and-run assailant from the prior year, Austin battered everybody in his path, heel or babyface. Such was the pace of the industry at the time that it actually started to feel dated, and almost certainly contributed to his desire to turn heel.
Never was this needless pop thirst clearer than during the October 2nd 2000 edition of Raw. Gunn made his own shocking return from injury, gave Austin a load of new information about the case...then ate a Stunner because Austin "didn't like him anyway".
This was pecking order pettiness, flattening Gunn's main event aspirations the same way Rikishi had flattened him.