10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About John Bradshaw Layfield

4. His Really Long WWE Title Reign Was Not A Success

It was ECW One Night Stand 2005 when Paul Heyman was in the ring "shooting" about various topics when he got to JBL. He fired off this gem of a line: "The only reason you were WWE Champion for a year is because Triple H didn't want to work Tuesday." When Heyman delivered that line, the crowd let out a big "ooohhhh" and popped huge for it because they knew that was a very true statement. http://youtu.be/-7AoX3LkxpA When JBL became WWE Champion on June 27, 2004 at the Great American Bash it surprised a lot of people. Eddie Guerrero was the champ for about four months and it appeared as though he was in for a long run as champ, but it ended that night. Apparently Eddie was incredibly stressed out as WWE Champion and management was worried about him, so they moved it onto JBL. The problem is that the JBL character was only a couple of month old and he was already getting WWE Title shots. We had seen this guy wrestling as a midcard singles wrestler as well as a tag wrestler. Fans didn't buy him as a WWE Championship contender. JBL's WWE Title reign lasted 280 days, which was one of the longest reigns of the last 30 years. His matches were boring and whenever he retained the title it was done in such a cheap manner all the time. Part of the problem was that WWE just didn't care about Smackdown enough. There was a lack of talent on that show, not to mention Kurt Angle had injury issues and Brock Lesnar had just left the company. JBL was a poor draw as WWE Champion. As an example, the No Mercy 2003 PPV headlined by Brock Lesnar and Undertaker did 275,000 PPVs. A year later with JBL taking on Undertaker the same PPV did 183,000. That's a significant drop. JBL still went on to hold the WWE Title until WrestleMania 21 in 2005 where he dropped the gold to John Cena. Just because he wasn't a draw as WWE Champion does not diminish what he did in his career. He was a very good heel especially as JBL. The problem was that he wasn't built up enough and as a result his time on top led to poor results at the box office. WWE celebrates their best champions, but they want you to forget about JBL's reign because when you look at it from a business perspective it was unsuccessful. That's not the only ECW One Night Stand 2005 story involving JBL. There's an even better one coming up.