10 Times WWE Genuinely Shocked The Fans

For more than three years, Stone Cold Steve Austin was basically the on-screen embodiment of all of the Attitude Era fans. He said the things that many of us would have said given the same opportunity (and charisma).

This suddenly changed one fateful night in March 2001. The Texas Rattlesnake went into his WWF Title match against The Rock a heroic good guy and came out the worst kind of heel. And not one person in the audience - at home or in the arena - saw it coming.

Apart form the fact that it would have made very little sense in terms of story continuity - Austin and Vince McMahon had been enemies since the moment the latter took on his role as an on-screen authority figure - it also represented a huge risk in terms of finances.

Sure enough, that's exactly how it played out in reality. Moving the company's biggest baby-face over to the dark side proved to be a colossal blunder, and one that arguably brought the curtain down on wrestling's biggest boom period. Turns out shocking isn't synonymous with success.