10 Times WWE Turned Trash Into Treasure
4. The APA
Reductive attempts at deadpan often fall into dreaded snark territory, but ultimately, the Acolytes were the two nearest big lads the Undertaker could daub naff "satanic" imagery on, and it didn't seem to matter that one was a cowboy, and the other was a black nationalist. That was the extent of the act. It was as one-dimensional as it gets. Even the most rose-tinted Attitude Era apologist couldn't name one memorable Acolytes match outside of the infamous Public Enemy encounter, and that wasn't so much a pro wrestling match as a massacre.
Those apologists remain in massive numbers, however, because between 1997 and 2001, the WWF utilised every last soldier in the trench to combat the WCW battalion.
Bradshaw and Farooq became the Acolytes Protection Agency, and the matches no longer mattered; they were a fun part of the shared universe fabric, utilised to advance storylines and deliver retribution. Two formidable bruisers, they were believable in the role, and as blunt with sharp one-liners as they were thudding the hapless to the canvas.
Misawa's lunatic neck-first bumps; Mick Foley's unprotected chair shots; Katsuyori Shibata's full-force kicks to the chest; the way in which the APA clobbered their opponents ranks among them as some of the most painful-looking sh*t to ever emanate from the squared circle.