10 Wrestlers We Had To Hate Before We Could Love

2. The Rock

This is a no-brainer, so let's skip all the stuff you already know, and work out why it is that The Rock worked out so well while Rocky Maivia needed to "die, Rocky die". Part of it was a sign of the times. Bret Hart has a theory that well-off ECW fans began to buy ringside seats to every WWF show in the northeast, booing the babyfaces and cheering the heels until everyone who watched RAW on television thought that was the reaction they were supposed to have, and a sea change began.

However it started, the Attitude Era killed the white meat babyface for years, and Rocky Maivia was just the first and most famous casualty. Part of it was the way that television works these days. It's an open secret that in the last twenty years or so, the classic babyface character has become a really difficult character to pull off and pull off well: in a television era like this, audiences have become used to morally complex characters played with layered performances.

The other part of it was simply, honestly, that Dwayne Johnson sucked as a happy-go-lucky babyface, and sucked badly. The cheesy grin. The slapping hands on the way to the ring. A finishing move that blew goats. His reactions were weird and off-kilter. His clothes made me want to travel back to summer 1971, kill myself and somehow and frame his parents for my murder so that they'd never get to conceive him. Thankfully, I had no flux capacitors to hands; The Rock in 1998 was the finest thing on television, and made me glad that I chose not to abuse the privilege of time travel after all.