10 Wrestlers We Had To Hate Before We Could Love

6. Bo Dallas

Bo Dallas is a weird one. Initially a plucky, happy-go-lucky fired-up babyface champion, the NXT crowd hated him. Absolutely hated him. As in, they would cheer for literally anyone facing him in the ring, and scream TAP TAP TAP TAP at him when he wasn't even threatened by a submission move. That kind of thing.

Rocky Maivia joined the Nation Of Domination and started quirking an eyebrow and talking in the third person. What did Bo do? He did exactly what he always did... only he added the element of the disingenuous. Slowly - so slowly that it was barely perceptible if you were watching week to week - Bo Dallas turned heel, and he did so by carrying on being the fired-up babyface, but gradually removing all traces of sincerity.

It took weeks, if not months, but by the time Bo Dallas, ultraheel NXT Champion was in full effect, he wasn't a car crash of a character anymore. He'd become something amazing: a heel so astonishingly delusional, so breathtakingly insincere, so wholly oblivious to the hatred that the crowd felt for him, that he flipped everyone around the other way and began getting babyface reactions again. Bo Dallas became the best part of the show, not by getting deadly serious and 'no more Mr. Nice Guy' (aka the excuse for 93.57% of all WWE heel turns), but by being the greatest babyface in the world and being a total d*ck about it.

Then he was promoted to the main roster. Yeh.