10 Wrestlers Who Drew The Wrong Kind Of Heel Heat
5. Michael Cole
He doesn’t always get the credit he deserves, but Michael Cole has been part of WWE’s broadcast team for close to 20 years now. Whether working as a backstage interviewer or Raw’s lead announcer, he has been a constant presence throughout an era of immense change, for himself as well as the company.
WWE have tweaked Cole’s role in various ways over the years, with their worst experiment coming in 2010. For some reason, the company decided to have the play-by-play man turn heel. He regularly belittled the audience and certain babyface wrestlers, developing a new, smarmy persona that turned him into one of the most insufferable personalities in the business.
From his spell as the voice of the Anonymous Raw General Manager to his horrendous feud with Jerry Lawler and Jim Ross, Cole had the audience wanting him to go away, and never come back. His constant bickering with his announce partners regularly dragged the programming down, with his character more concerned with getting himself over than selling the action in the ring. WWE abandoned Cole’s heel persona in 2012, but for a while, he was the embodiment of X-Pac heat.