10 Wrestling Careers Ruined By Awful Storylines
1. Steve Austin
The sight of Steve Austin shaking hands with Vince McMahon closed his classic WrestleMania X-Seven bout with The Rock on an iconic visual, but his heel turn will forever go down as the most destructive in wrestling history. Austin’s performances were fine, but turning him to the darkside was a catastrophic failure, and his career was never the same afterwards.
The handshake effectively signified the end of the Attitude Era. It was WWE’s anti-hero star abandoning every single principle that made him so popular in the first place, and nobody bought it. Fans just weren’t ready to boo Stone Cold, and couldn’t accept him as a corporate yes man, regardless of whether he was working with Triple H as one half of the Two Man Power Trip, or turning on Team WWE to spearhead The Alliance.
Austin's crowd reactions never truly recovered. He signed-off with a fun match against The Rock at WrestleMania XIX, but Austin has since acknowledged the turn as the worst call he has ever made. Longstanding neck problems played a bigger role in his eventual retirement, but “the old Stone Cold” died at ‘Mania X-Seven.
On a larger scale, Austin’s turn was catastrophic for the sport as a whole. Business took an immediate downturn, reflected in dwindling TV ratings and PPV numbers, and WWE have never been able to recover. Every single metric shows that it was a huge failure across the board, and in hindsight, one of the worst decisions WWE have ever made.