10 WWE Mega-Pushes Fans Hated BEFORE Roman Reigns & John Cena

Do you miss Roman Reigns?

'The Big Dog', he of an omnipresence unlike just about anybody else on the roster over the second half of the 2010s (save for his thankfully-only-brief sabbatical between 2018 and 2019), will be written about for decades as the wrestler that unfortunately wore WWE's warped relationship with its own fanbase more often than his own branded flack jackets. In another era, he'd have needed that protective clothing for all the knives and heeled shoes wielded by locals out for blood.

Few deserve it less. Reigns works incredibly hard in matches, wrestles a dynamic hybrid style, and doesn't win half as much as the loud disdain suggests. He's a class act too, rarely selling the furstration of the unfair situation he's been placed in. He's been gone since just before WrestleMania 36 (because he's a class act), and had spent the better part of a year working midcard programmes after his return just before last year's 'Show Of Shows' (again, class act).

It's hard to know if fans will ever settle for him, but how did this happen? It'd be easy to map a flow chart from John Cena downwards, but 'The Champ' wasn't the template wrestler for this phenomenon, even if his reactions amplified an always-possible disconnect between the audience the intended pushed project.

Reigns has had to shoulder the permanently-severed ties between some customers and the company, but Vince McMahon has been subjecting his hardcores to death by a thousand cuts for decades.

The problem with Rocky Maivia was that there was no problem with Rocky Maivia.

By late-1996, maturing and evolving wrestling audiences wanted their characters broken, pushed to breaking point, or breaking out. The New World Order allowed Hulk Hogan to turn his entire career upside down in front of millions that had once adored it the right way up, Stone Cold Steve Austin's teasing and testing of Bret Hart forced uncomfortable questions about what represented genuine "cool" in cynical times, and Shawn Michaels suited the jagged edge reality of his life so much more than the white meat run thrust upon him.

Brand new out the box and aw-shucks-so-glad-to-be-here hadn't worked for years, but it came across much worse when fans were so gleefully willing to reject it.

"Die Rocky Die" was one of the signs The Rock latched on to when he turned heel, but the potency wasn't in the literal meaning of words but what they represented. Rocky Maivia had to die so the future 'Great One' could live - a rapidly changing World Wrestling Federation had no place for a guy without a bit of lived-in baggage.

He'd pay forward his entrance into the Nation Of Domination a year later, too...