John Layfield will probably always be best known either as an Acolyte or as the douche-cowboy, Blake Shelton-lite JBL. But he used to be a much different kind of cowboy, one that Layfield is for some reason reluctant to talk about. JBL first debuted in WWE in 1995 as Justin "Hawk" Bradshaw, a tough mountain-roaming cowpoke who wrote JB on his opponents in ink after defeating them. Surprisingly, he was left to go undefeated for almost a year until Shawn Michaels took him down a peg. With his perfect record tarnished, he simply moved onto a new, eerily similar gimmick. He was, erm, a cowboy. Dressed in a leather vest and sporting a Snidely Whiplash mustache, Blackjack Bradshaw was the most cartoonish cowboy WWE ever put on television (and they had a guy who carried a real branding stick down to the ring with him). The Blackjack gimmick was one WWE had used years earlier, and decided to repurpose with a shiny new coat of stereotypes. The gimmick fizzled out just as the Attitude Era was taking shape, luckily for the future Wall Street ace. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5odtwsRtc
