25 Most OUT OF POCKET WWE Attitude Era Moments
5. Kurt Angle Buries D’Lo Brown
The average pro wrestler simply doesn’t go away these days. The Undertaker’s ten-year stint was once so impressive that WWE marketed it as a ‘Decade of Destruction’.
Now, the Miz is closing on on his second Decade of Destruction. 20 years he’s been at it, still botches most weeks, and he’s not even the longest-serving active WWE wrestler; that would be Randy Orton, who is almost a quarter of a century in. Natalya has been a main roster presence for 18 years. Her WWE career is old enough to drink alcohol in the UK, but you could be sober and still struggle to list 5 memorable matches she’s had. Sheamus is also 18 years deep into his Fed run, but he’s a midcard guy who isn’t all over the show at all times. Roman Reigns is 14 years into a run in which he’s either been pushed as the next big thing or the actual Big Dog. 14 years.
If you add Hulk Hogan’s 1991 top guy swansong to his original top guy stint (1984-1990), that’s seven years. Add Steve Austin’s main event career to that number (1998 to 2001/2 with a year out), and you reach approximately 10. Add the Rock’s years together as a full-time headliner (late 1998 to 2002), and that number is probably still a few months short of 14. Roman’s run as the guy or the guy WWE was obviously waiting to push is about the same as the cumulative time Hogan, Austin, and Rock spent on top. It wasn’t always like this.
The whiplash was so intense in the Attitude Era that wrestlers were buried for failing to stay over after a matter of months.
D’Lo Brown held the Intercontinental and European titles concurrently on July 27, 1999. Kurt Angle repeated the feat on February 27, 2000. That is a difference of 215 days. By February 29, 2000, Brown was losing to Al Snow on Sunday Night Heat in three minutes. On March 6, he jobbed to Essa Rios on Jakked. When Angle became Euro-Continental champ, he said he was the first to do it - “apart from D-Lo Brown, but he doesn’t count.”
Jesus Christ!