8 Babyfaces The WWE Universe Turned Heel

1. Rocky Maivia

Batista promo 2014
WWE.com

It is unlikely that there will ever be a more famous example of a crowd turning on a babyface in WWE history. Heck, these days Dwayne Johnson is the highest paid actor in Hollywood and a future WWE Hall of Famer. It is a far cry from his tentative first steps into the professional wrestling world as Rocky Maivia.

Rocky Maivia was introduced to the then-WWF world as a third generation blue chipper, all smiles and clean-cut image. He was literally referred to as 'The Blue Chipper', which pretty much guarantees a crowd turning against someone. His wrestling inexperience certainly didn't help, and this combined with a change in attitudes from wrestling audiences made chants of "Die Rocky, Die" an inevitability.

Well, that's somewhat dramatic but it is what it is. The audience turned on Maivia with a vitriol not seen before, and watching the young third-generation star try to grit his teeth and smile through it was painful to say the least. Luckily for him, it didn't last forever.

WWE had no choice but to turn him heel, which they did by aligning Maivia with the Nation of Domination. Rocky Maivia was dead, to be replaced by The Rock. The rest is history.

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.