8 Vital Elements Behind The Many Faces Of The Undertaker

2. He Nearly Retired In 2000

In late summer 1999, Calaway suffered a nasty groin tear: however, the decision was made to keep him on television but away from the action, and hope that the injury healed well enough on its own. It didn€™t: he was forced to take time off in September 1999 to rehabilitate the injury. However, it was while he was off recuperating that Calaway would tear a pectoral muscle, the two nasty injuries combining to effectively make it impossible for him to train or work out. He would be away from WWF television for over eight months. During this time, he considered whether it might be time to call it a day and retire: he wasn€™t blessed with the genetic gifts of some pro wrestlers, who could retain size easily and who seemed to be made of india rubber in the ring, never getting seriously injured. Calaway worked a stiff, intense style in a stiff, intense character, and despite his height, had a fairly normal physique: moreover, he€™d been at or near the top of the card for nearly a decade, doing everything that he was told to, working through minor injuries. He was battered to hell and back, and now these two serious injuries had caused him to doubt whether he could carry on at all.

"About a year or so ago I went through two really serious injuries, serious enough to where I contemplated retirement. Anyway, I took this ride and I was just, like, everything that's happened over the past ten, eleven years has for some reason brought me to this point. I didn't want to go out in the midst of self-doubt and whether my body was going to hold up anymore. The thought came over me, you know€ and it was like, you know what? You're gonna make a comeback. You're gonna go back to the top of the pile, you're gonna be the big dog in the yard and there's no two ways about it." - This Is My Yard, 2001

That was the genesis of the most controversial gimmick variation in the Undertaker€™s career: the beginning of the American Badass (known by some as the Bikertaker, because wrestling fans are hilarious). Returning in leather and denim as a more realistic, hardass biker at the Judgement Day event in May 2000, Calaway was noticeably heavier than he€™d ever been before, finding it difficult to keep his wind: that was the result of coming back as soon as he was physically able, but before he€™d managed to train again to get back into fighting condition. He€™d remedy that while on the road over the following few months.

Inexplicably unpopular amongst wrestling fans in 2015, the American Badass version of the Undertaker wasn€™t just an attempt (an incredibly successful attempt, at the time) to keep a cartoonish, scarcely credible gimmick relevant in the Attitude Era, but a make-or-break situation for one of WWE€™s most important performers. The character change also allowed Calaway to play a real heel for the first time since WCW: not a weird zombie doing the bidding of a psychotic manager, or a megalomaniacal high priest with an inexplicable agenda, but a big, nasty guy with a love of bullying people smaller than him (ie, almost everyone). Big Evil was a revelation, and Calaway was never less than believable as a complete and utter b*stard. Creatively, the character allowed Calaway to cut promos as if he was a normal person, instead of a character from a bad play. Because of the supernatural Undertaker€™s propensity for long-winded, po-faced promos in a slow, artificially deep voice, it€™s long been accepted that Calaway simply can€™t talk on the mic: those of us who actually watched WWF/E during the period between May 2000 and November 2003 (in other words, who don€™t just know the period through watching old matches on YouTube and reading magazine retrospectives like this one) know that€™s not true. Remember, this was the first guy to figure out how to defuse the €˜What?€™ chant€ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyKPySrEdK0 Simple, yet effective. Love the little head tilt acknowledging the win, too.