9 Times WWE's Attitude Era Broke The Rules Of Professional Wrestling

8. There Are Winners And There Are Losers...

JOB Squad Hardcore Holly Too Cold Scorpio
WWE.com

'1-2-3-4 Life' was as clever a t-shirt slogan as you were going to find in the Attitude Era, although the bar wasn't set particularly high. The slogan was used by a faction known as the J.O.B. Squad, and the entire point of the faction was the acknowledgement of jobbers in professional wrestling. Each member was someone languishing in the lower half of the card, as the group was made up of Al Snow, Bob Holly, Too Cold Scorpio and Duane Gill.

The J.O.B. Squad wasn't the beginning of this, but the Attitude Era had no interest in keeping closed the lid of perceived competition in professional wrestling. Rather than being an athletic competition between two athletes, wrestling had become more of a dance where one individual was designated as the winner.

This is a bigger issue in the modern age, where 'having a good match' has become more important than winning and losing. By acknowledging the specific existence of enhancement talent, the vague idea that professional wrestling was a competition was dead and buried.

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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.