9 WWE Champions You Didn't Care Enough To Hate

The go-to defence offered by WWE colleagues when nominal faces like John Cena and Roman Reigns are booed out of the arena is that "negative reaction is better than no reaction".

This faultless logic appears to be the reason that The Big Dog has been pencilled in for his fourth consecutive WrestleMania main event when the company heads to New Orleans next April. If you want to stop that, you're going to have to keep quiet about it.

To be fair, it does make a modicum of sense. Even a wrestler who is hated can help put butts in seats by enraging fans to the point where they'd part with their money in order to see them get a well-earned ass-kicking.

In practice, however, WWE hasn't always been able to remain faithful to this maxim. There have been one or two world champions from its history who have simply been too boring to command cheers or boos.

Sometimes, this is because of insurmountable flaws (or perceived flaws) in their wrestling profile - but, more often than not, it's down to the creative team making a mess of things.

There were times, even after his 2003 unmasking, that fans would have accepted Kane as a legitimate WWE world champion - mid-way through the following year, when he was feuding Chris Benoit, perhaps being one of them.

Six years later, however, there was little appetite for seeing The Big Red Machine in the main event, particularly with younger stars like CM Punk, Rey Mysterio and John Morrison waiting in the SmackDown wings.

To compound matters, it took WWE just two months to rekindle his long-term sibling rivalry with The Undertaker, a feud that fans had grown tired of at least a decade earlier (their matches, despite the familiarity with one another's styles, never really managing to catch fire).

In short, it was nice for a tireless worker and 15-year company veteran like Kane to get his belated moment in the spotlight - but we probably could have done without a six-month reign and another re-hash of wrestling's most over-done storyline.