Ranking EVERY WWE Champion From Worst To Best
40. Sycho Sid
Harnessing the one thing he always had over almost everybody he worked with (and every human full stop), Sycho Sid overflowed with aura when he returned to WWE in 1996 as top babyface underneath Champion Shawn Michaels.
His uneasy relationship with the concept of sanity was perfect when he was joining ‘HBK’ to batter the likes of Vader, Owen Hart and Davey Boy Smith, but all it took was one tweak of the persona and eyelid, and he was dethroning Michaels in brutally cruel fashion in front of a Madison Square Garden completely in love with the chaos he wrought.
The pattern repeated at Bret Hart’s expense when Sid reclaimed the belt the following February, but in the case of both reigns, the vociferous reactions in the buildings didn’t result in the box office changes the company desperately needed. Whether it was because his work was too see-through or his character too one dimensional, fans crucially only bought the big man up to the point they were actually asked to pay for him. There have been worse men chosen to stabilise things in unstable times, but with big Sid in general the limitations always ended up overwhelming the short-term gains.