8 Wrestling Game-Changers Who Became JOBBERS!
2. The Rock & Roll Express
...and not because they found themselves kidnapped by Jon Moxley in All Elite Wrestling, as funny as that scene was.
Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson might have eventually been usurped by Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty as the pre-eminent high flying sweetheart tag team of the 1980s, but before time caught up with their hard partying territory years, they were templates for the perfect doubles match. Morton's hot tag was known was the industry standard - nobody took a beating quite like him, with his ability to reach the emotions of the crowd so powerful that it passed through screens too. If you couldn't be there to scream him back to life, you wanted to be, rendering him a draw on television and at the box office. And it didn't go off as well without Gibson's fire upon re-entering.
Heels bumping and feeding looked like it had been invented for him and him alone to benefit from, so pronounced was his ability to put heels in the ground. Even the gimmick was perfectly attuned to the times - before heavy metal was usurped by grunge, Morton and Gibson reflected pop culture as much as anything within the typically behind-the-times pro wrestling. Alas, when the same rate of change occurred in wrestling, the two were hung out to dry.
Brought back as the backbone of the ancient-feeling NWA stable in an otherwise red hot 1998 WWE, the two men - at the time in their late 30s-early 40s - were portrayed as total fossils who were simply interlopers for daring to exist in the Attitude Era regardless of their actions on television. Never was this clearer that when they were demoted to Shotgun Saturday Night, home of the inconsequential matches and wacky subtitles such as the one above keying them as "Grandma's Favourites". Performers then younger than both WrestleMania 42 main eventers were cast as dinosaurs, until the NWA idea itself went extinct.