4. Stone Cold Turns Heel – WrestleMania X-Seven
The Stone Cold Steve Austin character was designed to be a heel. In early 2001, Austin was under the belief that the character was getting stale as a face and needed a change. If the character were once a heel, it could be again. At the time, there was no reason to think Austin couldn’t handle being a heel.
Looking back to Wrestlemania 17, someone should have stepped in to tell Stone Cold it was a bad idea. Jim Ross has called it John Wayne because a Nazi General. It went directly against Austin’s typecast and Austin’s character struggled to become the dominant heel that Austin could have been under different circumstances.