I Want To Talk A Little Bit About WWE’s Tag Team Relaunch
In the fall of that year, another team was starting to have some issues. This team was known as the Rockers and was comprised of Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty. They were hitting their peak as a team, showing continuity the likes of which were rarely seen in the WWF, before Shawn started having a big head. It seemed that the team was on the verge of splitting when they met face to face on the set of the talk show The Barber Shop in December of 1991.
On that show, in probably the most famous tag team split ever, Shawn Michaels superkicked Marty and rammed him face first through a window, completely splitting the team and establishing himself as the a fast rising heel. Shawn would also go on to greatness, feuding with Bret on and off for five years while putting together one of the greatest in ring careers of all time.
Look to modern tag team wrestling for proof of this. Well by modern I mean about three years ago but you get the idea. When Miz and Morrison split up, the crux of their feud was over which one of them would be the Jannetty. Just the idea of which would be a success (and dang were most people, myself included, wrong on which one would be the star of the team) was enough to warrant a feud.
Back to the subject of what killed the tag division, there are two other men that had a big role in this: Hawk and Animal, the Legion of Doom. Now before I get into this, I want to make it clear that I was a HUGE LOD fan. I had an LOD hat, I had an LOD shirt, I ate Legion of Doom cereal, and yes that really existed. However, there came a point where there was no one that was going to be able to beat the LOD and everyone knew it.
Think about it: what tag team could give a legitimate challenge to the Legion of Doom? This was a team that had gone toe to toe with the Horsemen in the NWA and now were here, beating up everyone in sight, including the formerly dominant team of Demolition (how those two never had a big PPV match is one of the great wrestling mysteries of our time). As cool as the LOD was, there are only so many places you can go with them as champions.
These two were former multiple time tag team champion Billy Gunn and the Road Dogg Jesse James, who formed the team known as the New Age Outlaws. The Outlaws would dominate tag team wrestling for the next two years, winning five tag titles, a record at the time. To give you an idea of how dominant the Outlaws were by comparison, other than them, no team from May of 1997 to June of 2003 held the titles for longer than three months. La Resistance, the team that broke that streak, won them after the brand split when there were two sets of titles.
The Outlaws lost their final title in February of 2000 to a new team called the Dudley Boyz, kicking off what is incorrectly considered a renaissance of the tag team division. Over the fourteen months, the Hardy Boys, Edge and Christian, and the Dudleys won a combined thirteen tag titles, with the final change between the teams coming at Wrestlemania X7. Between February of 2000 and April of 2001 (X7), three teams (Right to Censor, Too Cool and Rock/Undertaker) combined to hold the titles for 62 days. Other than that, it was all Dudleys/Hardys/Edge and Christian.
So what does this tell us about this period? It tells us that this was not a renaissance or a rebirth of the division. It was a three way feud that was incredibly popular for how action packed the matches were. This was a fresh idea because the Outlaws followed the Nash/Hall formula of being tag team champions: they rarely defended the titles.
Now the Outlaws defended them a lot more often, but how many times do you distinctly remember them defending the belts? How many of those defenses do you remember lasting five minutes? In the Attitude Era, you very rarely got a long match, so seeing Edge/Christian, the Hardys and the Dudleys going out and having fifteen minute matches that were pretty awesome was a new thing for the division and it made the titles look greater than they were.
As always with a great feud, at some point it becomes stale, which is what happened once Edge and Christian broke up. You can only run the Hardys vs. the Dudleys so many times before no one cares anymore, and by the end of 2001, not many people did. After that, the tag titles fell through the floor with no one caring about them on Raw or their counterparts on Smackdown (other than the end of 2002 and early 2003 on the blue show) for the better part of the decade.