5 Major stars who played sidekicks to mid-carders that fans forgot about

#2 Bob Backlund Coaching Darren Young

Bob Backlund returned as a coach to less-than-top talent Darren Young.

Bob Backlund is a wrestling legend. He was the last great face WWE Champion of the pre-national expansion era, who held the title for nearly six years straight. Moreover, he managed to reinvent himself a decade later in a crazed heel persona, that garnered a short world title reign in its own right.

All in all, despite getting featured scarcely during peak periods for the wrestling business, Backlund remains one of the best known and most widely respected talents of all time.

Backlund returned to the WWE more than once, fold to play supporting roles, and the most recent instance saw him acting as a life coach and manager for Darren Young. The idea of Backlund coaching someone, in and of itself, makes good sense and Young was enough of an athlete for the pairing to make a degree of sense.

However, excluding his early run with The Nexus, Young never put the pieces together to become more than a lower mid-card guy.

Backlund acting as his sidekick comes across more as a piece of historical trivia now, than a logical pairing that advanced either man’s career or legacy in meaningful ways.