Gimmick Some (Wrestlemania) Lovin': Double Pneumonia, Double Titles

A debut year for the ages

It's rare, but occasionally, WWE will debut a new superstar who, through a combination of sheer determination, innate charisma, front office faith, and that intangible "it" factor, will seem very quickly like they had always been ingrained in the fabric of the company's history.

AJ Styles, for instance, made his first WWE appearance at the 2016 Royal Rumble and entered the 2017 event defending the WWE Championship after high profile matches (and several main events) at WWE's other marquee shows throughout 2016.

Brock Lesnar, similarly, made his WWE main roster debut (promoted from the Ohio Valley Wrestling developmental system) the night after Wrestlemania X8 by interrupting a Hardcore Championship match and demolishing its competitors. One year later, Lesnar captured his second WWE Championship in the main event of Wrestlemania XIX, The Next Big Thing's first-ever appearance on the Grandest Stage of Them All.

The man Lesnar faced in that main event, however, was the superstar who set the gold standard (pun intended) for a debut year in WWE: Olympic wrestling champion Kurt Angle.

[silently to self]: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Angle debuted with a series of vignettes in the fall of 1999 hyping up his celebrated amateur wrestling accomplishments and his status as a "real athlete" deigning to appear in the World Wrestling Federation. Angle's promos accentuated his athletic accomplishments with an earnestness in the defence of his hero status; according to those present in creative at the time, Angle was unaware that he was a heel, and felt that it would be impossible to boo an Olympian, an attitude he brought into his professional persona.

The result was the WWF repeating a mistake they'd made three years prior with newcomer Rocky Maivia, aka Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who was told to smile as much as possible and simply be a traditional 1980s babyface in a company quickly transitioning into more adult-oriented Attitude era content. Fans quickly soured on the beaming former Flex Kavana, and the front office's response was to double down on their support by giving him the company's number two singles title.

Luckily, WWE learned their lesson here and never tried to force another member of the Anoa'i family on their audience as an unwanted babyface ever again.

The difference with Angle, though, was that the backlash was fully intentional; McMahon and the creative team knew that it would be impossible to convince Angle to play a traditional (cheating, angry, sneaky, etc.) wrestling heel, but also understood their audience well enough to know that such actions wouldn't make Kurt a heel. What would make Kurt Angle a bad guy at that time would be, as they learned with Maivia, to have him be the honourable traditional babyface in an era of middle fingers, beers, abductions, and other Attitude Era craziness.

By the time Angle captured the European Championship from Val Venis on an episode of Smackdown airing February 10, 2000, he was being booed out of arenas nationwide for his holier-than-thou approach to his accomplishments and the business of professional wrestling; at No Way Out later that month (a show featuring a future Gimmick Some Lovin' entry in the Triple H-Cactus Jack Hell in a Cell Match, this author's vote for Greatest HIAC of All Time), Angle defeated Jericho to add the Intercontinental Championship to his waist, becoming the top non-McMahon affiliated heel in the company.

This is easily the best a double champion has ever looked with the two belts. Oh, it's true.

By the time the next Survivor Series arrived, Angle was the defending WWF Champion, having also held both secondary mid-card championships and won the King of the Ring tournament previously that summer. In twelve months, Angle had accomplished everything (of value) a singles competitor possibly could.