Tag team wrestling in the WWE, as was said yesterday and is believed throughout the blogosphere, is a dying art. They are doing lip service in bringing the prestige of the titles back by having established main eventers like Triple H, Chris Jericho and Shawn Michaels holding them in the recent past and present. Furthermore, there are a few tag teams on the scene now and in the pipeline, which leads me to believe that there is a push to get tag team wrestling back on the front lines in the WWE.While there have been a few strong regular tag teams in the WWE in the last decade - London and Kendrick, Miz and Morrison and the World's Greatest Tag Team to name a few - the last time tag team wrestling has been a legitimate part of the main event scene on its own merit rather than having current main eventers migrate into the division was before the company got the F out. We all know the players; the Hardy Boys, the Dudley Boys and the Canadian Blondes were the major ones, and to a point, the APA and *shudder* X-Factor were players. Still, the memories of ladder matches, the birth of TLC and all the insanity that came out of those three teams colliding with each other made such an impact that two out of the six became major World Champions, another two held minor World Title-level belts, and well the Dudley Boys are still the most recognizable team in the world today aside from DX.
But with all the warm and fuzzy memories, the tables, the ladders, the chairs, the main event credibility lent to three teams that would have faltered on their own but as collectives stood as some of the brightest stars in the WWF at the time, did they undermine the WWE's tag team division for the future? Did they set the bar too high?
The three-way rivalry started out innocently enough, with Edge and Christian taking on the Hardys in the Terri Invitational Tournament (fuck you, Vince Russo), and they never really looked back. The Dudleys jumped from ECW and immediately were brought into the feud, and the festivities got hot to the point where all three teams were put in a three-way ladder match at WrestleMania 2000. The results were so spectacular that the fans at the time wanted more and more. By SummerSlam, the TLC match was born. The first three matches in its history were competed by those three teams, with the third one injecting Chris Jericho and the Lord Voldemort of Wrestling, Chris Benoit (i.e. He Who Shall Not Be Named).
By the time the third match came around, all three teams were ready to be split, or at least attempted to be split. As they moved onto bigger and better things, the tag teams that came up to replace them weren't all that bad at all. TWGTT had the benefit of Kurt Angle speaking for them and letting their actions in the ring define most of their personalities. Billy and Chuck got over with their homoerotic gimmickry, but never to the level that the other three teams preceding them did. BookDust may have been the best things Booker T and Goldust ever did (and that's saying something). La Resistance, London and Kendrick, the Colon Bros., MNM... it's not like the WWE didn't try (albeit sometimes haphazardly), but they never regained the mojo of having a bona fide tag team division.
What was the reason? Could it have been that fans were expecting all these teams to break themselves in half every couple of months on PPV like the Blondes, Dudz and Hardys did? I don't want to speak for the millions of wrestling fans out there, but from where I sit, that could be a pretty good reason. You can't just go back to normal after overstimulating the people and conditioning them to believe that a good tag division had to be based around TLC.
That's not to say there weren't tag successes, but the point is, they weren't based around having traditional teams. You can point to the Smackdown Six era, and yes, that is considered among the best things that the WWE has ever done, but I also think it was one of the nails in the coffin of a natural tag division. Yes, Edge, Angle, the Guerreros, ReyRey and Benoidemort provided scintillating television based on their alliances and the newly-created WWE Tag Team Championships, but they also really kick-started the trend of putting two established stars together and shunting them in the tag division to kick start it. Rather than being a breeding ground for future main eventers (although you could argue that Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio and Edge at the time were still pretty entrenched in the midcard), it became a place to put people who'd otherwise be climbing the singles ladder who didn't have anything else to do.
So while the S6 era is one that is fondly remembered, when people think of the tag division's last stand in the WWE, they go back to when three teams ruled the roost with their tables, ladders and chairs. They may have set the bar too high, but you can't fault them or the writers/bookers for givings the memories we have today.
