Twenty years is a long time in professional wrestling.
In 2006, John Cena was still establishing himself as the face of WWE. Batista was becoming one of the company’s biggest stars. Edge finally broke through as WWE Champion. Rey Mysterio won the Royal Rumble and World Heavyweight Championship, D-Generation X reunited, and WWE even brought ECW back from the dead as a third brand.
It wasn’t all great. This was also the year Vince McMahon booked himself and Shane McMahon against Shawn Michaels and “God” at Backlash, which is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.
But I was 10 years old in 2006, and I remember it as a good year to be a WWE fan. Twenty years later, I cover wrestling for a living, and while WWE is still recognizably WWE, almost everything surrounding the product has changed.
Today, WWE operates under TKO alongside UFC — something that would have been unthinkable in 2006.
The business has become more deeply integrated into mainstream sports and entertainment, with enormous media-rights agreements, international events and corporate partnerships that would have been difficult to envision in their current form 20 years ago.
Kayfabe Is a Lot Harder to Maintain
In 2006, it was still possible for the average fan to simply watch the show without knowing nearly as much about what was happening behind it.
Today, wrestlers have podcasts. They post from backstage. News breaks on social media in real time. Contract negotiations become stories. Creative decisions are dissected almost immediately.
The curtain isn’t completely gone, but it’s a lot more transparent.
And maybe that’s the best way to think about WWE 20 years later.
Nostalgia can make the wrestling we watched as kids seem better than everything that came afterward. I’m not sure that’s the lesson here.
WWE in 2006 had plenty of flaws, but it also gave us all-time rivalries like Cena vs. Edge, unforgettable moments and a roster that helped define an entire generation of wrestling fans.
What strikes me most 20 years later isn’t that WWE is unrecognizable. It’s that the wrestling ring is one of the few things that hasn’t changed all that much.
There are still heroes and villains. There are still championships, ridiculous storylines, great matches and moments that make you feel like a kid again.
