5 WWE Tag Team Champions You Forgot About
The second WWE brand extension has been active for almost three years now and the RAW side has had several different tag teams holding their doubles gold. But did you know the current WWE RAW Tag Team Championships have a much longer shelf life than three years?
Ironically, the current WWE (RAW) Tag Team Championships began their legacy as Tag Titles that were exclusive to the SmackDown brand. The titles debuted in 2002 for SmackDown, with the first Champions being Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit, who won a tournament last defeating Rey Mysterio and Edge at No Mercy that year.
Ever since, this gold has been held by many notable tag teams including the Hardy Boyz, Dudley Boyz, DX, the New Age Outlaws, Charlie Haas & Shelton Benjamin, MNM, Paul London and Brian Kendrick, Team Hell No and many more.
These titles have not only been held by all these great teams, but have also been held by several other teams who were pretty much just thrown together for no other reason only that WWE had nothing else for them. There have been several tag teams to have held these particular tag titles that you probably forgot about, and here are who I think are the top five.
#5 Kofi Kingston & Evan Bourne - 2011
Kofi Kingston and Evan Bourne were paired together as a tag team back in the summer of 2011, mainly because the company had no other plans for either man at the time. They had been randomly teaming together at live events, and it just transpired into television.
WWE decided to go all in with the team pretty early on as they became the WWE Tag Team Champions after just a few weeks of teaming on TV together. Kingston and Bourne would claim the tag titles from what was left of The Nexus, and would successfully defend them in rematches with them, as well as The Miz & R-Truth, and Dolph Ziggler & Jack Swagger.
Kingston and Bourne were officially named 'Air Boom' in August 2011, after a fan voting poll on an episode of RAW. However, they were rarely ever actually referred to by that name and were still often just introduced as '' Kofi Kingston & Evan Bourne ''. Much like today, WWE didn't care much for the tag team division back then, and when Bourne was suspended for a month for a wellness violation, he and Kingston still remained the Tag Team Champions and were never stripped of them.
Bourne returned to WWE TV in early December and the two would remain Tag Team Champions for just about a month before losing them to Primo and Epico at a house show. Two days later, it was announced that Bourne had been suspended for a second time, and he and Kingston quietly disbanded before he returned to TV.