Ever seen a bad show and just want to go there yourself and beat up Michael Cole? I have had a lot of those moments, so I’m not even going to reference all the times I have wanted to. You all know what makes a bad show. Poor matches, bad endings, inexplicable booking, the whole nine yards. Here are some honorable mentions that just barely missed the cut.
Night of Champions 2013: Whole lotta nothing here. And a fast count in the main event to boot.
No Mercy 2003: Same main event as the previous No Mercy PPV, but this version of Brock Lesnar and Undertaker sucked. Not to mention that it was during this time where WWE were shoving McMahon family drama down our throats like we cared.
Unforgiven 2003: Goldberg was badly exposed here, and the rest was a mess.
Backlash 2003: Goldberg’s debut collapsed into itself as the crowd was cheering for The Rock. Rest of the card featured low level matches you would see on RAW or Smackdown. Man, 2003 was a rough year wasn’t it?
WCW Clash of the Champions XXXI: Ew.
King of The Ring 2000: Kurt Angle won the tournament, but boy did the rest blow.
WCW Halloween Havoc 2000: It’s a good thing the tag teams like Kidman/Rey and Jindrak/O’Haire were on this show, because the rest was enough to make your eyes burn.
WCW Great American Bash 1991: Two steel cage matches, one was a 2 on 2 and lasted 2 minutes. And the latter was the main event. Ugh.
Fatal Four Way 2010: I have heard of naming PPV’s after stipulations, but this was ridiculous. Every match on the card featured either something no one cared about, and the WWE title match ended with the Nexus assaulting everyone and Sheamus stealing the pin and subsequently running away.
Capitol Punishment 2011: R-Truth got a WWE Title match?!
TLC(and S) 2014: I had this on my main list, and I was going to bring up how TLC did the lowest buyrate ever. But we have the Network now so those numbers are essentialy useless. Still pretty bad.
Summerslam 2010: One of the worst Summerslam’s ever, and I’m surprised no one dial 911 for John Cena’s murder and subsequent burial on what was one of the hottest things in WWE going on at that point in The Nexus.
WrestleMania 13: If Bret and Austin was anything less than the five star match it was, this would easily be on your list.
Now, onto the main list.
10. Judgement Day 2003
The rough stretches of bad 2003 WWE PPV’s continue. See, I always thought that during the Ruthless Aggression Era, in terms of raw talent, I believe the roster was as deep as it could get. And out of all the talent, what did we get? Triple H and Kevin Nash representing RAW and Brock Lesnar and Big Show representing Smackdown. HHH/Nash didn’t last ten minutes and ended in DQ, and I hate when WWE ends a match on PPV controversially just to promote the next show instead of having an actual damn finish. As for The Big Show, the only thing entertaining was WWE poking fun at Big Show’s weight issue via Lesnar carrying him on a fork lift. The two on two ladder match between The Guerrerros and Team Angle wasn’t enough to salvage the mess of an undercard that WWE produced. This was bad. Very bad indeed.
9. The Great American Bash 2004
Keno Suzuki and Billy Gunn. Moredecai and Hardcore Holly. Rey Mysterio and Chavo Guerrerro. Luther Reigns and Charlie Haas. Does that sound like an entertaining undercard to you? And the sad thing is that the main event was even worse than that as The Undertaker faced the Dudley Boyz and involved that whole debacle involving Paul Bearer and cement. In every sense of the word, this was one of the worst shows that I have ever bore witness too. I couldn’t help but feel that the Smackdown brand in 2004 had a rough patch of shows because of the overwhelming lack of star power. After Brock said “see ya later, suckers”, the matches had to be carried primarily by The Undertaker, Eddie Guererro, JBL and Booker T. Meanwhile the rest of the roster, while they showed promise, simply could not deliver on a consistent basis. With the only passable match on the card being JBL and Eddie Guererro, this made for one of the worst shows that the company has ever produced. The show was really bad. I mean, REALLY bad.
8. WrestleMania 27
When your main event of WrestleMania is John Cena vs. The Miz, what more can you expect from it? Not to mention that the match was, once again, only to promote The Rock and John Cena at the next WrestleMania. The Miz was simply getting in the way and really didn’t belong in that slot. We saw Edge’s last match, which came against Alberto Del Rio, but if we’re honest with ourselves, the match wasn’t something you will remember. CM Punk vs. Randy Orton was good, but not great. And the rest of the card you say? We have Lawler and Cole (which got nearly as much time as Punk/Orton), a throw away 8 man tag team match and another throw a way six man tag. Triple H and The Undertaker was great, but not great enough to make this show worth watching, considering how much they topped their match the following year. This WrestleMania showed how lacking the star power was and this brought part timers and past legends such as Chris Jericho and Brock Lesnar to work WrestleManias. John Cena vs. The Miz. That wasn’t even the main event of The Bash in 2009. Wow.
7. New Year’s Revolution 2006
If you read my previous article, one of the greatest moments in WWE history occured on this night as Edge won his first WWE Championship. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the form of a mash as it was a 2 minute ambush. The Elimination Chamber was good, but the ending was beyond predictable and it was slow for a while. The rest of the card isn’t worth the ink it’s printed on. Jerry Lawler and Gregory Helms. Shelton Benjamin and Viscera (your eyes will bleed if you watch this; you’ve been warned) and a whopping sixteen minutes for Triple H and The Big Show. Shouldn’t that tell you all you needed to know. Edge and Ric Flair could have had at least made for a decent match, but it only got 7 minutes and ended in DQ. Had you not tune out early in this PPV, you saw what happened with Edge and Cena, and if you did tune out early, who could blame you?
6. Battleground 2013
Any WWE event in 2013 that ends with a WWE Title match ending with The Big Show knocking out Daniel Bryan, Randy Orton and helpless referees just to celebrate the occasion and have the logo screen show at the bottom right of the screen signaling the end of the show with no finish guarantees you a spot. And it’s not just this. Who is going to go out of their way to see Curtis Axel and R-Truth? Bray Wyatt and Kofi Kingston? AJ Lee and Brie Bella? No, well CM Punk and Ryback main evented Hell In A Cell. That would be sure to save the show, right? Wrong. When a face as popular as CM Punk needs a low blow to beat Ryback, what does that say? RVD and Del Rio could have had an entertaining hardcore bout, but RVD looked all the more weaker as a face as he couldn’t win even with Ricardo fighting with him. This show was smack right in the middle of a slump WWE was involved in when Cena went out for surgery. Night of Champions, Battleground, Hell In A Cell and Survivor Series and TLC all really, really, really stank. This was just the worst show out of that bunch.
5. WWF In Your House 19: D-Generation X
Sadly, this was a card that Steve Austin and The Rock (Rocky Mavia) couldn’t save. The biggest travesty on this card that I found was the reprehensible 18 minute “Boot Camp” match between Triple H and Sgt. Slaughter. Slaughter wrestled an 18 minute match. Then there was this “toughman” match that went nowhere but down, Jeff Jarrett and The Undertaker was synonymous with DUD, The Road Warriors and New Age Outlaws was a snoozefest filled with nothing more than stalling (apparently that was enough to quantify a rematch between the the two teams at The Royal Rumble) and no horrible PPV would be complete without a main event with HBK and Shamrock that goes 20 minutes and ends in a disqualification. Oh, and we must address the elephant in the room with this show. Look at the title of this show. In all of the In Your House series, they couldn’t come up with a more original name? Whatever. That’s not a big deal, but what the big deal is refers to how big a disaster this was. Not worth your time at all.
4. WrestleMania 9
Am I wrong for calling this edition of WrestleMania the worst by a country mile and a half? I mean where do I start? It was a whole lot of nothing. Lots of matches on the card were worthy of having negative stars, but the travesty was of course the main event. You have Yokozuna beat Bret Hart in a WWF title match that doesn’t last 10 minutes. Then you have Hulk Hogan come out in all his majesty and take it off him within half a minute. Then Hulk goes home and sits down for two months while Hart and Yokozuna picks up the wrestling slack and when Hulk Hogan comes back and King of The Ring, he drops it to Yokozuna when he loses off his own finisher in humiliating fashion, and this was the unofficial end of Hulkamania, at least during this period of time. I would call WrestleMania 27 worse but Triple H and The Undertaker had at least some good near falls and swerves. This WrestleMania was just blah.
3. WCW Uncensored 1996
The main event by itself is enough to crap on this show. I won’t even go to the rest of the card. Let’s just focus on WCW on its worse day as you do a 2 on 8 “tower of doom”. To me, it looked nothing more than a glorified playpen. They really did a Hogan and Savage eight on 2 matchup. It’s a three story stage with Hogan and Savage starting at the top and moving downwards. No rules, and they’re supposed to fight their way down. First, did anyone not notice how terrible the vision was in this match? You couldn’t see a damn thing. It made me sick to hear the announcers call this spectacular. Heck, you even had action outside of the cage, thus eliminating the entire point of the entire match. Now I believe this was the official end of Hulkamania, as the fan reaction was so overwhelmingly bad and The Mega Powers would never, EEEEVVVVEEEEERRR be the same again. This was just a mess. A giant, big mess in a three story cage. If you want to see how bad WCW could be, though, please watch this show. Please.
2. King of The Ring 1995
The actual card for this match was beyond awful, but we all know the real tragedy of the night was Mabel winning King of the Ring by defeating The Undertaker and Savio Vega in horrible, putrid matches. As King Mabel stands on his tainted throne, he was serenaded with garbage and ECW chants. Vince finally saw that this idea was quite frankly horrible and Mabel’s relevance quickly dwindled. People talk about how much the creative team is out of touch with reality today on what is good, but you have to wonder if they were even stable to begin with twenty years ago. Oh, and the main event of this show featured Psycho Sid and Kevin Nash in an 18 minute tag team match. Just the icing on the cake, baby.
1. ECW December to Dismember 2006
What, you were expecting something else? Wrap your head around this. At the time of the broadcast, only two matches were announced. Two. Then you had the inconceivable logic of having this PPV come right after the Survivor Series that year. So you are expecting fans to shell out money to see the Survivor Series and then cough up more dough to see this show? Oh, and let’s get to the show itself. The undercard was laughably painful. It was kind of sad, actually. Makes you want to shed a tear. And of course, who could forget the “EXTREME” Elimination Chamber? Get it? Cause it’s ECW? It’s a shame that the execution was so sloppy. But the order of the match was completely bull. Vince delegated the responsibility for this show to Paul Heyman. Heyman wanted CM Punk, the ROH standout, to win the gold, while Vince wanted Bobby Lashley to win with a post-match celebration to hammer home the point; Heyman scoffed at this idea and said it would bomb. The Big Show was nearing the end of his deal and was not coming back, so he’s not winning the title, and you can forget about Test or Hardcore Holly. Then you have Rob Van Dam, the face of ECW. When Van Dam held both the WWE and ECW championships, he was on the top of the world. But then his stoner like attitude became his undoing as he and longtime ECW companion, Sabu, was cuaght with mounds of drugs and weed. Therefore, he would lose the WWE and ECW titles not too long after. So his trust with carrying the “revived” ECW was all but gone. The conflict around Punk and Lashley shouldn’t have been a conflict at all. Punk had the moves and the fan support. Lashley, for the most part was a largely unproven in-ring talent. Just a lot of muscle. But what better turn on for Vince than muscles? So yes, Lashley did win the title, and as for Punk? He was eliminated FIRST. By who, RVD? Pretty much says it all doesn’t it? Who would take the title off Lashley, you ask? Vince McMahon himself. Yea, Vince McMahon. ECW Champion. Yet, Paul got all the heat for its failure, was given an expulsion from WWE, and the triple brand fiasco that was RAW, Smackdown and ECW would be removed, though ECW somehow made it to 2010. Ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t get worse than this show.
What were some of your worse shows that you watched? Please let me know. And if you can respect what I put up here, I’ll do the same. Thanks once again.
