Wrestling's not all that different from legitimate sports in a number of regards, among them the 'what could have been' instances. In sports, it could be one play in a game that, had it gone just a smidge differently, could have swung an entire outcome. For wrestling, it comes down to decisions, both from the office and the workers. Had all hands on deck agreed to go a certain way with a proposed idea, wrestling history as we know it could be much different in many aspects. WrestleMania lore is loaded with ideas that ended up crumpled and littered on the power broker's floor. Maybe an injury changed fate. Maybe somebody exercised creative control and killed an idea. Perhaps Vince McMahon himself, going through one of his many abrupt changes of heart, decided to roll in a different direction, as he's apt to do. The twenty matches that follow were indeed in some sort of planning stage. A few of them were even announced on WWE television, before being scrapped for entirely different ideas. Quite a few of them would have given their respective WrestleManias an entirely different sheen, and changed the course of WWE history as we know it. In other words, 'what could have been'.
20. Hulk Hogan Vs. Zeus (WrestleMania 6)
Using this logic, WrestleMania 23 should have featured either John Cena vs. Robert Patrick, or Kane vs. one of the dopey delinquents he murdered in See No Evil. Zeus, of course, was B-movie actor Tony Lister, who played the Drago to Hulk's Rocky in No Holds Barred, a WWE-produced movie vehicle released in the spring of 1989. One rumor through the ages states that a Hogan/Zeus match for the SkyDome WrestleMania would have been a lock had the movie done well at the box office. No Holds Barred made money, more than doubling its US$8M budget, but the feud was instead relegated to the SummerSlam/Survivor Series circuit. Imagine the alternate history timeline where fans miss out on Hogan's "Ultimate Challenge" with Warrior, instead getting Zeus' incredibly-rote offense.
Justin has been a wrestling fan since 1989, and has been writing about it since 2009. Since 2014, Justin has been a features writer and interviewer for Fighting Spirit Magazine. Justin also writes for History of Wrestling, and is a contributing author to James Dixon's Titan series.
