10 Angriest Wrestling Crowds Ever
It's still real to them, dammit.
A couple of weeks ago on Monday Night Raw's 25th anniversary special, a group of hacked-off WWE fans stuck around after the show went off air to protest the fact that they had each just spent hundreds of dollars to watch The Undertaker say absolutely nothing for five minutes.
While it's unlikely Vince McMahon gave any of them the refunds they were after, he can't have been happy to see consumers of his product making such a scene, even if it was partly their own fault for getting their hopes up about what they were about to see.
But then again, perhaps the chairman of the board should be grateful that their protest only took the form of an orderly arena sit-in. A cursory look through WWE history - as well as that of wrestling more generally - tells us that things could have gone much worse.
To prove it, here are 10 times that wrestling crowds got angry, ranging from die-hards chanting hilarious things at super-shows, to the dark and deeply shameful moments that fans got so caught up in what they were watching they forgot the industry's golden rule: none of it actually matters.
10. One Night Stand 2005
After four years cold turkey, you might have expected fans of ECW to be grateful for literally any show hosted at the Hammerstein Ballroom, produced (at least in part) by Paul Heyman, and performed by a cast of wrestlers including Sabu, Tommy Dreamer, Sandman and The Dudleys.
And they were grateful, to be fair - but also angry. And they showed their anger throughout the evening by loudly jeering the handful of WWE employees present who didn't have a connection to the original 1990s product (like JBL), and a few of those who did (like Rey Mysterio).
Remarkably, there were only 2,500 in attendance in New York that night. The noise generated owed less to the size of the crowd than it did the intimate feel of the "bingo hall"-style arena on which they descended, and the fact that anyone with a ticket was, by definition, a die-hard.
As expected, they reserved their loudest reactions of the night for the now famous mid-show promo in which Heyman gave the assembled group of Raw and SmackDown gooseberries brutal, kayfabe-breaking dressing down. "The only reason you were WWE Champion for a year is because Triple H didn't wanna work Tuesday." Ouch.