10 Wrestlers Who Refused To Drop Titles
These wrestlers didn't want to part ways with their championships at any cost.
In professional wrestling, the creative process can be as intense as the in-ring action. The wrestlers have to sit with the writers and the other higher-ups to come up with the best outcome that benefits both the wrestlers and the company, and one of the most important parts of those discussions is when and how a champion should drop their title.
If the decision fulfils the two-way beneficial criteria, the wrestler accepts to do the job and drops the title to his opponent. However, such unanimous decisions are not always easy to come around - as there have been many cases in which the wrestlers straight out refused to drop their titles.
One can argue that such decisions are always in the hands of the higher-ups, however, the wrestlers have used some factors like their star power, contract negotiations, backstage influence, and many others as leverage to find themselves out of the situation of having to lose their titles.
From Hall of famers to current wrestlers, many have found their way into these stories - and, while some only had their interests in mind, some had good reasons for refusing to lose their titles, and ten such instances are listed in-depth below.
10. Shawn Michaels Refused To Lose To Vader
Shawn Michaels might be one of the most respected backstage executives in WWE at the moment, but he didn't have the same reputation when he was in his prime as an in-ring competitor in the 90s.
He often found himself as the face of backstage politics and controversies back in the day, and he politicked his way into getting what he wanted on multiple occasions - even if that meant stepping over the other wrestlers on the roster.
WWE signed former 3-time WCW and IWGP World Heavyweight Champion Vader in 1996. After surviving Vince McMahon's attempts to rename him as The Mastodon, Vader made his WWE debut at the 1996 Royal Rumble.
WWE pushed Vader as a vicious and intimidating character on the road to booking him in a feud with Shawn Michaels for SummerSlam 1996. While Michaels defeated Vader at the event, the latter claimed during an interview with Wrestling Inc. in 2014 that WWE promised him two World title reigns.
Vader revealed that if he did the job for Shawn Michaels at SummerSlam 1996, he was supposed to win the title from Michaels, drop it to another superstar, regain it again, and finally drop it to Shawn Michaels at Royal Rumble 1997 in his home-town San Antonio, Texas.
However, the plan didn't materialize after Michaels got pissed off when Vader missed a spot during their SummerSlam match. After the incident, Michaels refused to work with Vader in the future, claiming that the latter was too stiff to work with.