100 Worst Wrestling Moments EVER

By Michael Sidgwick / December 5, 2024

Wrestling, you could convincingly argue, is an inherently flawed medium.

When wrestlers are locked in feuds with one another, they magically spawn side by side in the same location. Wrestling the most contrived of all the entertainment forms. A booker could write down that Jay White is feuding with Frank Gotch, and a man who died in 1917 would come back from the dead and interrupt Jay in backstage interview on Rampage. That’s how forced and mandatory these interactions are.

Wrestlers automatically become worse at their craft and act cowardly when they take shortcuts. This is because (in the US, anyway) a lot of wrestling aspires to be an incredibly simplistic and contrived morality play.

If it’s already flawed, consider this: the dumbest people alive once held a creative monopoly over it. Vince Russo wasn’t just dumb, either: he hated you. If there is an art to pro wrestling, and there is, he stripped all of it away and replaced it with slurs, poles, and an undying hatred of women.

Vince McMahon hated it even more, and he held an actual monopoly over it. He didn’t even want to be wrestling!

It’s a miracle this list - which is limited to storylines - doesn’t have at least one extra zero on the end of it.

100. QTV

It’s never a good sign when a wrestling promotion satirises the media. It usually means they’re doing something wrong.

AEW was hurtling towards the second portion of the Rise and Fall documentary in 2023, at which point QT Marshall - a very entertaining dark match heel, and nothing more - once again needed something to.

With skin thinner than nori, QT was…perfectly cast as a defensive intense guy who should log off, but instead needs to lash out. Leading a TMZ parody, it was awful. It was almost sad, watching a cackling Aaron Solo whip out that fresh breath spray gimmick knowing that he probably thought deep down he’d become a meme.

As terrible as it was, it was easy to dismiss. It was just some dumb undercard experiment fated to die within months, and indeed it did - but QTV nearly dragged Powerhouse Hobbs to hell with it.

What was Hobbs doing with such a 1995-assed faction? He’s a hulking, threatening badass with a profoundly sympathetic background. He could have been a massive star.

Instead, he was a fake journalist’s friend.

99. Dean Ambrose Gets Innoculated

Dean Ambrose had peaked as a babyface - he was much too wacky - and so he quickly turned heel upon his return to WWE from injury in 2018.

This was promising. Ambrose possessed the rare ability to play unhinged and was one of very few wrestlers with a credible approach to violence.

Vince McMahon didn’t care for wrestling violence, but he was deeply passionate about insulting his audience for no discernible reason other than he hates them. Ambrose was repackaged as a germaphobe who would refuse to make appearances in front of fans without a gas mask. In one segment, he was so disgusted by the fans that he received a series of inoculations to protect him from disease. He also said that, when Roman Reigns contracted leukaemia, it was God’s way of punishing him.

This hateful cheap heat - which was also too silly to take seriously - was such a creative nightmare that it changed the course of pro wrestling history.

Does AEW reach the heights it once did without peak Jon Moxley’s drawing power?

98. The Demon Flops

At Extreme Rules 2021, WWE booked a no-good-can-come-from-this match between Roman Reigns (who was never going to lose) and the Demon Finn Bálor (an alter-ego that wouldn’t withstand a loss).

This was never going to end cleanly, which begs the question: why bother booking it in the first place?

The body of the match was pretty damn good, and Roman only venturing into the crowd after wearing a mask was a sensational bit, but then the finish happened. Finn Bálor was laid out by the Usos (who weren’t reprimanded for about two years). But all was OK!

Using demon powers or something, Finn was resuscitated with a heartbeat sound effect, in case you didn’t know what was going on - and, in fairness, he did look like he was a beached fish drowning, so it was probably required.

Then, back from the dead, he attempted to put Roman away with the Coup de Grace - but then the top turnbuckle broke and he fell.

Utter cowardice. The ring broke. No man was better than the other. WWE wanted to do the match because you wanted to see it but they didn’t want to do it either.

Bálor didn’t lose, but he looked like a geek, and really, what’s the difference?

97. Jim Duggan Squashes Steve Austin

A pattern followed Hulk Hogan when he left WWE: he’d join the #2 promotion, invite his mates along, and those mates would defeat promising stars on the rise.

This happened in TNA. The Nasty Boys won on pay-per-view in 2010. And while Bubba Ray Dudley was less a “star on the rise” and more “a wrestler who peaked in 2001”, he was still worth putting over the Nasty Boys, who peaked in 1994. Maybe this is a bad example. Maybe neither revolting foul-mouthed gasbag deserved to win on pay-per-view in 2010.

A better example is Jim Duggan pinning Steve Austin in 35 seconds at WCW Fall Brawl 1994.

Now, Stunning had yet to become Stone Cold, but Steve Austin was considered - by every single “dirtsheet” writer to Paul Heyman to every hardcore fan - to be the next big star in wrestling. He had it. It wasn’t his fault that not a single promoter was clever enough to get it for seven years.

Match quality. Charisma. Psychology. Promo skills. Entertainment value. Austin had it all.

Except Hulk Hogan’s friendship.

96. Malakai Black’s Non-Exit

On the November 6, 2024 Dynamite, Malakai Black lost to Adam Cole.

The match wasn’t very good. At all. Both men had declined physically since their late 2010s prime, neither were particularly over, and atmosphere-wise, this era of AEW wasn’t as hot as it was when Austin Gunn was one of 30 planted fans in the pandemic.

It went 12 minutes, and yet, Malakai Black sold it as if it was the most gruelling experience of his life. Although, since he was asked to lose, it might well have been.

He sat on the mat, accepting his fate, and let Cole beat him. Instead of being bested, he made a big song and dance of going out like some noble warrior. This might have been a bit much, if it was how the Undertaker decided to put an end to his WrestleMania streak.

In the post-match, as Cole put him over, Malakai stood by the stage, looking emotional. It looked and felt like his grand send-off. Otherwise, why surround a TV match that functioned as a subplot with so much ceremony?

It wasn’t his last goodbye, you idiot. What is it with you people? Can’t a guy make a big dramatic exit without being accused of leaving?

What is your fascination with Malakai Black’s forbidden closet of mystery?

95. Jenna Morasca Vs. Sharmell

There’s a golden rule in pro wrestling, and it is as difficult to make sense of as the form itself: celebrities are often better at it than a horde of midcarders.

It’s not just their inherent magnetism and ability to work a crowd, either: some get the mechanical nuts and bolts immediately.

TNA, being TNA, got it all wrong when drafting in Jenna Morasca. She was known to the public, through winning a reality TV series, but there’s a difference between “known” and “talented”.

With camera work so perverted that it made Kevin Dunn look like a fedora-hatted eunuch, TNA viewers were nearly treated to the sight of Jenna’s innards as she entered the ring.

When in the ring, Morasca, who was no Jackie Gayda, tried to slap her. Multiple times. She looked like she had harmless grass snakes for arms. She couldn’t have looked less dangerous. This was an abomination of emulated combat.

Still, this was far shorter and thus less of a disgrace than many Triple H matches at WrestleMania.

94. Eric Young: No! No! No!

There aren’t many rules in pro wrestling. The medium is too inherently dumb to prescribe any sort of logic to it.

There’s a very important rule, though, and it is one of few enduring constants: don’t be like WWE. There is a WWE for that, and its fans have been conditioned to hate and laugh at and think less of everything else.

WCW failed to heed that lesson in 1999. AEW, infuriatingly - since it was launched on this very basis - copied WWE’s homework with unfunny soundtracked skits in 2023.

Most egregious and pointless of all was Impact Wrestling’s attempt to capitalise on the popularity of Daniel Bryan in 2014, when a conspicuously bearded Eric Young won the World title four days after WrestleMania XXX.

Eric Young also won his title by wrestling two matches in one night, the first of which allowed him to contend for the gold in the second. Young also bravely wrestled through a storyline injury.

To complete the set, Impact might as well have flown Stephanie in to cut the most grating 20 minute promo you’ve ever heard.

93. The Reintroduction Of Bobby Lashley

It was one thing, when the WWE of the mid-to-late 2010s would punish you for enjoying an internet darling of a technician. By, say, 2018, you must have realised that the promotion was never going to go with that sort of wrestler at the top.

The reintroduction of Bobby Lashley, though, was one of the first “Jesus Christ, these morons can’t get anything right” moments of WWE’s dirt-worst four year stretch of programming.

2018-2022 was an epitaph masquerading as content.

Early in the run, Lashley sat down with Renee Young for an interview. He talked about his experiences growing up. He was portrayed as a nice dude, and not an impossibly rippling badass, but his uneasy, softly-spoken manner didn’t suit it.

The tales of his squabbles with his three sisters registered like the confession of their murders.

Mercifully, they were alive. In a sense; Sami Zayn, in one of the worst WWE segments ever, hired three men to play them in a never-ending skit that a young child would not find amusing - except, of course, the ketchup-gorging temperamental baby that was Vince McMahon.

WWE couldn’t even book a guy who looked like Bobby Lashley right in 2018.

92. The SummerFest

WWE was absolutely rubbish towards the end of the 2000s. The PG era was no excuse for the drab and wildly unfunny tone of its programming. Vince had simply lost it, and the limitations he imposed upon himself enabled his most childish impulses.

As desperate as ever for mainstream acceptance, between 2009 and 2010, he implemented the ‘Guest Host’ era.

Every week, a celeb, more often than not totally uninterested, booked matches, performed in atrocious skits, or otherwise interacted with the talent. This didn’t grow ratings, which was the obvious play. Nobody who was fond of The Price Is Right was going to get much out of Triple H taking 14 excruciating minutes to do very little at all with Chris Masters. There was one really funny bit, though. Santino Marella tried to body slam the Big Show.

He was never going to do that - they don’t call him the Small Show!

Jeremy Piven infamously called SummerSlam ‘The SummerFest’, which says it all. He treated the entire thing with apathetic contempt.

91. Chris Jericho Is Not Money

Chris Jericho endured his annus horriblis in 2024. A lot of people wanted him to go away, but, like a fibre-deficient skidmark, he would not.

He resumed his 2020 feud with Orange Cassidy, which somehow, despite them only wrestling three singles matches beforehand, felt like AEW’s answer to John Cena Vs. Randy Orton. Jericho wanted his money back for the suit jacket Orange had destroyed four years ago (even though Orange had won the right not to do that…four years ago).

Orange had a plan: he’d pay Jericho back in coins, destroying Jericho’s prized new car in the process. The visual gag did not work. Orange’s Conglomeration buddies, who had somehow procured a forklift within an hour, used the vehicle to pour the coins on top of Jericho’s new ride. The new ride was not destroyed; the coins simply fell on the seats.

As dire as the actual idea was, as laughable as the execution was, the timing was somehow worse. AEW had just promoted All Out: a show that promised a new, shockingly violent tenor to its programming. Jericho trivialised this compelling new direction just days later.

Every show needs range, true, but AEW Dynamite did not need Chris Jericho. At all.

90. The Invisible Camera

This is a general entry, but the use of the invisible camera is appalling and makes wrestling even dumber than it inherently is.

In other fictional mediums, something is written off, and rightly so, when it falls under the category of an “idiot plot” - one which is driven solely by the idiocy of the characters. The story doesn’t even happen if the characters aren’t stupid. This describes almost every WWE storyline for a quarter of a century.

Before Paul Levesque tightened up the storytelling, the vaunted Bloodline saga was an idiot plot; all Roman Reigns had to do, to determine Jey Uso’s allegiances, was watch the show back - and it’s canon that the show exists within the show, unlike virtually every other fictional drama.

Who knows: perhaps he didn’t watch it because he was bored by two consecutive years of the Usos interfering in his matches without reprisal.

89. Oklahoma

Vince Russo’s WCW wasn’t just abysmal. It wasn’t just nonsensical. It wasn’t just incoherent. It wasn’t just inscrutable. It wasn’t just a totally pointless and hypocritical meta exercise in appealing to the very same hardcore fans that Russo has buried other bookers for serving. It wasn’t just a lot of moves happening at 1.75 speed, the matches an inconvenience before the next horrible segment.

It was phenomenally mean-spirited.

Every now and then, you might be tempted to rewatch the worst of the Russo years. Before you remember what it actually was, Russo’s WCW appears to hit the sweet spot between so-bad-it’s-good schadenfreude and nostalgic escapism.

And then you remember Oklahoma, which exemplified the sheer unpleasantness of it all.

A Jim Ross impersonator played by Ed Ferrara, Russo’s asshole friend mocked JR’s Bells Palsy, and that was the gag. It was witless, cruel, and appealed only to an audience of one.

WCW wasn’t just bad. It was awful in every sense of the word.

88. August 1 Warning Reveal

Wrestling fans always fall for it.

A promotion - a very desperate promotion, invariably - will tease an announcement that is set to change the very foundation of the industry. Tony Khan relied on this one a lot before he took it too far with reveals that should have been confined to social media.

Tickets being put on sale for Collision is hardly a game-changer. Tickets being bought for Collision would be more of a shock.

TNA was awful for this sort of desperation as well, and went big on the ‘August 1 Warning’. Who was it gonna be? What was gonna happen?

It was MMA royalty (and legendary dunce) Tito Ortiz. After a verbal spat between the Main Event Mafia and the Aces & Eights, Ortiz walked down the ramp and folded his arms. That was it. For minutes on end.

His mere presence alone unsettled both stables. Mr. Anderson of Aces & Eights infamously placed his hands on his head as if to convey that he was in deep trouble (he probably drew on his last year in WWE for inspiration). Everybody did, for that matter. They were probably worried about their retirement funds, since Impact was as good as finished.

If you can remember what happened with Tito Ortiz subsequent to the reveal, then congratulations: you’ve set the record for longest stretch of time spent indoors.

87. The WrestleMania 25 Main Event

God, this was pathetic - a total ego-trip that informed one of the most boring matches in the history of big stage US wrestling.

Triple H was a situationally great heel, but a terrible babyface. His idea of making people like him was to talk about his massive penis with a cocky grin. Or to make jokes about how big his penis was, or how other blokes - eurgh! - might like penises. He made what remained of the Attitude Era fanbase laugh, quietly, as a babyface in the 2000s - but they didn’t really buy him as a guy they lived and died with.

Against Randy Orton in Houston, if he was disqualified, he’d lose his WWE title. He didn’t have the champion’s advantage - and Randy Orton was trying to wind him up!

Did anybody think “Come on, Triple H! Win the right way, be the better man!”

Or did they just sit on their hands, bored out of their minds?

For 25 excruciating minutes, Triple H was the victim of his own hubris. Do you realise how bad the match must have been for his critics to not even get any schadenfreude out of it?

86. The Mercedes Moné Title Celebration

Right, it probably wasn’t one of the 100 worst moments ever, but go with this for a minute.

After retaining her TBS title at All In: London 2024, Mercedes Moné held a title celebration on the following Dynamite. This was meant to be a party thrown by one of the coolest wrestlers on the planet. It was attended by her heater Kamille and two bored extras. No music played. It was very obviously a corner of the backstage area acting as a fake, makeshift set. The character building here was utterly atrocious and disastrous for her aura. On the celebration scale, this was closer to a wake than a VIP afterparty.

If this was recreated as a bit for the Orange Cassidy character, it might have functioned as an effective parody.

So often, cable TV wrestling stinks without even thinking about how much it stinks. The fake party is so lame. It’s thoughtless, obligatory in that stupid way that the writers never seem to question.

Put some money behind it, Christ. If you’re going to book a VIP megastar character, maybe don’t make her look like a “Legend” on a late 2010s WWE Raw nostalgia show.

85. Roman Reigns Eats Dog Food

Before he became the Tribal Chief - or as Taz might have it, ‘Mid-Match Soliloquy Jones’ - Roman Reigns used the nickname ‘Big Dog’.

The idea, at least until 2019, was to highlight Roman’s stature. He was the new force in the main event scene. He was the man poised to take over. Hence: ‘Big Dog’.

Baron Corbin took this very literally. He taunted Roman with dog-related comedy. He played Roman’s theme over the PA, only with a yapping puppy noise covering the guitar riff.

How was Roman meant to be annoyed by this?

Roman was not an anthropomorphic dog. He was a man whose nickname was the ‘Big Dog’.

In another angle, Baron Corbin, alongside Dolph Ziggler, poured dog food over Roman. This would be unpleasant - what goes in a dog’s mouth is almost as foul as what comes out of its ass - but the idea that Roman Reigns was a dog was, nonetheless, pathetic.

Just because his babyface run felt like seven years rolled into one didn’t mean he was actually a canine.

84. Mojo Rawley Takes A Short, Hard Look In The Mirror

Mojo Rawley needed a character refresh in 2019.

His NXT act hadn’t so much grown stale as it was phenomenally awkward to begin with. He didn’t get hyped, but rather he stayed hyped. This was a …fine? premise for a prelim babyface who basically got in and out of there within minutes in high-energy displays that kept the show ticking along, but the execution was, well, it was off-putting.

Mojo dry-humped midair with an ecstatic look plastered over his horned-up face. Did “stay hyped” mean that he wanted to have shoot intercourse with every member of the audience?

The 2019 persona shift was insane, though. Mojo, cosplaying as Luna Vachon (?), screamed into a mirror insisting that he was no longer a team player.

This in and of itself wasn’t that egregious, but it was so typical of Vince McMahon’s sludge-brained late years creative.

A terrible character is introduced, nobody really gets it (including the performer), the character goes away almost as quickly.

??????

Profit.

And the grim part is that the profit was in fact forthcoming; WWE in spite of itself had never made more money.

83. The Anonymous Raw GM

For ages - far too long - WWE Monday Night Raw was administrated by a laptop.

Now, you could say the same thing about AEW, but Tony Khan’s spreadsheet booking at least throws up the odd banger every now and then.

The laptop was used by the Anonymous Raw General manager.

For over a full year - June 2010 to June 2011 - the Anonymous GM made the lives of the babyfaces difficult. Concurrently, not to be too dramatic, the Anonymous GM made the lives of the fans not worth living. The incessant beeping was followed by another, more aurally insufferable noise: Michael Cole’s voicebox. He read the directives aloud.

Who was it? Who was behind the laptop?

It was a question few people bothered to ask, after a while, and according to former writers Brian Gewirtz and Kevin Eck, Vince McMahon had no firm idea about who it was meant to be.

In 2014, it was revealed to be Hornswoggle, in a punchline riffing on the Vince’s illegitimate son storyline.

Sensational.

82. Beaver Cleavage

Beaver Cleavage - a Leave It To Beaver parody - was in 1999 the WWF’s latest attempt to shock the audience into watching: an incestuous man cosplaying as a child with a wrong desire for his mother.

Introduced via a series of vignettes, Beaver complained that his cereal was dry. He needed “mother’s milk” to gobble it up. If you don’t understand the innuendo here, he wanted to suck his mother’s tig old biddies to sufficiently lubricate his breakfast.

So how did this have any connection, at all, to pro wrestling?

In a WrestleCrap article, Vince Russo claimed that Beaver and his mother were never meant to be related - they were, as Russo points out, the same freakin’ age. For argument’s sake, say that the idea was for Beaver and his “mom” to make out in the ring in a bid to unsettle, distract, and ultimately defeat his opponents. Wouldn’t the babyfaces be dumb for buying it?

In the end, it was revealed that the mother was Beaver’s abused girlfriend, and upon learning of the domestic violence, various members of the roster kicked his ass.

But the swerve? The signature, misogynistic swerve?

She was lying, bro. Women are liars!

81. Last Rites

Important note: The Last Rites match between Sting an Abyss was promoted by a company named Total Non-Stop Action.

Total.

Non-Stop.

Action.

The stupidity was so infectious that Sting bladed himself after being struck in the stomach with a candelabra - a prop associated with a genre of horror as quaint as a frolic in a meadow. A frolic in a meadow, incidentally, would feature more intense wrestling action than this.

After slowly thwacking one another with flimsy props, the titular “death bed” - which was a casket - descended from the rafters. It moved so slowly that it made AEW Matt Hardy look like Nathan Frazier.

It moved so slowly, in a promotion named Total Non-Stop Action, that the fans en masse chanted “Fire Russo!”

For safety reasons, they could hardly bring the thing down any quicker, and the pacing was meant to elicit suspense, but why not just do a normal casket match?

Why did Russo have to make literally everything he touched dumber than it had any right to be?

80. Barbed Wire Everywhere

Eurgh.

The fabled Chris Jericho rub happened - or rather didn’t - to Eddie Kingston.

This sprawling feud was promising, initially. Jericho was sensational at pretending not to sell for the menacing threats Eddie made to him over the phone. Their first match, at Revolution 2022, was the perfect intersection between US PPV opener pacing and King’s Road brutality.

Then, a strong personal issue was complicated by a dumb philosophical war between “pro wrestling” and “sports entertainment”.

Eddie and Jericho wrestled in a Barbed Wire Everywhere match to blow off what had become a subplot.

It was an overbooked shambles. The Jericho Appreciation Society were trapped in a shark cage, but inevitably broke free from it - which wasn’t exactly true.

Tay Conti couldn’t use the keys in time, so the JAS, which they could have done immediately, slipped out between the bars. The ‘Everywhere’ wording wasn’t true, either; to facilitate this contrived scene, there was no barbed wire on the ropes facing the hard cam.

This was so densely overbooked that poor Eddie, after being cheated out of victory, missed Jericho with his Uraken backhand. Kingston, Jericho and Sammy Guevara literally had no clue where to put themselves.

It was OK, though: Eddie “gained a measure of revenge” by throwing Jericho into a crash pad covered in about two barbed wire strands.

Piss off.

79. Hawk’s Fall

The WWF was an ugly and shameful and desperate place underneath the cathartic and deliriously entertaining Steve Austin Vs. Vince McMahon programme of 1998.

It was the era of anything goes - anything, that is, other than competitive sports-based storytelling. Wrestling was out; a weekly series of revolting shock tactics were in.

Pretending to cut somebody’s dick off was nothing, really. No penises were harmed in the making of this terrible television.

Exploiting the real-life substance abuse issues of an independent contractor, however, was as gross as it was pointless. It felt, with Hawk’s drunken onscreen “act”, that the WWF was punishing him for being troubled.

Hawk was made to shamble and forget his cues and lines. In a frightening and reckless stunt, he was made to scale the Titantron without even a hidden harness to protect him.

A storyline with zero potential positive outcome and just as much entertainment value. WWF was trash.

WCW wasn’t much better…

78. The Revolution Explosion DUD

The hype was mental.

An Exploding Barbed Wire Death match? In AEW, a promotion with a ridiculous budget that actually embraces proper wrestling violence? Between plunder God Jon Moxley and master craftsman Kenny Omega?

LFG!

The explosions in the match were…adequate. That the sparks flew was enough in itself. And that sense of craft did elevate the body of the match, particularly the spot where Mox kicked Kenny into the ropes immediately after a first explosion. The playful syntax was awesome.

Then, the ring “exploded”. It was a pathetic embarrassment. This is barely a joke: they might as well have stationed four small children holding sparklers by each ring post. The scene looked only marginally less pathetic than that.

Awful in and of itself, before it was rescued and they became a phenomenal buddy duo, Jon Moxley and Eddie Kingston looked like such geeks. This was less than ideal, since they’re the two most cool, soulful and believable wrestlers on the planet. If you’ve ever been to a big WWE stadium show, you’ll see fans dressed up as wrestlers, encountering one another, and pretending to tie-up in an improvised bit. .

This is what Mox and Eddie looked like doing Funk and Onita.

77. Abyss: Hulkamaniac

Hulk Hogan had trouble creating new Hulkamaniacs after 1993.

His heel turn sparked a pro wrestling boom - which is stupidly impressive, really, since he had already achieved this feat - but people were only interested in him as a babyface on a very fleeting, nostalgic basis thereafter.

The magic of WrestleMania X8 never led to an uptick in business; Backlash 2002 was only up 25,000 on the 2001 event buys, and that show was judged an alarming disaster.

So what did Hogan do?

Why, he created a Hulkamaniac!

And who did Hogan choose?

Why, an unhinged psychopath named Abyss!

TNA fan wanted TNA to be an alternative. TNA’s bizarre worship of WWE - through trading in its sports entertainment tone, or by being overjoyed when former WWE stars graced it with their presence - was anathema to TNA fans.

Abyss learned how to hulk up through the magical property of Hulk Hogan’s WWE Hall Of Fame ring (!).

Jesus TNA, if you like WWE that much, why don’t you marry it?

They would if they could, bitch.

76. The TK Driver

AEW was up against it by 2024.

Brawl Out; the departures of Cody Rhodes and CM Punk; the incredibly ill-advised flirtation with sports entertainment: the promotion entered its creative and systemic decline at the exact same time.

AEW responded in the only way that wrestling, stupid wrestling, knows how: with a dismal publicity stunt.

The Young Bucks wanted to go back to…something?

They said they wanted to Change The World again. Presumably, since they appeared on Collision about two times, their vague mission statement to save AEW from itself was to go back to working one day a week.

It was unclear what they actually wanted to do, but to enact it, they hit Tony Khan with the TK Driver, which, cute foreshadowing aside, was a waste of time. It was never established what the issue was, and the stakes were nonexistent. At Anarchy In The Arena and Blood & Guts, the new Elite wrestled babyfaces who represented ‘AEW’. Nothing was on the line.

This nonsensical scene was also executed horribly. When Jack Perry stuck Tony in the gut, he simply fell on his arse.

This led to…

75. Christopher Daniels: Onscreen Authority Figure

No AEW fan ever asked for an onscreen authority figure; in fact, the sheer preponderance of authority figures in Vince McMahon’s WWE is part of the reason AEW exists in the first place.

After TK sold his injuries, Christopher Daniels was installed as his deputy. Daniels basically existed to thwart the plans of the Young Bucks when they attempted to wield their power, even though it was never determined how much influence they actually held - nor was it ever explained why Tony Khan, upon his return, couldn’t just overrule them himself.

Also: hadn’t people been working remotely for at least four years prior to this dumbass storyline?

Nothing about this tragic storyline ever approached making sense, and realistically, the fans never embraced Daniels as a respected legend who acted as an architect of the indie circuit. He was basically the Adam Pearce we have at home.

Neither Anarchy In The Arena nor Blood & Guts had any stakes - i.e. the Bucks would be stripped of their EVP status were they to lose - probably because Tony Khan never wanted to commit to the idea.

Tony Khan buried his head into a mountain of powder with this one (sand).

74. WWE Sting

In AEW, Sting was presented - through careful, protective booking and wonderful smoke-and-mirrors party matches - as a living, ageless Icon.

In WWE, Sting was punished for wrestling in WCW 14 years prior.

Originally presented as the man intent on avenging the Authority once and for all, plans changed, pal. His WrestleMania 31 match with Triple H was instead reimagined, very suddenly, as a Monday Night Wars retread. Even with the help of his old chums, the New World Order - Jesus Christ! - Sting was just too much of a minor leaguer to compete with the might of Triple H and D-Generation X.

He tried his hardest, bless him, but what could you reasonably expect from Sting? He never made it to the big time!

In the ultimate punchline, Sting - about the only wrestler adult fans have ever truly bought as a superhero - went 50/50 across his WWE run. Like, most wrestlers did, but this was Sting. Sting!

Sting won two and lost two. Literally 50/50.

WWE could have signed a Lovecraftian Old One at that time, and they’d have still traded wins with Dolph Ziggler.

73. Shorty G

2019 was quite possibly WWE’s worst ever year creatively.

The sheer state of the company was so abject that virtually every storyline development scanned as a parody of something that even Vince McMahon would be too stupid to do.

Except he did it.

The repackage of Chad Gable was the worst thing Vince could have done with Chad Gable. Nobody was cynical enough to pitch it as a joke, and yet, it happened. Chad Gable became ‘Shorty G’: a guy who owned how short he was because that way, the bullies couldn’t get to him, or something.

Gable - one of the best pure wrestlers in the game, who got over on that very basis during WWE’s renaissance era - wore a basketball uniform for the juxtaposition. That’s what tall people wear - and he’s short!

AEW arrived on the scene in parallel, and benefitted massively from WWE’s dire, alienating creative to establish itself as a hit.

Then again, a Heroes of Wrestling reboot might have done OK in that landscape.

72. Garrett Bischoff

The worst nepo baby of all time - and this is a world in which David Flair exists - Garrett Bischoff was so bad that it was spiritually painful to watch.

The apple does not fall from the smug bastard tree, and Garrett’s essence was just awful. He was meant to be a babyface at first, under the idea that Eric Bischoff didn’t think he had what it took to make it. This was…not ideal, since Garrett didn’t have what it takes. Eric was right. Do you know how bad you have to be for that to happen?

Eric Bischoff hasn’t been right since 1997!

With his unreasonably long sideburns, Garrett played the plucky babyface archetype early. In his first match against Gunner, he acted surprised that he was able to do anything. He expressed this shock by keeping his mouth open for the entire duration like he was a moray eel.

Is that a harsh assessment, since it was in fact his very first match?

No, because if he wanted to do it properly, he could have wrestled for an indie.

71. Ucey Hot

The Usos Vs. The Revival. You might wonder how Vince McMahon could have possibly messed that up.

Really, you should have asked in what universe would he have nailed it.

Scott Dawson, the future Dax Harwood, was a stout southern fellow who was short, didn’t use fake tan, built his gimmick around ‘80s NWA worship, and vowed to revive the art of tag team wrestling.

If you built a WWE Superstar from the ground up, he’d look like Randy Orton. If you built somebody who Vince McMahon would hold in utter contempt, he’d look like Dax Harwood.

It’s little wonder, then, that in 2019, the Revival were treated like jokes. The victims of various pranks, the Usos filmed them shaving one another’s backs and laced their trunks with a topical pain relief, forcing Dawson and Dash Wilder to scoot across the canvas as if their anuses were infested with threadworms.

This was awful, but what else did you reasonably expect by 2019?

Oh no, Vince didn’t reboot the Crocket Cup!!!

70. Sufferin’ Succotash

Roman Reigns: top babyface was an experiment that failed so drastically, you could argue that it indirectly led to the formation of AEW. Certainly, the overbearing push was integral to the downer vibe.

It’s almost cathartic, in retrospect, knowing you were right and Vince was wrong all along. Everybody said that Roman needed to turn heel, develop an edge, display the ego that was always there, and then be the top guy. Everybody knew that a cool guy existed under what, ostensibly, a John Cena skin costume.

John Cena was, to half of the fanbase, an unfunny dork who wrestled like Forrest Gump before he ran off the braces. Reigns was his spiritual heir, but even the kids didn’t seem to find him very funny.

Vince McMahon’s big idea for the face of the next decade was the guy in the group chat whose awkward banter never gets even a polite, halfhearted cry-laugh emoji react when nobody can credibly type out “lol”.

The infamous “Sufferin’ succotash” promo wasn’t just embarrassing. It was, to those old enough to grasp it, a premonition that the next several years were a complete write-off.

69. Bayley Won’t Use Violence

Bayley was a WWE super-fan, a wholesome and endearing presence as far removed as possible from the overtly sexualised ‘Diva’ archetype - to such an extent that it was inconceivable that WWE even came up with it.

…in NXT.

On the main roster, her actual character - a sweet person who would kick your face in if she was pushed hard enough - was utterly mangled. Despite growing up obsessed with WWE, she must have missed the Hell In A Cell stipulation. And the Ladder matches. Tables. First Blood. Inferno. No Holds Barred. No Disqualification. Street Fight. Punjabi Prison. Tables, Ladders and Chairs. Chairs. Stairs.

Because, in a match against Alexa Bliss at the Extreme Rules pay-per-view, she refused to use a kendo stick. The name of the pay-per-view was Extreme Rules.

This was the same wrestler who tried to break the hand of Sasha Banks in righteous fury when Sasha had disrespected her fans.

Vince’s diabolical creative killed potentially great runs on a weekly basis.

68. Total Non-Stop Self-Loathing

TNA had the talent. Before it entered its zombie years - in the early-to-mid 2010s, when everybody seemed to finally give up - the promotion had the talent.

The problem is that TNA also had Russo.

Rather than blame Russo, who was responsible for some of the most laughable and ineffective ideas in the history of the form, former president Dixie Carter decided to berate her roster and air it on television.

Dixie reduced them all to the status of bollocked children. They looked pitiful. “You’re questioning me, and I cannot allow that to happen,” she said, as she was busy making plans to bring in Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff and reboot the Monday Night War. How did that go, again?

She also said “I’m asking all of you to step it up.”

Rather difficult to achieve when the arrival of the Nasty Boys limits your ring time to around two minutes.

Bill Watts attitude, Herb Abrams intelligence: this toxic blend of delusion and hubris was astonishingly misguided.

67. ‘Last Call’ Scott Hall

Not that anybody should really care about the Eric Bischoff Vs. AEW feud - but this is the only evidence you really need in determining the “winner”.

Scott Hall was a troubled man. His alcoholism was completely overwhelming by 1998, during which time he’d turn up to work “in no condition to perform”. Eric Bischoff, because he’s an awful person who would do anything to pop a number, decided to turn Hall’s genuine struggles into one of his beloved stories. He bangs on about that word a lot, does Eric, and what was the idea behind this one?

What was Eric going to do for the big third act? Cure Hall’s alcoholism?

He couldn’t even fix Nitro with the deepest roster in wrestling’s most star-stuffed decade.

There was no beginning, end, purpose, entertainment value, nothing. Not a bloody thing. Bischoff wanted to exploit Hall because that’s all he could do with him - and what else was he paying him for?

66. The AEW Devil Storyline

Oh dear.

Better Than You Bay-Bay was a very fun and even moving act at its best. Far better in the live environment than in the lame three camera skits, their chemistry was incredible. Perhaps the Devil storyline failed because people just wanted the team to get along.

Or perhaps it was just dire.

An over-thought TNA-esque mess, the Devil’s Masked Men looked like slightly more ripped Dark Order creepers. They were also able to hack da mainframe, somehow. Did Mike Bennett sharpen his IT skills when he was stuck in WWE catering?

How was a prelim wrestler capable of interfering with a cable TV broadcast feed?

Adam Cole and Roderick Strong filmed skits together, in which Roddy annoyed Cole, to throw MJF off the masterplan. Why was there a masterplan, even? And why was Cole going to sub in for MJF at Full Gear despite being even more injured than MJF? How was Cole cleared?!

A desperate attempt to keep the Better Than You Bay-Bay magic intact led to a series of farcical story beats and the most predictable payoff imaginable.

65. Matt Hardy’s Acting

Matt Hardy was allowed to be Matt Hardy in AEW on occasion, and the results were almost invariably diabolical.

Almost. When he was beating down Sammy Guevara in the boggy woods at Full Gear ‘20, his line - “The competition is in the mud, you love to see it!” - was actually pretty great.

Elsewhere, Hardy dragged down the quality of AEW programming with 500 atmospheres of water pressure. In 2023, the Hardy Boyz, HOOK and Isiah Kassidy “wrestled” the Firm in a cinematic match. It was rubbish. The build was even worse.

Kassidy was thrown through a table as Matt and the gang watched backstage on a monitor. Matt cried out “No! No, no, no!”

If Hardy was the pioneer of cinema in wrestling, this was more offensive than A Serbian Film. Hardy entered a shocking acting performance here.

Be cynical all you want about his individual performances and output between the ropes, but you cannot deny that, with his expert ability to give the rub to younger guys, Isaiah Kassidy has headlined multiple pay-per-views and will surely win his third AEW World title sooner rather than later.

64. The Dark Order Segment

On December 18, 2019, AEW produced one of the worst segments in wrestling history. It was so bad - and such a sad betrayal of the early bluster of sports-oriented, serious wrestling - that Tony Khan reacted to the backlash by disbanding the old creative committee and taking full editorial control of his promotion.

Do you know how bad things had to have been, for him to do that?

This is a man who would let Chris Jericho dig up Katie Vick if it meant not having to say “no”.

The Dark Order beat up the Young Bucks and initiated John Silver and Alex Reynolds into their ranks. Kenny Omega, Cody and Dustin Rhodes attempted to save their stablemates.

In an unacceptable scene, the Dark Order’s ‘Creepers’ - untrained geek extras who didn’t have the experience or sense to start bumping - kicked their ass. Those clowns shouldn’t have been on TV. That was on AEW. One of them tried to punch Dustin and, infamously, missed by a full foot.

Shane McMahon might have joined AEW sooner than was rumoured.

63. Sting Vs. Jeff Hardy

“Well sir, we promised you a great main event…”

“Yes, but Jeff Hardy is very clearly addled, presenting a significant risk to both his safety and Sting’s, in addition to your promotion’s already horrendous and richly deserved reputation.”

“Did I stutter?” - Eric Bischoff, who already had your money and had already paid Jeff Hardy.

What was he going to do: give him the night off?

The main event of TNA Victory Road 2011 was a travesty. It should never have happened. TNA could have presented an infinite amount of alternative scenarios, considering wrestling is a work, all of which would have been better than Sting, who deserved and thankfully got so much more under Tony Khan. Instead, an irate Sting pinned Hardy to the mat and got out of there, but not before registering his disgust. It had to be awful, for Sting of all people to do that, and it was.

An unconscionable display of promotion the likes of which even Paul Heyman would shake his head at.

62. Donald Trump Vs. Rosie O’Donnell

Some weeks, AEW will present a flat and or very questionable episode of Dynamite.

Even an episode headlined with the most obvious winner versus obvious loser imaginable is better, by orders of magnitude, than the utter slop Vince McMahon served up under monopoly rule.

In 2007, he presented a “match” between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell because he and he alone was entertained by their constant spats. Donald took a bit of grief, but because he was Vince’s pal, it was more of a “light banter” stripe.

But that obese liberal lesbian?

EURGH!

The O’Donnell character was portrayed as a leering, cake-desperate oaf. It was phenomenally mean-spirited, even by fully-gone Vince standards. In case you didn’t get it, O’Donnell kept removing herself from the ring to scarf down more cake.

Ultimately, Vince was the punchline. He tried to grab the zeitgeist, and failed miserably. WWE fans even chanted “TNA!” as the “match” unfolded.

61. The Debut Of RETRIBUTION

In 2020, RETRIBUTION debuted as an act that WWE made sure to disclose through preferred channels wasn’t “political”.

It sure seemed like somebody watched the protests that defined the US in 2020 and said “We should do something with that, or whatever.”

A large and weirdly short gang of vandals “destroyed” the Performance Center. It was a bleak, dismal scene, a rubbish attempt at chaos and disruption. One of the anonymous masked figures took a baseball to the canvas like a petulant toddler. Another spray-painted the WWE logo on the plexiglass that separated the wrestlers and the plants in the closed-set Performance Center, only to spray a line through it. They hated WWE, you see, and were unleashing their frustrations on it. This was…accomplished by another member of the gang spray-painting a line through the SmackDown logo on the ring skirt.

To underscore how little WWE committed to this half-baked idea, the clean-up operation must have taken all of an hour. That was about 59 minutes and 59 seconds longer than the RETRIBUTION act was vaguely, maybe promising.

RETRIBUTION, rather than destroy the new ThunderDome, instead signed with the Raw brand.

60. The Undertaker Tests The Big Show

“A mortician and a giant wander into a desert…” sounds like the set-up to a joke, which is ironic, since this Undertaker promo was one of the least funny (or entertaining) things you’ll ever see.

Before this 1999 turd was mercifully interrupted by Chris Jericho, everybody in the crowd looked like Mark Callaway: their eyes were rolled back so far they’d turned white, and they were f*ckin’ dead.

‘Taker told a story of taking the Big Show to the desert in quest to prove his mettle. He asked Show what he’d do to survive. Show said he’d skin ‘Taker alive in his sleep and eat him. ‘Taker, who had to f*cking win even in some sad act made-up story, said “Nice try, but I don’t sleep”.

“I don’t sleep”, what a load of rubbish. The Undertaker slept through every match he had in the WWF before Mick Foley rocked up.

An excruciating experience, this only existed to let you know that the Undertaker is really hard and enjoys riding motorcycles.

Amazing storytelling and psychology from the auteurs over at WWE.

59. The Big Show: New Year Baby

There probably wasn’t a way to book the Big Show in a modern, overlong “run”. His sheer size was no fit for the relentless episodic model of monopoly WWE. He was a limited act in a limitless medium. He couldn’t exactly win for 20 years.

Who was he, Triple H?

There was, however, a way not to book the Big Show.

Yes, Paul Wight had good comedic timing, which Jon Moxley will tell you is the worst thing you can show them. The thing is, Show didn’t have to bea stupid, juvenile type of funny. He could have simply used his own words to create an elaborate image of a terrifying threat, much like the underrated Road Warrior Hawk.

Instead, because Vince McMahon is a pathetic child, the Big Show - before you were invariably told to take him seriously as a monster heel again - was often paraded in awful skits because the juxtaposition of a man that large being silly was apparently a side-splitter.

As the ‘New Year Baby’, he once performed a creepy dance set to a europop version of Auld Lang Syne.

It was more humiliating than anything JR wrote about him in the Ross Report.

“Big Show needs to add a little sizzle to his steak and cut out the creamy mashed potato side, according to this old Okie.”

58. RAW Underground

Raw Underground defined the sheer state of WWE in the summer of 2020.

Ratings were tumbling. Critics were savaging WWE’s atrocious pandemic era output. Pre-ThunderDome WWE didn’t have the one thing it had going for it during Vince McMahon’s soup-brained twilight years creative regime: incredible production values.

And so, utterly desperate, they turned to Shane McMahon and they listened to the only idea he ever had: let’s do UFC!

Ring girls n’ worked shoot fights was the basic pitch, and basic is right. This was not the UWF-i. This was WWE hurriedly gathering together the nearest wrestlers with an amateur background or who looked “hard” and getting them to do ”shoots”.

You couldn’t even tell if the shoot fights were rubbish or not, because the camera cuts were as fast as blast beats.

But they were probably rubbish.

A hyperactive, moronic Shane McMahon over-sold the action to a hysterical extent, since it was his baby. He kept saying the words “Sick! That’s sick!” over and over again like a teenager who’d just waited two agonising hours to see some pixelated nipples for the first time on a 28k modem.

It was such a quintessentially Shane McMahon experience that it is nothing short of a biblical-scale miracle that he didn’t win nor even wrestle a match that night.

57. Little People’s Court

2009 was an awful time.

The DX reunion of 2006 was bad enough. They did it again three years later because WWE had spent the preceding time being just as useless at creating new babyface stars.

Accused of taking the piss out of Hornswoggle one too many times, Triple H and Shawn Michaels were taken to Little People’s court - which was an alternate dimension located underneath the ring.

This, before it was hideously offensive and even less funny, was excruciatingly self-indulgent. Triple H and Shawn did some “old dudes don’t know their age” patter in the ambience of the empty arena for three whole minutes. Were the little people able to bend time, as well as space?

Because it felt like three f*cking hours.

They were put on trial as evidence was put forward, during which they did every abysmal “short” joke you’ve ever heard. Triple H is to wrestling comedy what…Triple H was to long boring matches.

This was not an effective parody of wrestler’s court. The Undertaker and JBL didn’t get off on making petrified women cry, for starters.

56. NXT Goes Extreme

NXT invaded the spiritual home of ECW in November 2024, and it was the worst thing to happen in the 2300 since Tommy Dreamer last got changed.

Jaida Parker hit Lola Vice in the face with a brick, and it wasn’t the finish. That warranted inclusion in and of itself, but somehow wasn’t the worst thing on the show.

The worst thing on the show was Bubba Ray Dudley.

Bubba teamed with Trick Williams, NXT champion, to take on Ridge Holland and Ethan Page. Since the heel team ranged from very bad to very mediocre, the match was a big nothing. Ridge pinned Trick, but to gain a measure of revenge, Bubba and Trick tried to put Page through a table. But there wasn’t a table!

In, of all places, the ECW arena, the one ring that didn’t have a table under it was that ring. In a miracle, D-Von Dudley made a cameo with a table in tow.

Even though this nostalgia spot is literally the only thing Bubba is good for these days, Bubba sold the scene as if he hadn’t seen D-Von in years. His stupid face looked like he’d just woken up goofy from an operation.

He looked like a joke, and that might be because he is.

55. Triple H: Better Than Tag Teams

You see, the fact of the matter is, if Triple H took out his johnson and unfurled it in this very ring, it would span turnbuckle to turnbuckle.

Diagonally.

It’s massive, and isn’t he a cool dude with his relentless, smug wise-cracking? Man, he’s the best. He’s also really tough. After all, he is the King of Kings! The Cerebral Assassin!

Hard, funny, big old ankle-slapper of a gland: Triple H was beyond desperate in his quest to tell you that he was an Alpha male.

The thing is, at times, you didn’t get it. What if he proved this to you by, on more than one occasion somehow, destroying tag teams at the same time single handedly?

Test & Albert, The Hurricane & Rosey, Lance Cade & Trevor Murdoch, Paul London & Brian Kendrick: the Game either defeated these teams in matches or destroyed them in angles.

Alongside Shawn Michaels, he also dropped ostensibly the entire Raw tag division in October 2006.

54. The Reverse Battle Royal

Vince Russo was a complete idiot who literally set wrestling back years. Decades, even.

He enjoyed success in the Attitude Era, yes, but you can qualify that: his style was of its time, his ideas were filtered through Vince McMahon before his brain was liquified, and Russo enjoyed the unprecedented advantage of booking Steve Austin and the Rock at the same time.

Once people got bored of his inane shock tactics, Russo comfortably produced the worst wrestling television of all-time - and competition is fierce. Did you see NXT in 2021?!

(You of course did not, but rest assured: it made the Hart Dungeon look like the set of WrestleMania 33).

Russo once booked a Reverse Battle Royal, the objective of which was to enter the ring as quickly as possible. Russo had unwittingly booked a running race, which made the gormless wrestlers look dumb when they looked around for somebody to brawl with.

53. Ric Flair Gets Beaten In The Desert

Gauging by this and the aforementioned Undertaker promo, professional wrestling goes with the desert about as well as water.

On the legendarily awful February 15, 1999 WCW Nitro, Eric Bischoff - in his capacity as an indentured butler - drove Ric Flair around in a limousine. He drove an oblivious Flair to the desert, in which he was ambushed and battered by the nWo for what felt like an eternity. This was one of the longest beat-downs ever. Bully Ray himself would have told them that enough was enough with the heat. Do you know what was even worse than the physical action here?

Eric Bischoff’s face.

It was very obvious that he was up to something when opening the limo door. He’s less transparent on his bad faith anti-AEW podcast.

Eric trying to do sinister ac-ting here was physically painful. Great value as a smarmy bastard, yes, but he really thought he was unsettling here.

In reality, he was trying harder than CM Punk getting a Brawl Out reference off on WWE TV.

52. “It’s Not Hot!”

The Army of Darkness was an incredible act that tapped into the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s. No other supernatural act since has been so tethered to a very real fear.

The Dungeon of Doom, Kevin Sullivan’s other spooky faction, was its antithesis: a cartoonish joke that was not remotely horrifying. At least, not in the conventional sense.

They feuded with Hulk Hogan in 1995, who, checked out and uninspired, could only think to make literal the Monster of the Week formula.

In an iconic, fantastically awful skit, Hogan entered the titular Dungeon. He reached out to touch the stream from a nearby waterfall and proclaimed “Ah! It’s not hot!”

Sure wasn’t. Wrestling was on its arse in 1995.

Why would he say “it’s not hot!”?!

If he thought it was scalding hot, why would he willingly burn his hand?

Why was the Yeti a mummy?

How didn’t the Giant die?

How does the business still exist?

51. The Death Of The Golden Era

It’s a lot easier to state this now, since the awfulness surrounding the show has calloused, but WrestleMania VII was actually pretty great by the standards of the time.

The Rockers Vs. Haku & Barbarian and Hart Foundation Vs. Nasty Boys both ruled, the former a tale of athletic survival, the latter a very effective bit of sh*thousery; Randy Savage entered an all-time great ass-showing individual heel performance against the Ultimate Warrior; the Warlord Vs. the British Bulldog was an outrageous over-delivery.

The thing is, though, the entire show was themed on the idea that a pro wrestler defeating an Iraqi sympathiser in simulated combat would lighten the mood of the Gulf War, around which Vince McMahon had shaped that year’s storylines. People actually died, but you know what can never die?

The spirit of Hulkamania.

Exploiting real horror, and having the gall to pretend that it was all pitched for a bit of Americana relief, was gross.

50. David Arquette: WCW World Champion

Vince Russo defends this as a publicity stunt. Tony Schiavone actually pitched it, but Russo had final say. Schiavone, in his defence, was completely checked out.

Arquette was brought into WCW proper as a tie-in to Ready To Rumble, the drastically awful wrestling buddy comedy movie that killed Arquette’s prospects as a leading man. After aligning with Diamond Dallas Page and Kanyon, Arquette pinned Eric Bischoff in a tag match on Thunder to capture his teammate’s World title.

DDP sold the loss of the World title as this fun and random thing that had happened.

WCW was already a walking, rotting corpse by this point, so this development didn’t kill the promotion - but it hardly helped. It further stigmatised WCW as desperate, so much so that they were more than willing to destroy the credibility of its titles just to lose to the WWF in slightly less devastating fashion. AEW endured a torrid 2024, but stopped short of putting the belt on Big Boom AJ. (The Rizzler might actually be one of the better TNT champions.)

Turns out, there is such a thing as bad publicity.

49. The New York Rules Thunder

Amid the New Blood Vs. Millionaires Club storyline - in which the checked-out prehistoric wrestlers that fans were bored of were cast as the babyfaces - Vince Russo created a themed episode of ‘Thunder’: New York Rules.

The matches didn’t need no referees, that’s how extreme they were going to be!

This rule was rendered a punchline, immediately, when none of the wrestlers - who had to count their own pins - thought to do so quickly. At the very first hurdle, the utter stupidity of this buffoon was exposed.

The first match, held under New York rules, was not a Tables match. The second match, held under New York rules, was a Tables match. The third match, held under New York rules, was a Tables match.

No need to go through that again. You’ll never make sense of it.

If all of this was already sufficiently confusing, Ric Flair defeated Kidman when Kevin Nash power-bombed Mike Awesome.

Vince Russo had lost the plot.

Swerve!

He never found it to begin with.

48. Jinder Mahal Doesn’t Get Over (But DOES Get Racist)

Many lapsed WWE fans have that moment: the match, angle or storyline that, after years of a fraught relationship, finally convinced them to part ways with the company they grew up watching.

You couldn’t hope to find a needle in the sheer amount of last straws, and ranking very high on the list was the coronation of Jinder Mahal: WWE Champion.

Jinder Mahal was a uniquely bad pro wrestler, in that he did the exact same boring and ineffective things in every match, but was paradoxically so uninteresting that you’d still struggle to remember them.

Even worse than Vladimir Kozlov because WWE at least tried to present Vlad, patiently, as a big deal, Jinder in 2017 was an overnight non-sensation. The reign was awful, the matches stunk, and the vibe was wretched. Your investment had never meant less.

WWE tried to juice it up and draw heat by making Jinder racist. Jinder said Shinsuke Nakamura is frightened of Godzilla, but let’s just say he didn’t say it with the letter “L’.

47. The Nightmare Collective

If you wanted to be kind to the Nightmare Collective, you could argue that the storyline was a genuine attempt at representation. A wrestler of Awesome Kong’s age and ethnicity is very rarely if ever pushed on the mainstream stage.

It was difficult to be kind to the Nightmare Collective; Kong, sadly, was thrashed, and the stable reeked of a Brandi Rhodes vanity project. Rendered cringe-worthy by how great she seemed to think she was as a thespian, the stable sought to recruit various wrestlers for some vague purpose. The Dark Order at least had an M.O. - “Hey losers, join us and feel a sense of belonging!” - whereas the Nightmare Collective just targeted various babyfaces in a transparent, excruciating means of building up matches.

Not remotely scary nor intimidating, this was an unholy union of Stephanie McMahon-assed heat and hokey supernatural-leaning garbage. The Nightmare Collective debuted Luther as their heater in January because he was Chris Jericho’s mate. The nepotism was as off the scale as Omega Vs. Okada IV.

The Goth Authority didn’t last long, mercifully.

46. The Yet-ay

If not the absolute worst moment in WCW history - it was too funny to elicit true, bleak disgust - it was likely the most quintessential WCW moment ever.

In October 1995, WCW debuted a character named ‘The Yeti’. The Yeti looked like a mummy, because WCW, and to deepen the confusion, Tony Schiavone called him the Yet-ay, as if he were a cool yeti in a children’s film who made the uncool kid popular or something.

At Halloween Havoc, the Yeti - played by the very tall and very bad Ron Reis - interfered in the big World title match between Hulk Hogan and his Dungeon of Doom stablemate the Giant. This involved the Yeti and the Giant trapping Hogan in a two-man bearhug.

That is what was meant to happen; in actuality, it looked like more of an embrace. That is the generous description.

The accurate description: the Yeti performed like a dog with two dicks and dry-humped Hogan so ferociously that it’s a wonder Gawker didn’t get sued for releasing the footage.

45. The 2020 Money In The Bank Ladder Matches

WWE’s pandemic “cinema” was atrocious. The Swamp Fight was bad, but in its defence, WWE actually attempted to tell a story. It was pathetic. Embarrassing. But they tried, bless their stupid hearts.

The Men’s Money In The Bank match was diabolical. Dire non-action threaded together by wacky cameos, there was no sense of craft whatsoever. You were meant to laugh at Brother Love roaming WWE Headquarters purely on the basis that you remember him. Anyone in their right mind would have spent their preceding decades trying to forget.

Then, there was Doink. It wasn’t any incarnation of Doink. It was the nearest guy who’d volunteered to get his face painted, and the gag was: here’s Doink. He’s hiding behind a chair. You remember Doink, right? He was a clown. Clowns are funny. Also, you have a brain capable of memory function.

The Women’s match wasn’t much better. In the most odd gag possibly ever, Dana Brooke slipped near a WET FLOOR sign…over which dramatic music played (!). WWE thus failed to execute the most basic slapstick gag imaginable.

This gag was crying out for a slide whistle sound effect; instead, the rocket scientists over at WWE settled on the soundtrack to a Lars Von Trier film.

44. Can Sasha Banks & Bianca Belair Co-Exist?

Ahead of their match at WrestleMania 37, Sasha Banks and Bianca Belair teamed up in various matches - matches promoted to determine whether or not they could co-exist.

Why?

Why would they need to co-exist?

They were rivals.

This booking device, which WWE fell back on inexplicably most of the time throughout Vince’s latter years, was dismal, lazy, creatively barren, contrived. The wrestlers could never co-exist; this trope was always in place to engineer a misunderstanding in a tag match, a “fraught” interaction, and maybe a pull-apart.

What. What was this.

If those two wrestlers come to blows, a match might happen!

A match was going to happen before they even teamed up. This was narratively unnecessary and not engaging in the least. There were no twists and turns. You knew the destination before the journey, and every beat of the journey was boring and predictable.

WWE, though, already had your money.

43. The Cursed NXT Referee

Secretly, Shawn Michaels’ NXT is one of the worst brands of all-time, regularly churning out of the sort of insane nonsensical drivel that has lived on in infamy through WCW and TNA.

Why does NXT seem to get away with its awfulness?

Here’s an example: in 2022, Isla Dawn defeated Alba Fyre at Deadline. Fyre was in a position to win the match, but the referee - seemingly controlled by Isla’s sorcery - threw up black goo. This is not (or, should not be) a substance that comes out of somebody’s body. Distracted, Fyre was rolled up, and Isla won when a back-up official hit the ring.

Serious news, guys: witchcraft is real. Our very understanding of science and the material world has changed forever.

Nobody else on the card cared. The world actually went unchanged. Isla, bizarrely, didn’t curse every last one of her opponents en route to winning a belt (which as a witch, she’d want for some reason).

This supernatural hokum in wrestling is the equivalent of a rom-com couple enjoying a will they/won’t they flirtation in the same room prowled by a serial killer who they can see in the act of murder in a horror movie.

These. Things. Do. Not. Fit. Together.

42. The Doomsday Cage Match

Almost too funny to warrant inclusion, the Doomsday Cage Match nonetheless was a creative atrocity.

It was almost too dumb, too egotistical, to be true. Hulk Hogan, who originally wanted nine men - making this quite literally the most layered joke in wrestling history - took on eight heels, alongside Randy Savage, in a triple-decker Cage match at WCW Uncensored 1996.

This defined both insanity and hubris; Hulk Hogan’s response to a decline in popularity was to be even more like Hulk Hogan, expecting different results.

These people need 4x more Hulkamania, not less!

This was the deranged essence of WCW, distilled. They almost named a heel wrestler after the holocaust - a heel non-wrestler, actually, who outranked Ric Flair in the hierarchy of the Alliance to End Hulkamania - and, rather undermining the violent tone, frying pans were used in the big finale.

Lex Luger (the ninth heel did end up appearing!) botched his shot, when Savage ducked, Luger paused, and still went through with hitting Flair anyway.

Hulk Hogan beating every heel in one match: it sounds like one of his fanciful retellings of his in-ring years, only WCW was actually stupid enough to book it.

41. The Nu Monday Night War

In the most hubristic moment in pro wrestling history - one that, somehow, involved neither Vince McMahon nor Paul Levesque - Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff attempted to revive the Monday Night Wars by positioning TNA Impact head-to-head with WWE Raw.

Did TNA make it to 83 weeks?

No.

The already piss-poor stigma of the promotion became officially untenable within 83 minutes. If that.

Fans chanted “This is bullsh*t!” during the very first match. It was no Liger Vs. Pillman; instead, a collection of X-Division wrestlers fought in a red cage through which nobody could see. The objective was to escape the structure through a tiny hole, which involved climbing across a near-horizontal roof. It looked impossible to do and was unexciting to watch, but it didn’t matter: the cage match was thrown out (!) when Homicide used a baton. Jeff Hardy, WWE’s most popular star a few months prior, then debuted. As part of a stale undercard division.

The main event scene didn’t need him. It had Ric Flair, who was shown walking around as no wrestling happened. Embodying the famous quote about insanity, Scott Hall and Sean Waltman attempted to invade the Impact Zone.

Well, it worked in 1996!

Eric Bischoff, you might be shocked to learn, did not negotiate a $600M TV deal with this product.

40. The Beach Blast Mini-Movie

Jim Crockett Promotions was one of the more pesky, formidable competitors that Vince McMahon battled in the 1980s, because it was really good - so good that the WWF was rendered a cartoonish affront in comparison.

JCP drew its own audience, a set of fans who loved the blood and the struggle and the grit, but - fittingly, for a WCW precursor - was itself a systemic mess. The WWF employed sabotage tactics, yes, but JCP got in its own way.

WCW’s response?

Retain the systemic failures, abandon the identity that worked.

Masterful gambit, sirs.

This was perhaps best exemplified by the infamous 1993 Beach Blast mini-movie.

Giving Epstein, Sting and the British Bulldog played with some kids on a private island, which Vader and Sid invaded on their boat. With the help of a little person, they attempted to blow up the babyface’s speed boat.

With awful, ‘90s-tastic dialogue, Sting and Davey Boy pretended to entertain the offer of a plane ticket away from the beating they were set to endure: but instead, they in unison shouted “Nah! We’ll see you at Beach Blast!”

The kids in this monstrosity of a film were intolerably happy. Somebody had to be.

39. Seven

“Join me in complete bliss, ugh, that’s right.”

Isolate the grunt noise and those last two words, and what that sounds like is a pornographic actor just barely gaining purchase during the final phase of a nuru massage.

In WCW, it was what one of its wrestlers said to a small boy as they hovered outside of his bedroom window.

WCW introducing a creepy villain easily confused for a child molester was too much even for a conglomerate, Turner, that let the promotion get away with the most self-destructive creative of all-time. ‘Seven’ was played by a returning Dustin Rhodes, before the idea was sensibly nixed. The vignettes were something else. Rhodes, speaking to Inside The Ropes, revealed that the character was inspired by the movie ‘Dark City’ in the ideation stage.

On screen, it was all a bit 1970s British TV.

He made his grand entrance on Nitro, in which he floated to the ring, before fabulously deadpanning “My new name’s Seven, by the way” and retconning the gimmick then and there.

38. CM Punk: Scab

In the Pipebomb promo, CM Punk unleashed a scathing rant at the expense of WWE.

Not Vince McMahon: WWE.

It’s important to bear in mind that they were grouped together.

Punk said that the company was such a systemic shambles that it would still fail even in the event of Vince’s death; after all, and how ironic this is on multiple levels, the “doofus son-in-law” Triple H was set to succeed him.

Do you know who actually had an issue with the way WWE was run?

The most WWE guy ever: the Miz.

After the Awesome Truth interfered in a pathetic “chaotic” scene at Hell In A Cell, the vast majority of the WWE roster went on strike, citing unsafe working conditions, or something.

CM Punk wasn’t among them, despite holding the ultimate grievance three months prior. No, the company man (!) performed on the October 10, 2011 Raw as part of a skeleton crew of scabs that also included Triple H: his good buddy.

A wretched mess of awful continuity and objectively insane characterisation, this unthinkably stupid storyline convinced many fans - forever - that WWE could never change for the better.

37. “Bark Like A Dog”

Here’s the counter-argument: Trish Stratus herself was not offended by the role she played in the segment and, moreover, that famous “Linda McMahon rises from the wheelchair” spot at WrestleMania X-Seven might not get as over it got if Vince McMahon, ordering Trish to strip to her underwear and behave like an abused animal, isn’t on particularly vile and unconscionable form throughout the build.

If it’s a case of the ends justifying the means, the end to this sort of thing isn’t a fictional story. There is no end.

Attitudes towards women, often resulting in physical violence and domestic abuse, are a grim constant of life.

It’s not the responsibility of WWE to solve society’s problems, but they sure did a great and enthusiastic job of exacerbating them, knowing full well that the young adult audience of the day loved to watch the busty unattainable women get degraded.

Because they couldn’t shag them, and they resented them for it, and wasn’t that all they were good for?

36. Viagra On A Pole

Vince Russo was fundamentally obsessed with the idea of fixing an object atop a pole and making the wrestlers unfortunate enough to get booked by him to retrieve it.

Anything to stop them from actually wrestling.

Ironically, this exercise in climbing plummeted to a nadir with the 2000 ‘Viagra on a Pole’ outing between Billy Kidman and Shane Douglas.

The match happened because the Franchise, having stolen Kidman’s chick, couldn’t get it up. He needed medical help to achieve an erection. Rather than simply going to town and purchasing it and then…going to town, he had to retrieve it from a pole. Everybody had to retrieve everything from a pole. Personal issues don’t draw money, Jerry Jarrett, ya mark; poles do!

If this seemed like it was a little too silly, a little too harmless, then worry not: after the pills sprayed everywhere near the finish, Torrie grabbed Kidman by the back of the head and rubbed his face in them as the commentators in hushed tones expressed concern that he’d overdose.

Trivialising something that was happening to too many wrestlers at the time with a dick joke: that’s our Vic Venom!

35. The Kennel From Hell

It has been said that the Olympic Games should feature one average, run-of-the-mill person in every event because it’s otherwise difficult to grasp just how special every competing athlete is.

This has already happened - sort of.

Sport climbing made its debut at the 2020 Olympics, and you can actually watch Al Snow’s performance during the über-tedious Kennel From Hell match as an effective comparison point. In no danger from the sedated crap-happy police dogs twixt between the two cages, all Snow did was climb, and climb slowly. Almost nothing else happened.

If Snow has accomplished one thing in his otherwise mediocre career - and judging by his credentials as OVW head honcho, his mannequin head prop would make for a better promoter - it is to make you realise how impressive a good climber is.

34. The Sunny Slop Bucket

On the face of it, the 1996 angle in which the Godwinns emptied the contents of a slop bucket over the head of Sunny was dire enough.

A pair of pig farmers, working their second job as wrasslers, doing a slapstick gag designed to pop the juvenile Vince McMahon: it was all so quintessentially, brutally mid-’90s. Vince wasn’t merely popped; he roared as if in a state of demented, orgasmic bliss.

This was a strange intersection between New Generation and Attitude Era - the childish comedy juxtaposed with the sheen of Sunny’s heaving cleavage - but the story behind it, sadly, is timeless. A lot of men are pieces of crap - and that, according to wrestling apocrypha, was contained in the bucket.

As per the Dark Side of the Ring, which condemned it - and the Undertaker’s podcast, which glorified it - the bucket was left backstage. The “boys” took it in turns to deposit that which doesn’t bear thinking about into it. “Every bodily fluid was probably in it,” Mideon stated.

So there’s a not inconsiderable chance that Sunny was sexually abused on TV.

Jesus Christ.

33. Erick Rowan’s Doppelgänger

In the summer of 2019, people - fools - argued that competition, in the form of AEW, would finally awaken the sleeping giant that was Vincent Kennedy McMahon.

Vincent Kennedy McMahon responded to the challenge that he always prided himself on winning by penning one of his worst storylines ever. The basic gist is that Roman Reigns was attacked backstage. Somebody tried to kill him. Erick Rowan was the prime suspect, but wouldn’t you just know it?

His doppelganger just happened to be in the backstage vicinity.

Daniel Bryan bought this story, and in a cliffhanger, Roman - who was meant to be your savvy, credible babyface - halfway entertained the explanation. As it turned out, it was Rowan’s big ruse to enter the main event bracket, or something.

Daniel Bryan actually took Rowan’s word for it. There was no plan for any of this, by the way. WWE made its top two babyfaces look moronic for no reason, and then they simply called up Luke Harper out of the blue to pay it off in a tag match.

32. The Fiend & Alexa Bliss

WWE was so broken and phenomenally dumb that, in 2020, the promotion penned a storyline that accidentally cast one of its characters as a sex offender.

And they didn’t seem to notice!

The general outline of said story was thus: the Fiend targeted Alexa Bliss, in a bid to corrupt/distract Braun Strowman, who held a soft spot for her. In a twist, Alexa Bliss was actually swayed by the Fiend’s advances, describing the attraction as “a moth to a flame”. She took on the Fiend’s Sister Abigail finish when in a trance.

Eventually, she aligned with the Fiend outright. Whether she embraced him as a character with agency or was seduced by dark magic or whatever, what followed was a terrible look.

As soon as Alexa and the Fiend became a double act, she took on childlike characteristics. She wore her hair in pigtails and played on a swing set. Presumably, the idea was for the diminutive Alexa to take on the spooky child trope familiar to those who love horror movies.

The thing is, though, since this had all started with the Fiend taking a romantic interest in her, this felt like a spot of accidental grooming.

Unless it wasn’t accidental, in which case this should occupy the #1 slot.

31. Big Show Gets The Yes Chant

This was the moment that best captured the moronic essence of twilight years, wrong-brained Vince McMahon.

Daniel Bryan was over because he was likeable, he had earned his spot, and he was a blow-away phenomenal super-worker. The thing is, though, he was short. And pale. He couldn’t be over. The chant was over.

Vince then got the Big Show to do it. Because he’s big.

It didn’t matter that Show was Bryan’s antithesis. He was overexposed, slow, and had received countless pushes that nobody really asked for.

But…also…big. They didn’t call him the Short Pale Show, did they?

On one level, it’s a miracle that AEW exists in the first place. It’s a unicorn of a promotion that defied the stigma of dumb wrasslin’ within the TV industry and became a top 5 cable hit while presenting something as niche as Bryan Danielson Vs. Timothy Thatcher. It has no right to exist as something so flagrantly for the love of the game.

On another level, Vince held such contempt for his audience - and was so wrong about what they wanted - that the real miracle is that AEW didn’t form a week after this utter bullsh*t.

30. Kofi Kingston’s WWE Title Loss

Kofi Kingston’s title reign wasn’t great.

KofiMania was an immortal wrestling moment - the pacing of that match should be studied by every youngster in wrestling school - but after that, Kofi wasn’t awarded too many favours. Pairing him with Dolph Ziggler was a disaster of a World title programme, since theirs was the definitional midcard programme of the day. Kofi’s feud with Orton was more of a premise than a story - Orton big-leagued him once - and Orton is Orton. Completely tedious much too often for his never-ending push.

Kofi didn’t really elevate the material, which is what a World champion should do - his title matches felt like midcard bouts with the five slow minutes buried in the middle - but he deserved far better than his ultimate fate.

He was defeated by Brock Lesnar in seven seconds. One F5, and that was your lot.

WWE had the opportunity to bookend Kofi’s reign - and elevate it in retrospect - with two immaculate babyface performances.

WWE instead, for the umpteenth time that decade, decided to make you question why you even bother.

29. The Fingerpoke Of Doom

Hollywood Hogan Vs. Kevin Nash was a monumental match worthy of the massive Georgia Dome from which it emanated.

The nWo civil war was a big deal; the Wolfpac was a cool, over act with an absolute belter of an entrance theme.

On the January 4, 1999 Nitro, WCW got the band back together. Unfortunately for WCW, that band was a hairspray metal band in 1993. Nobody wanted to hear it.

The nWo was stale, and didn’t even get their comeuppance the first time ‘round - meaning the fanbase was interested in neither the beginning nor the end of the reboot. Hogan poked Nash in the chest. Nash, trivialising everything as he often did, fell theatrically to the mat. Nash voluntarily gave up the World title in a sad, desperate reset. On the other channel, Mankind defeated the Rock for the WWF title. Those two wrestlers weren’t headline-level acts 365 days prior.

The audience knew then and there where the stars were made and where the real Big Boys Played, as WCW entered an irreversible tailspin.

28. Claire Lynch

Here’s the digest version: AJ Styles and TNA head Dixie Carter were filmed in compromising positions and accused by Christopher Daniels and Kazarian of having an affair.

They were in fact revealed to be helping former drug addict Claire Lynch, but only after Dixie’s non-wrestler hubby sparked AJ out with a one-bomb.

Daniels and Kazarian conspired with Lynch to fake a pregnancy in a very easily disproven bid to smear his reputation.

There were multiple problems with this diabolical 1999 Fedpilled angle, but if it threatened to be perversely entertaining in a so-bad-it’s-good sort of way, the “actress” playing Lynch neutralised that threat with her voice.

Oh boy. If you couldn’t bear Stephanie McMahon, with her grating screech-growl, Lynch made her sound like Karen Carpenter. Lynch was either constantly on the verge of tears or screaming her f*cking head off. There was no off switch, but if you were forced to listen to that shrill, brutal voice for longer than five minutes, you’d venture through the gates of hell to find it.

It’s a wonder the Impact Zone didn’t reflexively evacuate en masse whenever she opened her fire alarm of a mouth.

27. The Lana & Bobby Lashley Wedding

In 2019, Vince McMahon decided he couldn’t be “in the weeds” any longer, when he was still very much in the weeds. He appointed Paul Heyman as ‘Executive Director’ of Monday Night Raw.

If Heyman had any actual control, he seemed to use it to appease Vince with controversy-bait trash TV, rendering the entire exercise pointless.

Obsessed with cuckolding angles, for some reason, “Heyman” “booked” the Lana character to cheat on Rusev with Bobby Lashley, who she was then to wed. The pro wrestling wedding is a reliable ratings draw, so this was…inspired, if that’s the word. The execution however was dismal, charmless, utterly bereft of the camp quality that drives these things into watchable trash territory.

After various old flames tried to interrupt - all of whom were dire actors - Liv Morgan revealed that she had an objection. The wedding could not go ahead - because Lana was in love with her!

Morgan had never revealed her orientation - which wasn’t real, a problem unto itself - this was simply a thing that happened to get the young adult males back in the fold.

The phrase “Throwing crap at a wall” is trite, but here, more than apt: WWE’s half-arsed “Let’s do the Attitude Era again” 2019 TV was dismal.

“People like lesbians, don’t they?” was the shrugged pitch, and it somehow made TV.

26. The Gobbledy Gooker

The WWF teased, ahead of Survivor Series 1990, what would be inside of a gigantic egg - or, as Mean Gene Okerlund pronounced it, an “ayg”.

What was in the egg? It could be anything.

It could even be an egg!

What was inside of the egg was the Gobbledy Gooker. The Gooker was an anthropomorphic turkey who quite literally could not wrestle. The mask wasn’t a snug, skull-shaped deal as worn by luchadors, but rather an oversized mascot hood. Rather than wear wrestling boots, the Gooker wore sh*tty little boots covered in Christmas slippers designed to resemble claws.

The Gooker was meant to wrestle, but could only fall over, and when even the children at Survivor Series seemed nonplussed by the act, it was almost immediately trashed. This was as much of an abomination as an actual turkey/man hybrid - a cringe-worthy monstrosity, the sight of which must have led many young fans to hop on over to the next fad.

A dumb character destined to age horribly who spoke gibberish exclusively, who couldn’t work safely and who bombed in 1990: that might seem like Jim Hellwig, but the Gobbledy Gooker was actually portrayed by Hector Guerrero.

25. One Final Beat

NXT got its dour ass handed to it in the Wednesday Night War.

Its über-intense style and syrupy melodrama just wasn’t “it” in contrast to AEW’s vibrant, electrifying range. NXT wasn’t fun, it took itself much too seriously, and the synthetic one-note storytelling was alienating.

A much better booker a few years later, in 2020, a beleaguered, defeated Paul Levesque was all out of ideas. He decided NXT wasn’t intense enough, and the brand evolved into a parody of itself as the pandemic took hold.

Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa “finally” settled their long-term rivalry in a cinematic ‘One Final Beat’ match. It was 35 minutes of drab, po-faced, formal violence with a dreaded thread of internal conflict performed against a pitch-black backdrop. Could they really bring themselves to vanquish one another?

Could anybody have cared less?

There’s “too much”, and there’s this: a match so excessive in its desperate, excruciating self-importance that neither man approached being over since. That’s not hyperbole, either.

Gauging by the reactions that Ciampa and Gargano generated over the next four years, people had seen enough for an actual lifetime.

24. Stephanie McMahon: Worst For Business

For three years in the mid-2010s, Stephanie McMahon thought it would be a capital idea to be completely insufferable and verbally slaughter every wrestler, face or heel, while only selling her comeuppance on an annual basis.

She didn’t like the babyface Dean Ambrose, deeming him too scruffy - but the pristine Charlotte Flair, a heel promoted in WWE’s image?

Also unacceptable.

She screamed “Get out of my ring!” to Brock Lesnar, generally acted like the disapproving stepmother to Seth Rollins, and, for a full calendar year, berated her underling Mick Foley for his stewardship of Raw.

This led nowhere; rather than select a representative each to fight at WrestleMania for full control of the show, Foley was storyline fired for running afoul of Triple H, who, naturally, kicked his ass. What did Foley ever do? Other than make Triple H’s main event career, that is?

As TV, this was anti-escapism. Stephanie, as aurally unpleasant as a colic-afflicted infant, made everybody miserable - not least the audience.

But her very worst moments…?

23. The Authority

The Authority was an awful stable that drove drastically abysmal television, and is only excluded from Worst Of All-Time conversations because WWE was forced into paying it all off.

CM Punk left WWE in January, leaving Triple with nothing to do at WrestleMania XXX. And that would not stand. This shock development converged with the toxic reaction met by Batista to create the alternate main event.

Daniel Bryan won in a genuinely excellent happy ending (which, if he’d stayed fit, would have seen him annihilated by Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam).

But before that?

Bryan, from about SummerSlam ‘13 onwards - was buried as a B+ player. He was demoted after his self-fulfilling prophecy of a World title run.

Every single week, in flat promos as overlong as they were overbearing, he got slaughtered. Everything that was magical about Austin Vs. McMahon was lacking in the 2013 pseudo-reboot.

McMahon was entertaining, and he sold. He sold every other week. The experience of watching TV in 1998 was an incredibly cathartic blast. Triple H, on the other hand, Christ almighty.

His dry, obligatory promos were so soul-destroying that it was almost like being forced to attend a meeting at work. That is the opposite of how television should function.

Bryan was screwed in most matches with a rolodex of ancient, ineffective tropes. He wasn’t worth believing in, but the fans persisted. The alternative was too depressing. They had to fight.

With the Authority, WWE worked itself into a shoot: the promotion fashioned itself as the heel, and thought it suited them.

It did.

22. Muhammad Hassan

Bruce Prichard said on an episode of his Something To Wrestle podcast that the Muhammad Hassan character was dreamed up by Vince when he lamented the plight that Arab-Americans faced in the wake of 9/11.

If you believe that, thanks a lot: you’re the reason why promoters think wrestling fans are marks, and you are responsible for the absolute dreck that has been forced upon us all for decades.

If the idea was for Muhammad Hassan to be a sophisticated character shaped by the uneasy sentiment of the crowd, why did Steve Austin - who was in effect the company mascot in the mid-2000s - say “I see sand people” to him for a babyface pop?

Inevitably, Hassan did become a terrorist. In an infamous attack on the Undertaker, Hassan dispatched a bunch of men in ski masks to choke him out with piano wire.

The problem is that, between the taping and the broadcast, 52 innocents were killed and 784 more were injured when four coordinated terrorist attacks were carried out on the London Underground.

Except it wasn’t much of a problem; despite editing the footage on the UK feed, the episode of SmackDown aired as intended in the U.S. Let’s not waste all of that heat, guys.

An enraged UPN network pressured WWE to scrap the character outright.

21. Dr. Heiney

Jim Ross, in 2005, underwent colonoscopy surgery. This was a major procedure which, naturally, was a source of profound anxiety, pain and fear.

Vince McMahon, under the guise of his onscreen avatar Mr. McMahon - not that there is any appreciable difference - performed a skit mocking it. As Dr. Heiney, Vince in full medical garb was assisted by a busty blonde nurse. Was it ever going to be a man?

The running “joke” saw Vince, against a soundtrack of gurgling toilet noises and famous JR calls, remove an assortment of objects associated with JR - footballs and the like - from a gigantic prop anus. It was unfunny and mean-spirited and produced for an audience of one - or two, if you include that turd Kevin Dunn.

What did this achieve? Was Jim Ross going to have a match with Mr. McMahon?

Was Dr. Heiney in any way believable?

Vince did have a PhD, in fairness; for much of the ‘80s and into the 1990s, he had a paedophile hiding division.

20. Katie Vick

Wait, just #20?

Why is the Katie Vick storyline ranked so low?

Because while utterly atrocious, it wasn’t that bad. Or, rather, it wasn’t that offensive relative to that which followed.

It wasn’t even the worst thing Kane did in the early-to-mid 2000s, as you’ll learn all over again.

To be clear: this was awful, disgusting, desperate. Triple H in the autumn of 2002 alleged that the masked Kane, who had somehow acquired a licence, killed his crush in a car wreck in his teenage years. Triple H went further, claiming that Kane had defiled the corpse. Triple H reenacted this, in an infamous segment via prop dummy, and claimed when its head fell apart to mush that he’d “literally screwed her brains out”.

No actress played Katie Vick, mercifully, and as gross as all of this was, it wasn’t something as triggering as a fake miscarriage angle. There are levels to WWE’s awfulness.

This is no defence of an indefensible angle; it’s just that WWE should instead be excoriated for exploiting and even glorifying real issues that, statistically, affect far too many people.

19. The WrestleMania IX Finish

Young fans were taught a valuable lesson in 1993: Vince McMahon would always go back to what he knew.

Midway through a terrible (but also wonderfully kitsch) pay-per-view, Hulk Hogan issued a challenge - an incredibly racist challenge - to the victor of that night’s main event. That match was won by Yokozuna after his manager Mr. Fuji threw salt in Bret Hart’s eyes. With Hart’s blessing, Hogan saved the day.

To a generation of fans who hadn’t even learned the vernacular of pro wrestling yet, this reeked of carny bullsh*t. If it felt off and not good in some vague way, that’s because it did. Bret, your new hero, felt like Hogan’s little bro.

Hogan took all of 21 seconds to defeat Yokozuna, and he did that because Vince was chasing the Hulkamania dragon.

Bret Hart was always a better “dealer” than a draw. He hooked fans for life, even if those fans weren’t large enough in number to pack out the SilverDome. Those fans stuck with the WWF because Hart turned high school gyms into an art canvas.

That nearly didn’t happen, if this disgrace wasn’t retconned a year later.

18. The Ultimate Mirror

The Ultimate Warrior was a huge star, and thus drew huge interest when he signed for WCW in 1998, but he was a living, grunting, unintelligible anachronism. This was very quickly exposed on his very first night in the company.

On the other channel, breakneck pacing and smash-hit catchphrases were in. The Warrior, meanwhile, rambled for what felt like (and nearly approached) a full half-hour. This was a run-killer of an introduction, and his actual run, somehow, was worse: Warrior was recast, for some reason, as a supernatural-adjacent entity capable of playing magic tricks on Hollywood Hogan.

Except the Warrior appearing in the mirror wasn’t a figment of Hogan’s tortured imagination, because the audience could see it. Eric Bischoff was adamant that Hogan was crazy, urging him to snap out of it. He wasn’t!

Everybody watching could also see the Warrior!

You couldn’t miss him. The face paint, the insanity, that bouffant hair do: you could tell what the Warrior looked like from his silhouette. A silhouette, incidentally, would probably be more easily manoeuvred in the ring.

Wrestling operates under surreal logic at the best of times, but this was an abomination of the senses.

17. Lance Von Erich

Fritz Von Erich was not a great man.

He set his World Class Championship Wrestling territory ablaze in the early 1980s by promoting his athletic stud heartthrob kids in a multi-year war against the Fabulous Freebirds. The Von Erich kids were so hot in every way that they could barely make it to the ring without girls in the crowd trying to make out with them.

Then his sons started dying on him.

This was a problem, obviously; the grief was bad, but so were the houses. Something had to be done, thought Fritz. He couldn’t impregnate his wife, because it would take too long to raise and train the resulting character, so Fritz went a different route: he invented a family member named Lance. He replaced Mike Von Erich, who had experienced toxic shock syndrome, against the wishes of Kevin and many other members of the family.

Lance was supposedly Fritz’s nephew, and while the myth of an instant rejection might have been exaggerated, the depths to which Fritz sunk can never be overstated.

16. Vince McMahon Loves Cock

1997 D-Generation X was a sensational act - obnoxious and transgressive, the stable genuinely did feel like the old values were being polluted.

1998 D-Generation X was much the same, only less compelling, and with blackface replacing Shawn Michaels. But teenage boys enjoyed telling all and sundry to suck them off, so the stable was hugely over.

2006 D-Generation X was completely pathetic. Two old dudes acting like 14 year-olds, Triple H and Shawn Michaels were so tragic that they were edgelords with no edge. Shawn as a born-again christian wouldn’t commit to the bit, leaving a smirking Triple H to do the heavy lifting. With one eye perhaps on the Rock’s Hollywood career, Triple H’s comedic timing was so smug it was unbearable, and, naturally, he couldn’t even get a lead in a straight-to-DVD flick unless WWE funded it.

The big running joke was that Vince McMahon was a homosexual, which apparently is bad.

In one excruciatingly bad skit, Triple H did a bit in which he accused Vince of hating animals. Vince denied this and was drawn into almost saying that he loves “cocks”.

Triple H doing chud SNL was a virus of the spirit.

15. Eddiesploitation

Eddie Guerrero died on November 13, 2005. You had to think about his friends, his family.

But, by God, you also had to think about WrestleMania! The season was nearly upon us, after all.

And so, with a main event-level talent dead - actually dead, and leaving behind a young family - WWE decided to exploit his legacy by mapping out his close friend Rey Mysterio’s path to the World title.

Under the guise of a tribute, Rey embodied many of Eddie’s characteristics and drove his car. It was even implied that the mischievous ghost of Eddie Guerrero interfered with the Royal Rumble tumbler, ribbing Rey from beyond the grave by orchestrating his entrance in the #2 slot.

Also, for heat, Randy Orton said that Eddie was in hell.

This grim Weekend At Eddie’s stuff went on for ages, and as soon as Rey actually won the belt at WrestleMania 22, Vince lost interest in the exploitation of his latest dead wrestler and jobbed out his World champion in countless TV matches because he was very small.

14. Jeff Hardy’s Teased Overdose

In the 2000s, many wrestlers who hadn’t even entered their middle-age years died prematurely. The mortality rate was shocking.

In 2008, knowing the work would be all too convincing, WWE suggested that Jeff Hardy might have passed away.

They knew exactly what they were doing, for once. Only when acting in such a disgusting manner did WWE get the finer details right, which says so much. The young dead wrestler was found more often than not in their lonely hotel room.

On November 21, 2008 - 48 hours before he was meant to compete for the WWE championship - WWE.com “reported” in an entirely kayfabe article that Hardy had been found unconscious in a stairwell near his room in a Boston hotel. The accompanying image was of Hardy, in a WWE ring, looking bedraggled.

The only further information was that Hardy had been rushed to the nearest emergency room, and that they’d have more information on the matter if it becomes available.

Hotel room; unconscious; Jeff Hardy, with all of his personal history: it was all too easy to infer that the unthinkable had happened, or was imminent.

Is Jeff Hardy dead?!

Order Survivor Series to find out!

13. Sportswashing

WWE never had a soul - it was founded by Vince McMahon - so it probably shouldn’t have scanned as a shock that it would accept money to propagandise a regime with such an appalling human rights record.

Was WWE’s Saudi sportswashing participation really “Bad, even for them” - or was it the most obvious revenue stream imaginable?

Proving that karma might still exist, it was at least an embarrassment for them. The Brothers of Destruction Vs. D-Generation X, at Crown Jewel 2018, was one of the funniest matches of all-time. Usually when the mask slips, Glenn Jacobs just says something problematic.

In this instance, it was literally true; Kane was so sweaty and blown-up that it fell off his face in the hot desert sun.

Then again, the sportswashing has worked. There are simply too many things over which to get furious. Old hate calcifies into resigned apathy. The WWE Saudi shows aren’t met with the same outrage. They’re even acclaimed now, after WWE insidiously promoted them as more prominent and canonical year on year.

12. Gary ‘The GOAT’ Garbutt

Vince McMahon lost his mind towards the end there. He didn’t just “fall off”, grow uninspired, recycle old, out-of-touch ideas.

He lost his bastard mind!

With no mind in coherent, working order, he produced pure slop that nobody could comprehend. A very ill and old man tasked himself with promoting new wrestling talent, and it went horribly.

As was customary, he did one of his three week pushes - the likes of which he probably genuinely forgot about - with Cedric Alexander in 2019. Shane McMahon and Drew McIntyre found a tag team partner for their rival Roman Reigns. This was a nefarious scheme. They found the least-qualified person in the back: an elderly janitor named Gary Garbutt.

But the babyfaces were smarter than that: a masked Cedric Alexander took his place, and dazzled the taken-aback heels with the signature offence of Cedric Alexander. Then again, they probably weren’t to know. Who watched 205 Live?

Then, erm, Gary ‘The GOAT’ Garbutt lost. He was pinned. He then unmasked and grinned in the direction of Roman Reigns. Even though he lost.

The expression is “Got ‘em!”

The expression is not “Nearly got ‘em!”

Was he meant to convey the old “Worth a try?”

Because it was not worth a try.

11. John Cena’s Star Wars Promo

This list has darkened in tone, from the inscrutable and the silly to the exploitative and disgusting, but any moment that evokes such visceral physical recoil of cringe warrants lofty billing.

Building his match with John Laurinaitis - his pay-per-view match, which headlined - Cena compared it to a bad episode of Star Wars.

As Michael Cole pretended to titter, Cena said that Big Show - sorry, Show Vader - was the world’s largest Jedi, but had recently turned to the dark side, tempted by the evil emperor John Laurinaitis.

Recently?

Show Vader had turned into a sith lord about 48 times.

Cena, who did impressions of Darth Vader, compared Vince McMahon to Yoda, (did Stephanie birth Grogu?) which made no sense. Yoda is a goodie, is he not? And is McMahon not the personification of American evil?

Jerry Lawler also pretended to laugh at this one, but his high-pitched squeal was conspicuously absent. Dollars to doughnuts, his internal monologue said “We got rid of the breasts for this?!”

It doesn’t matter that John Cena once entered a good performance against Umaga. He deserves to be imprisoned.

10. Kane: Babyface Sex Offender

This is worse than the Katie Vick saga.

On Twitter, many engagement-farming grifters will say something to the effect of “Nobody ever talks about this…”, and it’s just some well-remembered and well-received moment from WWE’s very recent history, like Charlotte Flair Vs. Rhea Ripley, which took place all the way back in April 2023.

You know what nobody ever talks about?

You know what people should talk about, because it was several levels beyond vile and is perhaps indicative of how little Vince McMahon’s WWE took seriously the gravity and repercussions of sexual assault?

In 2004, the Kane character raped and impregnated Lita.

Rather than report the very serious crime, WWE had a better idea: if Kane, Lita’s rapist, defeated Matt Hardy at SummerSlam, he’d get to marry her, even though she was reluctant, and indeed interfered in his matches so that he lost after they were wed.

Lita miscarried when Snitsky hit Kane with a chair, causing him to fall on her. It was at this point that Lita joined forces with her babyface rapist to get their revenge.

Is there a more disturbing oxymoron than babyface rapist?

WWE should have been burned to the ground in 2004.

Levelled. To. Ash.

9. Terri’s Fake Miscarriage

The loss of a child or baby is too brutal to even contemplate.

You watch pro wrestling because, ultimately, it is heightened, silly escapism from the horrors and mundanities of life.

Pro wrestling, inherently stupid, is absolutely not equipped, in the DNA of the medium, to tell challenging stories.

Vince Russo is an irredeemable piece of trash who once booked Terri Runnels to suffer a miscarriage that, it would be revealed, had not actually happened, because she wasn’t pregnant in the first instance. It was a ruse designed to make D’Lo Brown do her favours in the storyline.

That doesn’t change the fact that many people watching were forced to relive their trauma in a context in which they’d never expect to have to do that. Russo once defended it as something that happens on other television shows all the time, but the difference is that it’s f*cking wrestling. Wrestling isn’t about medical trauma. It’s about combat, hatred, reconciliation, revenge. It’s about wrestling.

Also: the end result was that women are lying Jezebels. Just as well that a generation of men didn’t grow up to be so hostile and violent towards women, eh?

8. Vince McMahon Mocks Jim Ross (Again)

Vince McMahon used his WWE vehicle to pop himself, and he had a sense of humour that ranged from juvenile to unconscionable.

This is the reductive take on monopoly years Vince McMahon, but it was genuinely true more often than not. He was the main character and a narcissist and, what’s worse, his dominant victory of the entire U.S. wrestling scene reinforced to him that every idea and impulse he had was correct.

A narcissist doesn’t even need the reinforcement, and he received more than most.

This toxic mindset informed his crass bullying of Jim Ross, without whom he’d have made significantly less money. JR found the Rock, and if none of his later hires happen, the 2000s essentially do not exist.

But no, go ahead, wear a cowboy hat and twist your face to make it look like you have Bell’s Palsy. On a random episode of Raw. For no reason other than to be horrible and remind fans that there was nothing they could do about it.

WWE was equally abysmal and unethical and successful for years and years, man.

7. Bayley: This Is Your Life

If Vince McMahon’s WWE wasn’t wrestling, it also wasn’t anything good.

He took Bayley - who in 2015 legitimately could have done for young women what John Cena did for the kids demographic - and turned her into a weird loser two years later.

Vince seemed either mystified or outright appalled by the idea of a female character who did not exist for male fans to letch over. The only person who could love Bayley, to Vince, was her father - which gave him yet another incest-tinged idea.

In an excruciating skit, Vince had her storyline rival Alexa Bliss do the old ‘This Is Your Life’ routine.

The acting was diabolical - Alexa seemed almost sympathetic towards these terrified people - and it was implied throughout that Bayley’s father had taken an unusually intimate interest in her upbringing.

Wrestling has done awful comedy forever; this, in addition to being one of the least funny things ever filmed, irreparably damaged a potential merchandise sensation of a role model.

6. Vince McMahon Interviews Melanie Pillman

This entry might break the rule outlined in the intro, but Vince McMahon put it on TV.

Brian Pillman died on October 5, 1997, the cause of death attributed to a heart attack in the autopsy. The news was received within wrestling as grim, expected inevitability; after shattering his ankle in a 1996 car wreck, Pillman, who lived a wild life before and after it, relied heavily on painkillers to blind a constant pain so intense that, according to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter obituary, he could barely walk through an airport, much less play softball.

And he was running the ropes practically every other night before his death.

The wrestling industry and its lack of safeguarding was criticised in the wake of Pillman’s death. In a disgusting onscreen segment, Vince McMahon, on the defensive, interviewed Brian’s widow Melanie 24 hours later.

Melanie looked devastated, sleep-deprived, broken. If you lacked context, you’d still know from looking at her that she had just endured something unimaginable. She was about to endure something else unimaginable.

Vince, choosing his words carefully, basically said that Brian took too many prescribed pain pills, and asked his widow - 24 hours later - if she’d like to offer any advice to “aspiring athletes” who feel the need to resort to painkiller abuse. Utterly ghastly stuff.

Vince was a grotesque human being. One of the very worst.

5. Hell In A Cell 2019

Seth Rollins Vs. The Fiend, at Hell In A Cell 2019, was the awfulness of what may well be WWE’s worst era, distilled.

The sheer carny contempt of actually running the match when they knew damn well they were only going to do an actual finish when they did it a second time.

Ruining something - the finality of a Hell In A Cell match - that fans actually cared about and bought into.

A complete disconnect between what a passionate wrestler wanted to achieve, and Vince McMahon’s dumbed-down, oblivious interpretation of it. “You’re a spooky guy, huh? Let’s put some red lights on ya, it’ll look like HELL!”

Complete and utter brain-wrong logic, in the form of Bray Wyatt attempting to use a mallet with no interference from the referee before that referee threw the match out when Rollins attempted to use another hammer. (This hammer was smaller.)

The pervasive, unshakeable sense that nobody knew what to do, or what was going on: was the Fiend impervious to pain? Where was the drama?

Vince McMahon’s brain was broken. Mushed into soup. If you drank it up, and had the gall to hail Paul Levesque as the saviour three years later, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

4. Goldberg Refuses To “Go Up”

Vince Russo will tell you - and in a landscape defined by tribalism, he’s still too useless and stupid to gain traction anymore, which says an awful lot - that, to its detriment, modern wrestling is catered to the “smart marks”.

In 2000, he booked his product exclusively for forum-dwelling diehards as WCW evolved into an incomprehensible meta commentary on pro wrestling politics. It was a show about wrestling, with a deeply flawed and limited appeal, and it was nowhere near sophisticated enough to scan as satire. Russo had simply lost the plot. He detested the medium so much that he was only capable of savaging it.

WCW was already dead before New Blood Rising. A point of no return had been reached. If there was a shred of hope left, it materialised as Goldberg.

Goldberg was all but killed off when, in a three-way match against Kevin Nash and Scott Steiner, he refused to “go up” for Nash’s powerbomb. It’s fake, guys. This seemed to exist so that Russo could live out his tough guy fantasies by demanding Goldberg go along with the script.

It’s often described as incomprehensible, this angle, but it’s easy to comprehend: Russo hated wrestling and punished you for enjoying it. And you know what?

He had a point. He was still involved in the game a decade later. Maybe wrestling deserved him.

3. The 2015 Royal Rumble

The excellent Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics, in a typically brilliant study, explored WWE’s viewership decline throughout the 2010s.

He pinpointed the events of the 2015 Royal Rumble as a key factor, noting that the build to WrestleMania - typically an outlier in the annual pattern - had failed to boost interest. Not since WrestleMania 13 in 1997 had fans cared so little about the annual event.

This might have something to do with the fact that the 2015 Royal Rumble was a bleak creative atrocity enjoyed only by those desperate for WWE to fail.

Daniel Bryan was dumped out in 10 minutes. Every other upper midcard wrestler who you naively thought might have disrupted the pattern of the part-time headline crew was dumped out by Kane and the Big Show.

In 2015.

Dumped is no decorative term, either; they were literally tossed out by the back of their trunks and tights, like hefty bags of garbage. This was all designed to cast Roman Reigns, who had already failed to get over as a babyface, as the lesser of evils.

Hey - at least he isn’t a slow, lumbering Attitude Era relic!

Embrace him as your hero!

Roman won (lol), and the Philly fans rejected him. The noise was a collective din of groans. It was as if they no longer had it in them to hijack the show.

This was Vince telling his audience to piss off for an entire hour.

2. The Invasion

Right.

It could not work, at least initially.

The real stars were right to sit out their cushy deals, and, as evidenced by the hostile reception to Booker T Vs. Buff Bagwell - which while almost impressively mediocre never stood a chance - the WWF fans had been conditioned to receive WCW as the minor leagues.

The thing is, the WWF didn’t have to run with the Invasion storyline immediately. There was nothing to stop them from putting everything in place to relaunch WCW properly in April 2002, with no actual invasion element.

If that actually happened, and the WCW brand got hot under, say, the creative stewardship of Paul Heyman, WWE could have run an annual WWE Vs. WCW super-show. They could have had two WrestleMania-sized shows a year.

And a Starrcade!

And a popular Nitro every week!

They didn’t. They instead turned Booker T into a thick idiot and Diamond Dallas Page into an incel.

This all stemmed from the ingrained need to bury the competition, even though it was no longer competition (!). The WWF won, pissed on WCW’s grave, and called it an angle.

A dream-killer of a programme, certain wrestlers were nothing short of disgraceful in their approach to it. The Undertaker kept his name, but might as well have went by Mean Mark Callus again for how much of a pathetic and defensive loyalist he was throughout.

The origin of the worst period in wrestling - the WWE monopoly years - the Invasion was the first and most upsetting indication that this was Vince’s world.

You were just existing in it.

1. Triple H Beats Booker T

In 2003, WWE told a story about a black man who was belittled by the arrogant white bad guy. Triple H told Booker T that he was only there, with his “nappy hair” to dance for him and entertain the fans.

In any other work of fiction, the good guy wins.

Not in WWE: Triple H defeated Booker T and, what’s more, it took him 23 seconds to crawl over and pin him after hitting the match-winning Pedigree. This was nothing short of hyperbolically evil.

It really felt like some unspeakably awful point was being made with the specific nature of the finish. Why did it take so long? That spot is usually a very transparent tell that the finish isn’t happening - that the wrestler doesn’t want to weaken their finisher.

Surely, WWE knew what reaction they were risking. The outcome was bad enough. The 23 seconds deepened the ugly feeling, mutating an already ill-advised result into something that rampaged beyond the offensive.

Was Triple H really that desperate for heat in 2003? Or was something more suspicious in play?

Triple H, who was very much in control of his character by this point, elected to tell a story in which he was a racist, and went over.

You know that I’m going to change the world / for the better, right? meme?

It wasn’t made for this result, but it should have been.

I’m going to be racist to Booker T.

So people enjoy it more when you lose, right?

Right?