12 Biggest "What If" Scenarios In WWE WrestleMania History
Changing one outcome at a WrestleMania could drastically change the entire history of WWE.
WWE history is littered with a series of twists and turns, with the company weaving from one direction to another, year to year.
Each booking decision affects all subsequent choices, a wrestling butterfly effect that is imperceptible in the grand scheme but becomes a gigantic rabbit hole to gallop down when you start to consider how one change could impact dozens of other decisions.
Change one World title reign, and it could have significant ramifications for the next several champions and booking for years. One wrestler sustains an injury – or doesn’t get hurt – and booking plans look dramatically different, with the booking playing out nothing like it was originally planned.
Case in point: Honky Tonk Man, who became Intercontinental Champion when Butch Reed didn’t show for a television taping on the night they took the title off Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat. Honky was tapped for the honor and then kicked off a then-record 454-day reign. If Reed had actually showed up that night, he would have become IC champ. Would he have held the title until SummerSlam 1988, when Ultimate Warrior finally ended the never-ending Honky Tonk reign?
These “what if” scenarios are magnified when they occur during major angles and shows, and there is no bigger show on WWE’s calendar each year than WrestleMania. Throughout its 40-year history, there are several booking decisions that could have gone a different way and would have significantly changed the company’s course of history. Imagine how unrecognizable WWE might be today if just a few of these situations had unfolded differently.
Get ready to hop into our time machine and mess with history a bit, but don’t worry, we’ll put everything back the way it was before we leave.
Let’s get to it…
12. WrestleMania I: What If It’s Not A Success?
Watch any WWE documentary that involves a recitation of the first WrestleMania, and you will inevitably hear any number of talking heads discuss how the McMahon family had mortgaged everything to put on that event, and that had it failed, they might not have had a company going forward.
And that really is a sound assessment. Had WrestleMania I flopped hard, the McMahons might have been out as owners. That’s an easy scenario to play out, with the company floundering and many of the innovations that followed never coming to fruition. WWF very well could have been bought out and just continued as an extra-regional territory with no Vince to drive the explosive growth everyone experienced.
But what if Mania wasn’t a huge success, but also didn’t tank? The McMahons paid their debts, but they didn’t become the celebrated sports entertainment juggernaut we know today. Does NBC not enter into a partnership with WWF to create Saturday Night’s Main Event? The cable and syndicated programs probably would have still moved forward, but the national explosion we saw in 1985-86 might never have happened - or it might have been delayed until Vince could think of another scheme to push WWF back into the national conversation.
Perhaps WWF still becomes the global leader in sports entertainment, but it would have required another major gambit to take hold if the original WrestleMania wasn’t the catalyst.