20 Worst Wrestling PPVs Of All Time
Abandon all hope ye who enter here...
Pay-per-views are supposed to be professional wrestling's zenith. It's at these monumental month-end events that weeks and weeks of build finally come to a head. Beefs are settled, storylines are resolved, and the year's most epic matches take place before a worldwide audience.
The NWA pioneered the format in the early 1980s, and WWE jumped on the bandwagon with 1985's Wrestling Classic. This marked one of the biggest production changes in wrestling history, and slowly but surely, pay-per-view events gradually became an integral part of wrestling's presentation.
With Raw and SmackDown both promoting brand-specific events, you can barely move without tripping over a PPV in 2016. The emphasis on such shows has never been higher, and while diminishing returns and over-saturation have diminished the value of transitional shows like Battleground and Backlash, WrestleMania is still the biggest event of the year, and SummerSlam, Survivor Series and the Royal Rumble are as important as ever.
As with everything in wrestling, things don't always go to plan. PPV's are supposed to be benchmark shows, but for every WrestleMania X-Seven or Money In The Bank 2011, there's a New Blood Rising or King Of The Ring 1995. Unfortunately, wrestling history is peppered with PPV events that have fallen woefully short of expectations, and left all involved with egg on their face.
This is an ode to those shows so bad, they make Hogan-era TNA feel like the Golden Age's second coming. These are the 20 worst wrestling PPV's of all time...
20. NWA Bunkhouse Stampede 1988
Starting in 1985, the Bunkhouse Stampede was an annual tournament held by Jim Crockett Promotions. Initially devised as a way to increase fans' interest in JCP, it was a standard battle royal-style match in which the wrestlers competed in "bunkhouse gear" (blue jeans and cowboy boots, apparently), with weapon use encouraged.
1988 saw the Bunkhouse Stampede given its own pay-per-view event, and it was a complete shambles. Nikita Koloff and Bobby Eaton wrestled a turgid time-limit draw, and the Barry Windham vs. Larry Zbyszko stall-fest that followed was just as laborious. The worst was yet to come, however, and the near 30-minute Bunkhouse Stampede main event failed to deliver on any conceivable level.
This particular Stampede saw the 8 competing wrestlers locked inside a steel cage together, with the objective being to throw the opponent out of the cage door or send him over the top of the cage. It was a dishevelled, chaotic mess of a match with very little in the way of actual wrestling, and an incredibly contrived ending saw The Barbarian scale the cage of his own volition, before Dusty Rhodes knocked him off with an elbow.
Not only that, but hundreds of fans showed up an hour late for the event after a printing error on their tickets. The building was only half sold-out in the first place, and this cold start perfectly set the tone for the most laughable PPV the NWA ever produced.