The WORST Wrestling Moment Every Year (1989 - 2025)

37. 1989 | The Debut Of The Ding Dongs

Realising that the end is near is almost worse than the end. 

A down period is bad, but you’re stuck with it. You’re able to enjoy and savour the good bits. There’s nothing worse than watching a great product start to fall apart because some idiot doesn’t get it. The dread is an awful feeling. But enough about late 2000 WWF - this is about Pizza Hut executive Jim Herd, and how his harebrained attempt to make WCW kid-friendly ultimately killed one of the all-time great wrestling promotions. 

The timeless animosity of Ric Flair Vs. Terry Funk, the futuristic awesomeness of Sting Vs. Great Muta, the state-of-the-art wonder that was Flair Vs. Ricky Steamboat: 1989 NWA was so unbelievably great. The dread that set in when the Ding Dongs debuted in July was intense as all hell, because that was when you knew it was over. Cool. They feel the need to be the WWF because that’s what’s in. Great. 

The Ding Dongs was the NWA’s attempt to reach the kids. (Kids love bells, everybody knows that.) The teams loved bells and were actual bells. Whichever human bell was stationed on the apron would - just for the one match before the bells tolled, mercifully - ring a giant bell in an apparent bid to alert their partner into a state of readiness. 

This was poetic, if absolutely nothing else. The sound of a bell is ominous, in some contexts, and by the end of the match, the tag team quite literally fell apart; the small bells affixed to the team’s boots were scattered across the mat.

So bad it's good, but also so bad it was the beginning of the end.