10 Alternative Takes On Hated Wrestling Moments
2. David Arquette's WCW World Title Win
David Arquette's WCW Heavyweight Title win is often cited as the death knell of the very company, but just look at the idiocy that preceded it.
In late 1999, Vince Russo was drafted in to revive an already moribund company in critical condition following a smorgasbord of baffling creative and personnel decisions - but it became agonisingly clear that he could not offer an alternative product to the WWF because he only knew how to write WWF-lite.
To underscore how spectacularly ill-suited he was for the job, Russo took the Cruiserweight division - the one area WCW fans consistently cared about and the one area Vince McMahon could never bring himself to - and made his non-wrestler writing partner Ed Ferrara its champion in order to allocate valuable TV time to a tasteless rib at the expense of Jim Ross.
WCW was dead before the harebrained early 2000 publicity stunt that was awarding David Arquette the title via Eric Bischoff. The title was even dead; floating atop a pile of submerged, steaming sh*t was the decision to strip Sid of the belt because he pinned the wrong twin brother to contend for it in the first place. This happened just over a week after the title was stripped from Chris Benoit because he was sane (!) enough to recognise how abysmal the company was.
Unlike so many reviled wrestling moments, like the revelation that Hornswoggle was the anonymous RAW General Manager all along, Arquette's WCW Title win had a happy ending.
Arquette donated the money he earned in WCW to the families of the deceased Brian Pillman and Owen Hart and the paralysed Darren Drozdov. It didn't kill WCW, and it helped grieving families cope with unspeakable loss.