10 Awesome WWE Returns RUINED By Awful Reactions

Ric Flair to Nitro in 1998. HHH to Madison Square Garden in 2002. John Cena at the 2008 Royal Rumble. Brock Lesnar at the Raw after 'Mania in 2012. Edge at the 2020 Royal Rumble. All classic returns met with incredible crowd reactions and a sense of grandeur by the announce team.

This piece is not about those kinds of returns.

No, this is about the exact opposite - wrestling returns that were met with an overwhelming 'Meh.' These are situations where the wrestler themselves were no doubt psyched to emerge from gorilla position to a cascade of applause and cheers, only to be met with boos, or, even worse, silence.

It's not always the crowd's fault, though. In some cases, the announce team, who is supposed to be responsible for selling the moment, utterly fails to do so, or does so too late. There's only one opportunity to put over the wrestler's return as a huge deal, and if they can't set the tone in a professional and exciting way, then that opportunity is lost. If the people getting paid to be enthusiastic aren't jazzed to see someone come back, why should we be?

Let's take a look at ten times when what should have been awesome wrestling returns turned out to be duds.

They tried. They really did.

This match represents the attempt to try to re-introduce WCW to TV, an experiment in keeping WCW alive after its acquisition by WWF. The point of this match was to highlight 'the best' that WCW had to offer. The defunct promotion's return, four months after Vince McMahon's purchase.

It's also the only WWF TV match for Buff Bagwell. That's probably for the best.

From the start, the match was doomed. WWF had been conditioning their fans to actively hate WCW for half a decade, and the fans responded in kind. Booker got a decent pop, Bagwell less so, especially after the surprising response his name had first generated when mentioned by Vince McMahon a few months before.

Because of this, anything associated with the match was booed. Stacy Keibler as the ring announcer. Arn Anderson and Scott Hudson as the commentary team. Shane McMahon as the 'owner' of WCW. Booker and Buff.

It wasn't necessarily a bad match, just a very hostile crowd, many of whom can be seen heading for the exits during the match. It wasn't until Stone Cold and Kurt Angle (remember that whole Invasion thing?) interfered in the match that there was any real crowd response.

This should have been, as Scott Hudson said, a historic moment marking the end of the Monday Night Wars. Instead it was a fiasco.