10 Most Extreme Rules In WWE History

Continuing a series of articles (very) loosely based around the titles of upcoming WWE Network special events (I understand they’re also available on pay-per-view, but really, unless you’re working a retro Luddite gimmick in real life, why would you?) we had Extreme Rules grace our screens last night.

That means it’s time to take a look at those WWE matches which suffered from the most extreme rules you’ve ever heard of: gimmicks that overcomplicated simple stories, stipulations that were so overblown that they swamped the match.

It’s a fairly recent phenomenon: up until the advent of the Monday Night War and the Attitude Era upping the ante, feuds still tended to be capped by a simple cage match. Back in 1992, Vince McMahon considered the idea of a two-person ladder match between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels in 1992 a daring novelty.

Special mention needs to go to the entirety of the WrestleMania 2000 card: featuring nine matches but only one straight singles bout (a two minute catfight between two non-wrestling valets), it’s the dictionary definition of overbooked and undercooked.

So, here they are: the most pointlessly complex, over-the-top and poorly thought through match gimmicks on the WWE’s books.

Taking place as the main event of the ECW taping on February 5th 2008, the Gulf Of Mexico match could easily have been a throwback to the real ECW: a street fight, with the participants (CM Punk and Chavo Guerrero) in jeans and t-shirts, that escalated into a brawl throughout the arena, out into the grounds and over to the boardwalk.

The twist was that the match could only be won by one participant throwing the other into the Gulf Of Mexico. This wasn’t the Cannonball Run style cross-country adventure that implies (that would have been amazing). The taping took place at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, and the water’s edge was only a hundred yards or so from the WWE’s front door.

There’s a lot wrong with this match - aside from the fact that, strictly speaking, said water was not the Gulf Of Mexico but Corpus Christi Bay, a good fifteen miles from the Gulf Of Mexico and completely separated from it by a series of barrier islands.

For a start, this wouldn’t be like other rule-free melees, careening all over the place before reaching a climax back at ringside. The completely unnecessary overbooked finish required the pair to be outside the arena. Even a Falls Count Anywhere match can return to finish in front of the audience but here, once they left they weren’t coming back.

Secondly, this kind of match needs time to build the drama. Punk and Guerrero’s encounter was eleven minutes long from bell to bell, meaning that they were forced to bail from the ring and start brawling their way offstage in the opening seconds of the match.

Booking the main event to play out without a live crowd is like going to a gig and having the headline band play out on the big screen instead of on the stage. The crowd isn’t getting what they paid to see, and the band might as well be soundchecking.

WWE had booked the main event for the night to take place outside the arena - once the crowd realised that, they began leaving in droves. After ‘GTSing’ Chavo into the murky water, Punk posed and ‘roared’ for the camera for long, awkward seconds on a darkened pier in front of no one but an amused cameraman.