10 Most Hated Wrestling Matches Involving Beloved Wrestlers
From Bret Hart to The Undertaker: circling the drain in WWE, TNA, and beyond...
The quote The Joker in Alam Moore's seminal The Killing Joke: “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy.”
In the already crazy world of professional wrestling, insanity is quite a price. A fearsome Giant who used Japan as his proving ground, bestowed with a Lordship on his return to WWE, can appear to boos and jeers and descend into dancing in lingerie for unwitting strangers within weeks.
However, some figures in professional wrestling are so adored they can swiftly move on from a bad day near enough unscathed, having absorbed little of the blame. They are like the protagonist of one of those car insurance advertisements, ploughed into by two limousines and a sports car decked out with flame decals and a spoiler. They were just there while disaster happened.
While most on this list are given a pass for their part in these calamities based on their body of work leading up to their in-ring catastrophe, others have been able to make the twists and turns, integral to the structure of professional wrestling, work for them, triggering a retroactive reprieve. Either way, these matches were disasters...
10. Bret Hart Vs. Vince McMahon (WWE WrestleMania XXVI)
The run up to Bret Hart and Vince McMahon’s match at ‘The Showcase of the Immortals’ was hyped with a betrayal via d*ck kick, screaming variations of “[Blank] screwed [Blank]”, and a fake car crash proceeded by a fake broken leg.
As legendary as the Montreal Screwjob is, even by 2010 everything had already been said. Fans knew that Hart was in no fit state to wrestle or to pull out a performance from McMahon. The announcement of the No Holds Barred stipulation clued fans into this being more of a No Holds match.
On the night, we were given a McMahon promo and an elongated double-double cross, with McMahon paying the Hart Family to be lumberjacks but them changing allegiance to Bret having taken the money up front. The match was a shocking display of strikes, a one-sided beating with a crowbar and a steel chair, and Bret repeatedly teasing a Sharpshooter but breaking it with crotch stomps.
This made sense in storyline, but soon became tiresome. Once he applied the hold, Vince immediately tapped. Hart unleased the vengeance he’d held onto since 1997, but this match isn’t befitting of ‘The Excellence of Execution’s’ legacy.