10 Terrible Wrestling Moments (That Were Almost Even Worse)

Think about the very worst of pro wrestling right now.

Damien Priest controls the lighting rig with his mind, but at least there's no goo coming out of his f*cking head.

The House of Torture is irredeemably bad. Relentlessly oppressive Americanised heat worked years after the Bullet Club made it feel like a transgression again, the novelty has worn off, and there's no vocal rejection of and thus a purpose behind the repetitive drivel that makes the referee look as thick as Braun Strowman's Twitter activity. But at least it can't get any worse. It's not as if EVIL is being booked in 40-minute Okada main events like he was in 2020.

The Sammy Guevara/Tay Conti onscreen relationship is a disaster. It is a total disaster. Sammy Guevara risked turning himself heel by relentlessly bragging about his life on social media. It's a complex issue. It's his personal account, but he also uses it to market his fictional persona. The babyface is meant to face struggle, but perhaps the audience should judge him purely by his onscreen performances. The issue now is that the struggling babyface is now talking about bonking his Jim Ross-liked-this-level girlfriend onscreen. His onscreen arc is the opposite of a struggle.

Still, it's not as if he's drilling Conti raw on national television. That would be even dumber. There is a limit to how dumb even wrestling can get at its worst.

Or is there...?

So there was that one banger with Chad Gable and Robert Roode, and there was that Ladder match with the New Day at TLC '19 which, while very good, was undermined by Big E being instructed by an agent to take two whole minutes to set up a suspended ladder structure while Dawson and Wilder sold the whole time.

Beyond that, it was a failure. Really, given FTR's wonderful 2022, it scans as a disgrace and a disaster in retrospect. They are outstanding as babyfaces. Dax Harwood's hot tag is unreal, but he's just as brilliant patrolling the apron and remonstrating with the ref. He knows what good cheating looks like. He holds it to a standard.

WWE couldn't even get them right as heels.

WWE had them scoot across the apron with burning anuses. In NXT, they threaded classic matches together to create thunderous reactions. On the main roster, they had threadworms.

As leaked by Bodyslam.net, the Revival very nearly met a bitterly familiar and even worse fate: after Dash was booked to fall over for a week or two, in a retread of the dreaded clumsy gimmick, they were nearly repackaged as jesters.

They were nearly clowns because good wrasslin' is amusing to WWE.

And you have spent the last 20 years wondering why WWE doesn't care about midcard titles.