10 Times Wrestlers Botched Their Biggest Moment

Many of us thankfully get our biggest public botches over with in school plays, stumbling over roles as animals whose presence at the nativity is questionable at best.

Professional wrestlers, on the other hand, live their lives in front of live crowds and TV cameras – not to mention the ever-present potential for fan encounters. Night after night, they are not only positioned in high pressure and risky positions, but there is always someone around to document it.

While most blips provide a week’s worth of sharing and mirth, such as Mandy Rose’s WrestleMania slip, they very rarely damage careers or come at make-or-break moments. Some have used botches to further their TV time and create hype, notably Nia Jax injuring her ‘hole’ and Titus’ Greatest Royal Rumble slip.

But some are more seriously affected than others. In professional wrestling, a talent will often only get one chance at breaking out of the mid-card to become a main eventer.

A wrestling legacy is one of the most precarious things to build. Big moments come with even bigger pressure. An ill-timed botch has caused even some promising careers to plummet into a brief clip on a fan-made cringe compilation.

Let’s get this one out of the way: The Shockmaster’s ill-fated debut is wrestling’s biggest blooper, rightly receiving the first mention in any discussion of wrestling botches. The mere stumble is not what makes the moment. It’s the hype, the tension, the special effects, the presentation as a serious threat.

As we learned through his garbled voice box, The Shockmaster arrived in WCW with the intent to rule the world rather than blooper listicles. Nothing about him was convincing, though his “you wanna piece of me?” inflicts intense cringe, sounding like Scrappy Doo if he accidentally took a seat on Old Sparky.

In hindsight, it’s difficult to see how anyone believed The Shockmaster would get over in a debut WarGames match that featured Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and Harlem Heat. Even without the stumble that shocked the world, he was a costume store abomination with a cheaply bedazzled Stormtrooper helmet, which gave the big man unintentional t*t-glitter, clad in funeral home curtains fashioned into a trench-coat vest with puffy sleeves.

While his WCW career has become overshadowed and lost in legend, The Shockmaster morphed into a semi-successful klutz gimmick. Still, he never troubled the top of the card again.