10 Times WWE Fans Were Outraged At WrestleMania
9. Was This The Worst WrestleMania Match Ever?!
13 minutes and 45 seconds.
This match was already promoted at the vast expense of the entire product; to book it, Michael Cole, play-by-play commentator and de facto, authoritative voice of WWE, had to sh*t all over the talent in the alternate, correct universe he had to promote as good/skilled/generally worth your investment of time and money.
This wasn't the correct universe. This was a universe in which Cole told you, ceaselessly and obnoxiously, that everybody you liked was a geek or a loser or a punchline. Except the Miz.
Enter our heroic surrogate: the past his physical prime Jerry Lawler!
And thus the match was set: a battle of commentators. And it was dogsh*t. So dogsh*t, in fact, that the 2011 VINTAGE of Michael Cole - about as unpopular as Vince McMahon is a decade later, only you had to endure him 100% of the time - was barely even jeered for getting his face slammed into the Anonymous GM's podium.
A farcical emulation of a comedy match worked piss poorly, fans did jeer Jack Swagger for maiming Lawler - not because he was the heel, but because they knew the merciful end was no longer in sight. They hated this. Vince McMahon hated this. He told Cole that it was the worst WrestleMania match of all time.
And then he still ran it back twice on pay-per-view, because he likes to insert crushed, dried leaves into your a*sehole.