10 Times WWE And WCW Screwed Over Their World Champions

5. Bob Backlund's Three Day Title Reign

The boundaries between the roles of 'heel' and 'face' in wrestling have gradually faded, wrestlers act less like clearly defined heroes and villains -f aces can act like heels, heels can act like faces, as long as the crowd support and reaction is appropriate, it doesn't really matter what a wrestler's alignment is most of the time. However, back in the mid 90's, wrestling promotions still cleanly followed the rules of heel vs face pretty religiously, especially when important titles were involved. In 1994, Vince McMahon wanted to put the WWF Championship on Diesel, but couldn't as Bret Hart currently had it, both competitors were face. Because of this, Backlund would instead go on to face Bret Hart at Survivor Series 94, eventually winning the 'throw in the towel' submission match, after performing the crossface chickenwing for a daunting eight minutes. Backlund then lost the WWF Title a mere 3 days later at a house show in Madison Square Garden to Diesel, in an eight second match. Clearly, Backlund was being used as a transition champion to carry the belt from one face to another, but this doesn't mean he wasn't screwed in his treatment. Would it have been so hard to delay the title loss to the next pay-per-view, if not a week or two later on Raw. Plus, there's not much justification to making Backlund look incredibly weak by squashing him, as that's the guy who just became champion and beat the incredible Bret Hart. There should be at least some believable aspect to it, but there wasn't, it made abundantly clear that Backlund's simply being used as a delivery boy. Either way, champions should seem stronger than how Backlund's second reign did.