10 Weirdest Ways To Create A Wrestling Championship

3. The WWF Hardcore Championship

The vaunted WWF Hardcore Championship, source of so much entertaining wrestling programming during the Attitude Era, was first created by Vince McMahon and awarded to Mankind as a trick, to manipulate him into being his fake championship candidate leading into the WWF Championship tournament at Survivor Series 1998. The story was that McMahon hadn't been able to control €˜Stone Cold€™ Steve Austin as the WWF Champion for most of that year. He'd finally managed to swindle Austin out of the title, but his tools for doing so - Undertaker and Kane - had proven unreliable. What he needed was a corporate champion who was tough enough to hold on to the title, and unscrupulous enough to cheat to keep it. That man was The Rock, who (not so) coincidentally was at that moment beginning to divorce himself from his own stable, The Nation Of Domination. In order to set up the swerve at Survivor Series, McMahon began misdirection: buttering up Mankind by creating the Hardcore Championship and giving it to him backstage, along with dropping the hint that he considered him like a son. Come Survivor Series, it appeared as though Mankind, the corporate sellout, was being positioned to win the tournament. Obviously, this wasn€™t the case. The Rock swerved everyone, as did Shane and Vince. To add insult to injury, two weeks later, McMahon's enforcer the Big Boss Man took Mankind's Hardcore title from him in a ladder match on RAW. Foley would never hold it again, although it would become a defining part of the promotion, taking place mainly on the undercard.