10 Worst Anticlimaxes In WWE History

Not only are we not guaranteed happy endings in life… we’re not even guaranteed endings at all. Life really isn’t fair… so that’s part of why we’re attracted to simplistic, epic storytelling in fiction. Our favourite stories tend to be larger than life: they don’t tell it like it is, but as it should be.

There’s no narrative that exemplifies that kind of childlike wish-fulfilment than professional wrestling. Other tall tales are told in film, television, prose, even comic books, and they’ll often play with and subvert the audience’s expectations: but wrestling made its name on delivering classic goodie-versus-baddie conflicts requiring emotional investment from its audience, and wrestling’s business model is based on delivering a solid return on that investment so that its audience always comes back for more.

All of that time and money we’ve spent, all of that love we’ve put into it, has to be worthwhile… and as most serious fans know, that’s not always the case. But we’re not here today to talk about wrestling gone wrong, to rehash the usual fandom complaint that our favourite thing sucks. No, this article is about those angles created to build to a pay-off that never materialised: the fireworks that fizzled out, the rainbows with no pot of gold and the cornettoes with no chocolatey bit at the end. 

These are some of the sorriest anti-climaxes in WWF and WWE history.

Set up as a professional feud turned horribly personal, this one had a big fight build: top heel Randy Orton had taken his habit of randomly assaulting people for no reason a step too far, and attacked the McMahon family, including babyfaced Triple H’s wife Stephanie. Helmsley had returned the favour by attacking the Ortons at home, and the grudge match storyline was due to climax with two of the company’s best in-ring performers meeting on the biggest night of the year, in the third and final main event, with the WWE championship on the line. It should have been huge.

In the end, the match didn’t deliver the desired big fight reaction, playing out to disinterested fans. It was, after all, the third main event, and there had been six matches on the undercard. To make matters worse, the instant classic that was Undertaker vs. Shawn Michaels had taken place as the first main event, followed by an average triple threat for the world heavyweight championship. Traditional booking involves cooldown matches for a reason: arranging all three main events one after the other without a break was practically guaranteeing audience apathy.

More than that, the match had a stipulation that if Triple H lost by disqualification, he’d lose the title. The crowd knew that the storyline required the babyface to take the heel to the woodshed, but the stipulation was setting up a bloodless, PG era main event instead – and Triple H and Orton had essentially been feuding on and off ever since the Game kicked the Legend Killer out of Evolution five years earlier in 2004. The paying audience had been watching the pair of them main event pay-per-views against one another every year since then, often squabbling over one of the world titles, and often with a gimmick like Last Man Standing attached.

In the end, a referee bump allowed Triple H to use the sledgehammer to defeat his archenemy, but by then it was just too late for the crowd to get into it. A red hot angle was let down by short-sighted booking on the night…