10 WrestleMania Main Events That Nobody Wanted To See

10. Sgt. Slaughter vs. Hulk Hogan - WrestleMania VII

For Slaughter's first Wrestlemania appearance, he actually got to main event the show. Unfortunately, it was one of the lowest drawing Wrestlemania's in history and as the urban legend goes, forced the WWF to invent an imaginary bomb threat to explain the lack of ticket sales. Slaughter had been a star in the WWF during the early 1980s as one of Vince's top babyfaces but left following a dispute with Vince McMahon over participating in the GI Joe toy line. After a stint in the AWA, Slaughter returned to New York but this time Vince wanted him to do it as a heel. With tensions in the Persian Gulf at a high and the possibility of American military action increasing with each day, McMahon tried to play off of these real-life events by turning Slaughter into an Iraqi sympathizer and giving him a Saddam Hussein lookalike as his manager. To say this was a tasteless angle would be an extreme understatement. According to Slaughter, he received numerous death threats and was denied service at restaurants due to his portrayal of the character. However, that heat wasn't what promoters know as "good heat". "Good heat" causes fans to run out and buy tickets to see the heel get what's coming to him. Bad heat causes people to change the channel and not come back to the product. That's exactly what happened to Wrestlemania VII. The WWF scheduled the event to take place in the huge Los Angeles Memorial Colosseum and promised 100,000 fans would be in attendance. However, ticket sales were so poor that it would have been downright embarrassing for the WWF to put on a show in such a huge venue with basically no one there. In a rush, Vince McMahon made up a story about a "bomb threats and security concerns" forcing the WWF to move the event to the much smaller LA Sports Arena. Only about 16,000 fans attended the show, so the move was logical if not embarrassing. The match itself was fine and featured Hogan doing his usual act to protect the good old USA but no one had any interest in seeing Slaughter dressed in an Iraqi military outfit and parading around with photos of himself and Saddam Hussein. Wrestlemania VII may have been relevant to current events at the time but it wasn't relevant to wrestling fans.