10 Wrestling Finishes Performed On The Fly

A year earlier in February 2000, the Radicalz - Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit, Perry Saturn and Dean Malenko - had debuted in the WWF as friends of Mick Foley from WCW.

Angling for a contract on the February 3rd Smackdown, they were put through the Horrible Boss wringer by Triple H and the McMahon-Helmsley Faction that ran the WWF: if they could win two out of three matches that night, they’d be given WWF contracts. Malenko would take on X-Pac, the team of Guerrero and Saturn would wrestle the New Age Outlaws, and Triple H himself would fight Benoit in that night’s main event.

Like most two-out-of-three gimmicks, the storyline was predicated on each side winning a fall apiece in order for the drama to build to the third act, the climax. In this case, it was the WWF Champion and the company’s tog dog, against the man who had been WCW Champion only weeks earlier, who’d left the WWF’s fiercest competitor while holding their top title to get better career prospects in New York.

Sadly, almost all the drama of that potentially epic confrontation fizzled out in the second act. Malenko had lost to X-Pac as planned, leaving Guerrero and Saturn to defeat the Outlaws. Unfortunately, Guerrero severely dislocated his elbow in performing a frog splash on Billy Gunn. In tremendous pain, he told Road Dogg to pin him: the New Age Outlaws had won the match.

It’s difficult to see whether Guerrero panicked, or whether pain clouded his judgement. However, his decision to end the match early with the wrong outcome meant that the Radicalz had lost two out of three matches before the third could take place. There were no longer any stakes for that evening’s main event: strictly speaking, the match shouldn’t even take place.

In the end, the Triple H/Benoit match went ahead. However, there was never any decent explanation given as to why Triple H, a self-serving bully who’d been railroaded into giving the Radicalz a shot in the first place, would give Benoit a match he didn’t have to. Worse, the announcers bizarrely bigged up Triple H as a gutsy fighter who lived to compete - hardly the impression you’d want given of the company’s biggest heel.

In the long term, none of it mattered: the Radicalz were scheduled to turn heel on Foley and side with the McMahon-Helmsley Faction anyway. However, had the tag team competitors had the presence of mind to improvise a finish that had Guerrero’s team coming out on top, or had the booking team come up with a better reason for the main event to go ahead - or even a different main event - they wouldn’t all have come across like so many headless chickens in the short term.