Thanks to Fin Martin for his assistance with this one. At TNAs Genesis pay-per-view on November 19th 2006, monster heel Abyss won the NWA World Heavyweight Championship from NWA legend Sting. The match wasnt the main event - Kurt Angles white hot feud with Samoa Joe took that honour - but it was over enough that the crowd was into it at least, at the beginning. Apparently the match had a no-disqualification stipulation that no one had been told about, as the referee allowed weapons and hardcore props to come into play right from the beginning. Sting immediately recovered his trusty black baseball bat from Abyss satanic manager James Mitchell and swung at the masked fiend. The referee allowed it. As the action went on, chairs, barbed wire, thumbtacks and a couple of referee bumps also featured heavily, the match going into the crowd - yet none of these things earned either man a DQ or a count out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9-8mKmKQcE Finally, Sting tied Abyss feet to his rappelling rope and hoisted him upside down into mid-air to batter him with soft-looking chair shots. The referee allowed this long-winded torture spot to take place. Taking Abyss down again, Sting dragged him to the stage, where he prepared to slam him through a table wrapped in barbed wire. This time, the referee didnt approve and tried to intervene: Sting shoved the referee out of the way twice, and when he came back again, weakly clotheslined him to the floor. Just before Sting pushed Abyss off the stage and through the barbed wire table, the prone referee pointed towards the wrestlers and the timekeeper (a psychic who knew immediately what that random gesture from across the room meant) instantly rang the bell. Sting had been disqualified for the clothesline, and Abyss was declared the winner: worse, the referee then awarded him the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. NWA rules occasionally (ie, when convenient) allowed for titles to change hands in the event of a disqualification - the NWA World Tag Team Championship had changed hands twice in 2004 after DQ finishes. Despite this, fans were enraged. The inconsistency was maddening. Firstly, the rule had never been employed for the NWA world singles title on TNA television before. Fans knew that the accepted standard was that the title didnt change hands on a disqualification: Sting himself had won an NWA world title match by disqualification against Jeff Jarrett three years earlier on a TNA weekly pay-per-view, and failed to win the title. Secondly, the DQ made no sense. The entire bout had been fought under the rules of a streetfight up until that point. Despite the overt weapons shots throughout, the scrapping in and out of the crowd, the torture spot and the two occasions when the referee had been manhandled before then, apparently one ropey looking clothesline was the last straw.
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