10 Wrestling Matches That Were Controversially CANCELLED
1. Taz Vs Sabu (ECW Barely Legal '97)
The payoff to a near-two year rivalry did indeed go down on Extreme Championship Wrestling's historic first pay-per-view, but a match that felt like it may never happen almost hit the skids in late-1996 when the entire event looked to be as good as done.
Facts trumped fiction for the hardcore outfit at the time, when the infamous "Mass Transit" incident occurred, resulting in a Christmas Eve cancellation of Barely Legal altogether. The 17-year-old barely-trained Erich 'Mass Transit' Kulas lied his way into a substitute spot and was bladed so brutally by New Jack that blood literally squirted out of his head, and this was enough to send the providers running for the hills. Ostensibly forever.
After one full year of unanswered call-outs following a nasty split at November To Remember 1995, Taz and Sabu finally stared each other down at the 1996 version of the event on November 16th. It fell exactly one week before Kulas' bloodletting and the winter of the company's discontent. The destination was dead.
There was no singular showdown Paul Heyman had exerted more patience with than the battle between 'The Human Suplex Machine' and the 'Homicidal, Suicidal, Genocidal' madman. To give fans the long-awaited first taste in November only to lose it (and everything else the shows had been building towards) seven days later was a darkness-before-the-dawn period like few others in wrestling history.