20 Biggest Wrestling Moments That Ever Happened In July

10. Vince Russo "Shoots" On Hulk Hogan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_DHYPKdUdM Date: July 9th, 2000 Vince Russo loves him a shoot, even when it's nothing more than a "shoot". We all know this to be true, and Russo is the first person to admit it. What we got at 2000's Bash At The Beach pay-per-view seemed to go above and beyond any of that, though. What was originally going to be Hulk Hogan VS Jeff Jarrett for the WCW World Title ended up with Jarrett literally laying down for Hogan, Hogan getting pissed, still pinning Jarrett, and leaving. Of course, this was merely the weird appetizer. The weird main course was yet to come. A little later on, Russo walked to the ring and cut a scathing promo on Hogan, accusing him of being a "backstage politician", mentioning Hulk's infamous "creative control" card (where he got to basically book his own character, winning and losing when he wanted to, and not when he was told to), and essentially saying the belt Hogan just won earlier in the show was a "memorial belt" and that Jeff Jarrett was still the WCW Champion. He would then praise the wrestlers in the locker room who cared about wrestling and WCW, specifically pointing out Jarrett and Booker T, before booking a WCW Title match between Jarrett and Booker for later in the night. Booker, in his first chance as a main event player, would go on to win the title and the rest of his career was pretty much made from there. There is still a lot of controversy as to how much of Russo's shoot was just that... a shoot. If you ask wrestling fans, it seems like most of them don't buy into the reality of the situation, and think it was something of a mix between shoot and work. The popular assumption is that Russo and Hogan planned it out, but that Hogan didn't like how far Russo took things, so he would file a lawsuit against Russo for defamation (the lawsuit would be dismissed eventually). Hogan says something similar, saying that Russo turned a work into a shoot, and that he (Hogan) was double-crossed by Russo and Turner executives that didn't want to pay him anymore. Eric Bischoff's version of the story is pretty much the same, saying that the plan was for Hogan to leave for a while, then come back for a "Champion VS Champion" match to crown an undisputed champion, but that Russo screwed him by firing him on-air. Russo has had multiple versions of his story, but ultimately says things were done to "swerve" the fans and the rest of the WCW roster, and that Hogan and Bischoff not only knew what would be happening, but agreed to it, only for Hogan to file the defamation lawsuit and claim he had no knowledge of anything. It's a jumbled situation, and no matter what version of the story you believe, it was something memorable for WCW, perhaps for the wrong reasons.