20 Most Hated Heel Moves In Wrestling History
5. The Fingerpoke Of Doom
The darling of list articles the length and breadth of smarkdom, the Fingerpoke of Doom normally only surfaces in the top three of articles like, 10 Reasons Why WCW Sucked Bottom, or 15 Booking Decisions Made Entirely Of Poo… so much so, that people tend to forget the context of the moment itself.
It was during that epic clusterf*ck of crappy booking that had infected WCW around the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999. At Starrcade in December 1998, Kevin Nash had just beaten Goldberg’s massive 173 match winning streak and won the WCW Championship with the aid of a taser, to significant controversy - but who remembers that Nash was a babyface at the time, or that Scott Hall’s taser attack was supposed to be without Nash’s knowledge?
The nWo had fragmented months earlier into the heel nWo Hollywood, led by Hollywood Hogan, versus the babyface nWo Wolfpac, headed by Nash. The honourable Nash had felt so bad about the circumstances of the tainted victory that he’d offered Goldberg a rematch on the first Nitro of 1999.
On the night, however, Goldberg was arrested backstage, and with the main event suddenly in doubt, the WCW Championship match became an nWo slugfest, as Hollywood Hogan reappeared on Nitro for the first time in weeks to challenge his former friend. It was nWo Hollywood versus nWo Wolfpac, the black-and-white versus the black-and-red.
Everyone knows what happened next, and had the fans not been so irritated by the company’s insulting booking decisions in recent months and the general slide in the quality of WCW programming, they might have taken it to be the heel move that it was, as Hogan simply poked Nash in the chest for a massive back bump and the pinfall.
Nash and his cronies been duping everyone for some time. The Goldberg screwjob wasn’t a unilateral decision by Scott Hall, working alone: it was a calculated nWo plan to get the title back onto Hogan without the wily old goat having to set foot in the ring with the undefeated monster again.
Taken in isolation, it’s actually a really neat piece of creative. It answered the awkward question of what on earth you do with a hugely over performer fifteen months into a winning streak angle - you have him screwed by the biggest heel stable in the company, and then have him dismantle them over the coming months, working his way up the food chain until he hit Hogan on top.
Unfortunately, context is everything: the fans were turning on WCW in droves, scornful of so many dodgy swerves, lame booking choices and anti-climactic feuds. The storytelling was so muddy that it wasn’t even immediately clear what was going on, and no one trusted the company to make good on any of this build-up. And, of course, they didn’t.