41 Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics In Wrestling History RANKED
It’s official: Bob Backlund is as bad as doing propaganda for Saudi Arabia.
Every year, the readers of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter are asked to cast votes on the Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic. Now, wrestling is a rotten business. We love, hate, and tolerate it regardless, but it’s awful, we all know it, and we try our best to ignore it. The award is designed to never let ourselves forget.
Shockingly, this list is not entirely dominated by WWE.
World Class Championship Wrestling is the promotion that, after WCW, came closest to giving WWE a real test. Only, the battle waged wasn’t for “ratings supremacy” but rather “being absolutely, stunningly awful”.
This award is the exact sort of thing the wrestlers of yore would take issue with, when presenting the case that Meltzer was a danger to a then-secretive industry. They didn’t want the ticket-buying public to know that their beloved “business” was all a bit foul. That, or they were upset that Meltzer didn’t rate their matches highly. One of the two. Almost certainly the latter.
The list of previous winners shouldn't be funny - it should be the exact opposite of funny, in fact - but, to a degree, it is.
While it is in theory a worthy award, one designed to cast sunlight over the darkness at wrestling’s toxic heart, the problem is that some - not all, but some - pro wrestling fans are as sensitive and empathetic as a Lance Storm obituary. They are nice and ethical enough to determine the truly rancid attempts to monetise tragedy, but they also conflate actually disgusting promotional tactics with a wrestler they don’t like getting a push at the expense of one of the best wrestlers in the world.
In the WON, there’s no common thread to the award winners, nor any way to distinguish what was truly evil business or unpopular booking - but that’s where this deep-dive list comes in…
Content Warning: some of the following list entries make reference to sexual assault.
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