6 Terrible Final Holders Of Wrestling Championships

There's a huge honour in being the first of anything. Posterity remembers your landmark achievement. Everybody can name the first man on the moon (Neil Armstrong), and likewise, the first trumpeter on the moon (Louis Armstrong). Spare a thought for poor, forgotten Buzz Aldrin, then, and remember: second comes right after first.

In wrestling, being crowned an inaugural title holder is a similarly huge accolade. In most cases, it's a vote of confidence from a promotion that you're the one who can sell the legitimacy of this fresh leather and spangly new gold, a worthless prop in itself.

Buddy Rogers, Pat Patterson, Orville Brown: the list of first title holders reads like a who's who of wrestling history - because it literally is. This established canon means that, whenever a new championship is created, the person picked as its primary is automatically imbued with decades of implied prestige. On the way up, the belt makes the man; on the way down, the opposite. It was for these contrary reasons Finn Bálor and Chris Jericho established the Universal and AEW Championships respectively.

But what does being the last mean? Championships are deactivated when they are no longer a draw; therefore, being a final title holder is a dubious honour. You're what's left of a dying division. Or, in the worst cases, you could be the one actually responsible for killing it.

What does your mind conjure when you think of an archetypal ECW champion?

A blood-soaked brawler who sacrifices his skin and safety in pursuit of infamy like The Sandman or Sabu? A technically gifted athlete promoting a pioneering brand of wrestling hitherto unseen on the scene, such as Rob Van Dam or Masato Tanaka? How about an ordinary-shaped everyman and eternal tryer through whom fans live vicariously, such as Tommy Dreamer? And what about him - what about Raven?

None of of those suggestions entered WWE's thoughtbubble when it came time to crown the final ECW champion, as the promotion's revival bid an overdue farewell in 2010. What had started as a faithful homage was by this point nothing more than a zombified husk, but the least WWE could have done is draft an ECW original as valediction. Instead, they put the strap on the supremely muscular 6'3", 280lb frame of Ezekiel Jackson - the answer to the question "who is the most archetypal WWE champion you can think of?"