8 Wrestlers Who Purposefully Sabotaged Matches

Professional wrestling is 'built' on many things but, for the men and women bending bones inside the ring, it is mostly built on trust. Performers put their bodies and their lives in the hands of their opponent(s) and it is up to them (to a degree) to make sure that they come out of the match in one piece and able to make it to the next town.

Wrestling is all about cooperation between parties and if that cooperation fails to materialise or breaks down entirely, it can make for some very interesting situations. The vast majority of pro wrestling matches pass without incident and everyone involved following the script as planned. Sometimes, however, wrestlers go into business for themselves and purposefully sabotage matches.

The reasons for doing so are varied, but more often than not it is due to a disagreement over the planned outcome.

Yes, wrestlers are sometimes so offended at being told that they're doing the job on that particular night that they ruin the contest for the fans, their opponent and the promotion that are housing it. It is, of course, totally unprofessional and usually results in the performer being blackballed from said promotion (if not a host of others), but that it isn't enough to stop some egotistical icons from doing it anyway...

Eddie Guerrero versus Chris Benoit was the dream match that ECW booker Paul Heyman desperately wanted to put on in during the promotion's prime, but was never able to after Benoit, Guerrero and Dean Malenko were signed by WCW in 1995. At ECW One Night Stand in 2005, Heyman tried to right that wrong by booking the match he'd wanted to see a decade prior.

Latino Heat was coming in hot off a heel turn and was in the middle of a deeply intense feud with Rey Mysterio, whereas Benoit had just been transferred over to Smackdown days earlier. When informed that he would be putting his real-life best friend over clean, Guerrero was not happy. He believed that suffering a clean loss on a major pay-per-view would seriously hurt his momentum, especially considering he was booked to lose repeatedly to Mysterio as well.

So, going into the match, he was angry. Then he became even more agitated when the fans in the Hammerstein Ballroom elected to spend most of their time aiming derogatory chants towards the WWE invaders who were situated in the balcony. Adding to his woes, Eddie suffered a cut to the nose during one of the match's early exchanges and had to take a breather to regain his composure.

Didn't work. 

Guerrero was furious and, in response to the fans and those that had booked him to lose, he purposefully entered a lacklustre performance. What could and really should have been an epic between two storied rivals and industry veterans was instead 'just OK'. While it wasn't an out-and-out stinker, everyone knew they were capable of so much more and it looked even to the casual viewer as though Guerrero was uninterested throughout.

Including The Crippler, it seems, who had some stern words for his road buddy after the match both in the ring and backstage. At one point, Eddie can be seen to mouth 'I owe you one', perhaps an admission of culpability and a promise to have a better one together further down the road. Guerrero left the arena immediately after his match, neglecting to stay around for the end of show celebrations.