Ranking Wrestling's Most Shocking Surprise Every Year 1990-2020
Bombshells, blockbusters and brilliant booking from 30 years of an industry gradually going insane.
This list celebrates high drama, but here are a couple of caveats on what's included below to offset more arising from what may seem like some obvious omissions:
- Real life proffers the most potent shocks and surprises, but this list is predominantly about the moments that took place in or adjacent to North American wrestling, rather than the wrestlers themselves. Invariably, if a year featured any kind of tragedy, it should go without saying that it was probably that year's biggest story, shock and surprise. It'll go without listing for the same reasons.
- For better and worse, the North American landscape has dominated the conversations about pro wrestling over the timeframe, and has thus been the focus here. Even now, with New Japan Pro Wrestling several years into an unprecedented global popularity boom and potentially in league with All Elite Wrestling, the company still have to compete with WWE for column inches everywhere but Japan.
Hopefully - and sooner rather than later - that pendulum will at long last swing, but in the meantime, here's to the best of the bananas bullsh*t from McMahon, Bischoff, Rhodes and...Fatu?
31. 1990 - Vince McMahon Crashes Mr Olympia
Long before the music studios or the XFL or the New York restaurant or the XFL, Vince McMahon believed the spin-off money was in Bodybuilding, and used 1990's Mr Olympia to launch his own company from within a magazine-shaped trojan horse.
Shocking vendors that were relatively uninterested in his planned 'Bodybuilding Lifestyles' monthly, McMahon instead handed out flyers for the World Bodybuilding Federation, promising biceps, bells and whistles that proved to be beyond what anybody in the industry even wanted.