The WORST Wrestling Story Every Year (1989-2025)
1997 - Hulk Hogan Vs. Roddy Piper
A wrestling promotion can get away with anything when they’re hot.
The Attitude Era undercards bordered on Heroes of Wrestling-tier until the year 2000. ECW was the hipster league of the mid 1990s, but every other key match was often a full 10 minutes too long. AEW in 2021 had Matt Hardy.
The on-fire WCW of 1997, meanwhile, presented to its public Hulk Hogan Vs. Roddy Piper - twice. They’d actually recaptured the old magic, in the build-up to and at Starrcade 1996, but everything else they did was rubbish. Piper, one of the best talkers ever, entered his nonsensical era around this time.
And so did WCW’s booking, after only a few months of peak New World Order bombast and mystery.
Piper, in the Starrcade build, said he didn’t need the help of the Four Horsemen to battle the nWo. He reiterated this ahead of Uncensored ‘97, preferring instead to assemble his own ‘Family’, which was a bizarre name for a bunch of no-marks, the guy who’d become Road Block, and John Tenta. Piper wrestled them in a gauntlet trial, to apparently prove their worth - and they must have sucked, because after the selection process was complete, he dumped them the very next Nitro to lead the Horsemen.
The plotting was inscrutable, and the source of conflict silly. A lot of this was based on Hulk bragging that he was the superior actor, which infuriated Piper so much that he trapped himself on Alcatraz island to train for their fight.
These vignettes were more hokey than the WWF of 1995 - but this gets glossed over in retrospectives. The WWF had to beat the very cool nWo to make its comeback all the more impressive.