3. WrestleMania 11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIgyfkM276A Yep, the whole thing. Although not quite the worst in terms of in ring action, (that distinction belongs to the utterly dire Wrestlemania 2) the eleventh anniversary of the showcase of the immortals is the worst booked in history. Where to begin? Well, for starters the main event featuring Bam Bam Bigalow taking on a football player might have made an interesting mid-card match. A celebrity filled spectacle to break up the evening would have been fine, but it had absolutely no place headlining the biggest wrestling show of the year. The title match featuring Shawn Michaels and Diesel, while fine in the ring, had each man in the wrong role. As the smaller, more exciting competitor, Michaels was the natural babyface. Instead, crowds were expected to cheer boring man lump Diesel, who'd failed to get over since his 18 second title victory over Bob Backlund. It wasn't even televised. Speaking of crazy Bob, Bret Hart had the misfortune of getting stuck in an I Quit match with the washed up ex champion. The match sucked. How do you end up wasting your best talent on a guy that should be a comedy act at best? Well you could start by making your champion lose to said comedy act, then have the comedy act lose the belt in 18 seconds. Thereby making Bret Hart's whole title reign look like crap. Yeah, that should set things up nicely. Then you have the whole event seemingly mobbed by celebrities, in a way that interferes and takes away from the show. While it's understandable that the WWE chase mainstream acts for the sake of publicity, it's gone too far when performers struggle to work for the amount of people around the ring. Alright, alright. None of these are solutions. So let's have a think. There are plenty of directions the WWE could have gone with, which would have produced an exciting and satisfying show. They managed it at Wrestlemania 10 with arguably less to work with. For starters, Bret should have been champion coming into this thing. Diesel was not over or talented enough to be champion. They could have kept Diesel vs Shawn, but for the intercontinental title with the roles reversed. Their No Holds Barred match at In Your House: Good Friends, Better Enemies proves that they work better with the latter heel/face dynamic. I'd also keep the Bam Bam vs Lawernce Taylor bout too. I actually think it was a cool little match. It just needed to be further down the card. Instead the main event could be Bret/Undertaker or Bret/Owen in an I Quit match. Both have the potential to be an electric affair with performers the audience can really get behind. As for the undercard, the WWE had a wealth of talent available at the time, capable of something better than the middling matches we were subjected to. Coming off a tour de force Wrestlemania 10, this should have cemented the WWE as the alternative to the usual Hogan shtick you'd find in WCW. But it wasn't meant to be. This set the wheels in motion for years of financial hurt, and it would be many months before they found their way out of the creative hole they'd dug. Luckily for them, a rattlesnake was coming from the distance.