8 Wrestlers That Visibly Hated Working For WCW
2. Booker T
If a picture paints one thousand words, does the above image cover two?
The framed photograph of Scott Hall was included in one of the four boxes suspended above the ring during the Jeff Jarrett/Booker T San Francisco 49ers match on the October 2nd 2000 in which the object was to find the World Heavyweight Championship belt in one of four mystery boxes suspended on poles above the ring. Finders keepers, losers all of us.
The match was a semi-catastrophic reflection of the joke promotion WCW had become during its penultimate year, where even some passable wrestling was deemed moot against yet another zany Vince Russo backdrop. This time, the wackiness came from the "weapons" in the other boxes the two arrived at before claiming the gold. The first box fell off the pole, allowing Jeff Jarrett to break into it and reveal a blow-up doll. The aforementioned framed Hall image was in Box 2, before Booker discovered a coal miners glove in the third one in a callback to another infamous WCW weapons-based shocker between Sting and Jake Roberts just under a decade earlier.
The whole match had been one bad gag, and unsurprisingly the belt itself had turned into a joke title in the industry by this point too. So much so that when it fell out of its box and into the hands of ring announcer Dave Penzer acting on instinct, increasingly online audiences of the time were more than content to consider him the real and lineal champion instead of the two doomed performers.
No wonder the otherwise-magnetic Booker looked so incredibly checked out.