The Magnificent Seven: The 7 Worst Kevin Nash Rivalries

I’ll preface this column by saying that I like Kevin Nash. I think he had a very good mind for the business, great look, and gave solid promos. Moreover, despite not being an all-time great worker in the purest sense, he held up his end of the bargain when in the ring with some top hands, including Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker.

Just the same, I understand why people give Nash a hard time. Whether or not he had “the pencil” his political maneuverings gave him more sway over his character and by extension the business than many of his contemporaries, and whether it was by his own decision or other bookers who wanted to make the most of his size and star power, his career had a tendency to advance at the expense of others’ potential. Not to mention the fact that some of the matches and moments along the way were bowling-shoe ugly.

This week I’m taking a look back at the seven worst Kevin Nash rivalries.

#7. The Giant

The year was 1997, and The Giant (who would, of course, become The Big Show) was a still a young up and comer—athletic, charismatic, and irresistibly large. And though he, like most everyone at the time, had his tours of duty with the nWo, he was more often a foil for the group, alongside men like Sting, Lex Luger, and Ric Flair, a rare talent who combined physical stature and budding name value to become a believable threat to the heel super group. The Giant most naturally fit in as a foil for Kevin Nash—the more consistently nWo-aligned seven-footer with main event credentials of his own.

The Giant and Nash probably weren’t ever destined for better than a three-star-ish match, but actual results of their program were far worse. The battle of the big men was to be a suitable sub-main event to Sting-Hogan I at Starrcade 1997, but instead Nash no-showed the encounter (the kayfabe and shoot explanations I’ve heard are closely aligned—that Nash didn’t want to take the fall to The Giant and feigned injury). Then, when the two did lock horns at Souled Out a month later, the match featured the infamous powerbomb botch in which Nash dropped the budding superstar on his head, and luckily didn’t seriously injure or paralyze the guy. This program never got its proper pay off and, as such, The Giant never got what probably should have been the most satisfying moment of his WCW run.

#6. Hulk Hogan

A feud between Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan ought to have been a no-brainer. From a historian’s perspective, there’s a generational clash between the WWF’s icon if the 1980s into the early 1990s (Hogan), going up against one of the WWF’s truest failures in trying to recreate that magic (mid-1990s Diesel). From a kayfabe perspective, you have the two biggest names of the nWo, whose big egos would naturally clash. Building from there, you have the top talents of the nWo Hollywood and nWo Wofpac, respectively, who would seem like natural archrivals for a major show.

The problem is, for as many times as WCW teased Hogan-Nash, the match took forever to actually come together. Then the first iteration ended far worse than anyone would have imagined—a Nitro main event that lasted mere seconds, culminating in the infamous “Fingerpoke of Doom” angle when the two men reconciled and reunited their nWo factions.

By the time Hogan-Nash did occur in earnest, the dust had settled from the nWo, and the two clashed at Road Wild 1999 in a bout with each man’s career on the line (perhaps the single most laughably meaningless stipulation WCW had in its repertoire at the time). Hogan won in a completely uninspired, paint-by-numbers Hulkster vs. big man match. The two would kinda-sorta feud again in WWE when Hogan turned face at WrestleMania 18, but the moment had long passed for them to have a meaningful one-on-one program.

Neither Hogan nor Nash really needed the other as a rival to get over. Just the same, given each man’s legacy and how long they coexisted toward the top of the card in WCW, it’s noteworthy that what programs they did have were so forgettable, if not downright poor.

#5. Triple H

There were two meaningful iterations of the Triple H-Kevin Nash feud. The first casted the two as friends with mixed allegiances—Nash struggled to choose between old friends Trips and Shawn Michaels who were engaged in a lengthy feud at the time, before Triple H grew impatient and attacked Nash to launch a program that included a bad PPV main event at Judgment Day 2003 with a schmozz finish, followed by a completely non-epic Hell in a Cell finale. After that, they clashed again, tangentially, as part of an Elimination Chamber bout at SummerSlam. Not only was the feud itself not especially good, but it was part of a prolonged period of Triple H as the invincible champion, and this program didn’t even result in any good in-ring encounters.

As if this program weren’t enough, the two would clash again eight years later when Triple H was in charge of Raw and Nash showed up to make trouble coming out of the Summer of Punk. I’m actually an apologist for the match this program culminated in—a ladder match at TLC. Just the same, Nash’s return completely distracted from and derailed Punk’s red hot summer run. Despite a record-length world title reign to follow, Punk never quite recaptured the magic of that once-in-a-career push after he never got to give Nash his comeuppance, and wound up eating a pinfall loss to Triple H at Night of Champions.

#4. Samoa Joe

My fanship for TNA has ebbed and flowed over the years. Samoa Joe’s rise to the main event scene hit a sweet spot. His program with Kurt Angle that culminated in a worked MMA-flavored clash at Lockdown 2008 was not only a borderline great match, but also seemed to denote something TNA was doing fundamentally right: cultivating a home-grown talent and gradually pushing him to the top, over the promotion’s preeminent star. Joe’s reign to follow didn’t exactly set the world on fire, booked to win a King of the Mountain Match, then get the better of Booker T in a drawn-out affair.

But as Joe’s reign neared the half-year mark, and the biggest show of the year, Bound for Glory, loomed, TNA looked prone to fully legitimize Joe’s reign in a showdown with Sting.

Except Joe-Sting wasn’t an epic match. And Joe lost.

Joe’s loss to Sting of all people—a veteran, non-home grown talent felt like a huge step backward for TNA, and the way that the went down felt all the cheaper, in a telegraphed heel turn by one Kevin Nash who cost Joe the match.

Nash had feuded off and on, harmlessly enough, with Joe up until that point. This new program looked as though it may have been built to give Joe further credibility, giving him a reason to chase and presumably killNash en route back to the world title scene. The insult to injury on this angle is that Nash got the better of Joe in every meaningful encounter to follow—putting his feet on the ropes to steal a pin at Turning Point, after which Nash’s Main Event Mafia team beat back Joe and his Frontline compatriots at Final Resolution. Joe only got one noteworthy win in that stretch—tagging with AJ Styles to beat Sting and Nash in cage match on Impact. The aftermath? Joe was promptly beaten down and injured by the Main Event Mafia. Joe would return months later to go hunting for members of the Mafia, and would finally pick up a one-on-one victory over Nash that May.

When critics talk about Nash failing to put over newer talents, but rather jamming them up in series of less compelling matches, and more often than not beating them, his feud with Samoa Joe is a prototypical example. This program killed Joe’s hard-earned momentum, and the Samoan Submission Machine was never really the same in TNA.

#3. Goldberg

With the exception of The Undertaker’s WrestleMania streak, I would argue that that there has never been an undefeated streak more over than Goldberg’s run in 1997-1998 WCW.

Who killed that streak in service to a tired nWo angle and furthering of his own legacy?

That’s right. It was Kevin Nash.

Goldberg-Nash felt like a suitable Starrcade main event for 1998—arguably the two most over faces in the promotion butting heads over the WCW Championship.

The thing is, Nash wasn’t getting any more over than he already was, and Goldberg was molten hot. Thus, putting over Nash was questionable at best. Just the same, Scott Hall interfered to zap Goldberg with a cattle prod and offer up the victory to Nash. In the immediate aftermath, Nash did not go on a monster run a la Brock Lesnar fresh off of beating ‘Taker. On the contrary, he immediately made himself subservient to Hulk Hogan via the Fingerpoke of Doom incident. Thus, the legacy of WCW’s biggest show in a red hot period is that the most over face the company ever had lost his title and his streak in a screwjob, only for the guy who beat him to immediately slide out of the main event scene to the upper mid-card. Goldberg got his win back against Nash that spring, but the damage had already been done, and the definitive face of the company was just another big name in a whole pack of them.

This particular rivalry leaves a particularly sour taste in my mouth because, by most accounts, Nash himself was the head booker of WCW at the time. While he has regularly been accused of political machinations, few wrestlers can really be held responsible for what bookers choose to do with them. This, however, feels a lot like selfish booking to totally destructive ends. The two would reprise their feud in 2000 in an ill-advised heel run for Goldberg that did little to improve upon the legacy of this rivalry.

#2. CM Punk

Not so unlike the cases of The Giant and Goldberg in WCW, and Samoa Joe in TNA, this was a case of Kevin Nash’s involvement cutting off a red hot star at the knees, ostensibly to get him more over in the long-term, arguably more for his own self-aggrandizement.

This case is particularly egregious because a) Punk was so incredibly over in the summer of 2011, b) Nash wasn’t a full-time talent and c) the guys never even blew off the rivalry in a match.

The story is that Punk pinned John Cena in the main event of SummerSlam to cap off the Summer of Punk angle. Immediately afterward, Nash made a surprise return to powerbomb him, after which Alberto Del Rio cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase to take the strap. What started as intrigue quickly gave way to convoluted storytelling as Nash claimed then-face authority figure Triple H told him to attack, Triple H denied it, and the ultimate reveal was that Nash had texted himself instructions from Triple H’s cell phone.

Assuming the best, I’d have to guess the original plan was for Punk to go over Nash in a one-on-one match to further legitimize him as a main-event level star, before seguing to a feud with Triple H and then returning to the title picture. In practice, Nash didn’t pass his physical, WWE rushed Punk-Triple H, Punk lost that match and limped back into the world title picture as just another upper card guy, as opposed to the revolutionary character he had threatened to become.

#1. Mabel

Kevin Nash has been involved in his fair share of programs that did disservices to newer talents. One could argue that this is a counter-example, given that he was still a relatively new main event talent and he was facing another fresh face to the main event scene. The trouble is that, while the then-Diesel could hold up his end of the bargain with greater in-ring talents like Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, and The Undertaker, he was not in a position to carry people with more limited skills to main event quality matches, nor was he yet showing his natural personality and charisma in a way that helped get feuds over.

Thus, when the powers that be opted to strap a rocket to Mabel’s purple pajamas, gifting him a King of the Ring tournament win that included besting The Undertaker in the semifinals, he was completely unequipped to be a suitable rival to Big Daddy Cool. The two engaged in a lukewarm program, culminating at SummerSlam 1995 where the pair lumbered through a completely uninspired slog of a ten-minute match. This was particularly discouraging for Diesel’s fledgling run atop the WWF, because it was his very first real non-ready-built program—not a rematch, not a match resulting from pre-existing storylines, but rather a fresh proviing ground and palate to begin painting the Diesel legacy. Diesel won without incident, and without any hint of awe, not even getting to use his Jacknife Powerbomb finisher because Mabel was to be lifted for it.

I would argue that, more than any other rivalry in Kevin Nash’s career, feuding with Mabel established his limitations. Though Nash would go on to greater success when he turned heel in WWE, and when he defected to WCW, the damage was done in terms of him failing as the solo face of a major promotion..

Which Kevin Nash rivalries would you add to this list? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.