wrestling / Columns

The Magnificent Seven: The 7 Worst Booked PPV Main Events

June 13, 2018 | Posted by Mike Chin
WWE Main Event WWE Royal Rumble Roman Reigns The Rock

I grew up in the PPV era. I was a year old when the first WrestleMania happened, and spent my childhood in the era when the big four PPVs were the only WWF PPVs to be found. Mind you, we never shelled out for them, so my consumption was limited to listening to the commentary and trying to pick images from the scrambled signal, then renting the Coliseum Videos months later.

Maybe it’s those humble beginnings that keep PPVs so special to me, even after the Monday Night War saw regularly televised broadcasts feature big matches, and after PPVs became monthly, and after WWE Network made PPVs immediately accessible such that I no longer had any tough decisions to make about whether or not to shell out for a PPV. I still look forward to these big shows, and will more often than not plan weekend activities around them when I know one is coming up.

But not all PPVs, let alone PPV main events, are very good.

This week, I’m taking a look back at seven of the worst booked wrestling PPV main events of all time. I’m putting a pretty fine point on this one, because it isn’t about bad choices of matches to go on last or even the ring work, but rather about the creative choices made going into the match itself. So, for example, while Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal in a Punjabi Prison Match at Battleground 2017 was very bad on many levels, it was nonetheless about as good as it was going to be given the main event that had been established, and at least the Great Khali appearance was sort of fun. Similarly, John Cena vs. John Laurinaitis at Over the Limit is quite arguably worst PPV main event ever, but if we’re going to accept that WWE booked these two into this match—well, it still wasn’t good, but it wasn’t all that much worse than there was any reason to think it would be. The countdown defines main events as matches that closed shows, but were not impromptu. So, Money in the Bank cash-ins, or Hulk Hogan challenging Yokozuna at the end of WrestleMania 9 don’t count; neither does AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura at WrestleMania 34 for not being the last match at the event.

This countdown, in large part, comes down to the disappointment factor. It’s a reasonable, or even excellent main event prospect in terms of storyline and the talents at hand. It’s also a match that sees the wrong guy go over, or that suffers from such poor design as to squander all of that potential. As always my personal opinion weighs heavily in crafting this list.

#7. Brock Lesnar vs. Braun Strowman, No Mercy 2017

To establish terms again, I’m by no means placing Lesnar-Strowman as one of the all-time worst PPV main events. The problem is that WWE pitted two super over acts with unique talents and auras, in what felt like it ought to have been an epic showdown, and the result was a sub-average B-PPV main event.

Maybe my expectations were unreasonably high for Lesnar-Strowman. Lesnar’s singles matches in 2017 were, at best, uneven, and Strowman hadn’t really proven himself by delivering any four-star-or-better singles efforts. Just the same, the Fatal Fourway these two participated in at SummerSlam 2017 was a very fun hoss war, and established a unique storyline. Lesnar, who had previously plowed through any obstacle was actually overpowered and largely overmatched against Strowman, this unlikely star who had gotten over in 2017 on the charm of being a good ol’ fashioned monster.

This was never going to be a Flair-Steamboat-style classic, but if Lesnar and Strowman could assemble a ten-minute-ish equivalent of Lesnar-Goldberg from WrestleMania 33, they could have easily sent fans home happy with super-sized sprint of a demolition derby.

The match we actually got was reasonably worked and told a realistic enough story of Lesnar getting pushed around early, before using his wrestling to wear down Strowman and ultimately collect the pin. The trouble is that, particularly after the bar these two had set from the build to SummerSlam up to this match, it felt terribly anticlimactic, and much longer than it’s actual nine minutes bell-to-bell.

Hopefully we might get another match between these two, and one that makes the most of both men’s power and explosiveness. As it stands, their PPV showdown is an all-time letdown.

#6. The Undertaker vs. The Dudley Boyz, Great American Bash 2004

WWE hadn’t exactly set itself up for success with this match. The Undertaker, while already a legend by this time, was still a few years away from the period in which he routinely delivered four-star matches. The Dudleys were pretty stale as a WWE act, and the company was grasping at straws with them, casting them as Paul Heyman’s henchmen.

This had no business as a PPV main event to begin with, but the results were even worse than the match up promised. The three men involved were skilled enough veterans that they might have pulled a rabbit out of their hats. With Heyman in the mix, as both creative head for the brand behind the scenes and an on-air authority figure, you have to imagine he might have had an interesting story to tell out of the unlikely circumstances. Instead, we got an utterly forgettable handicap match, made worse for The Undertaker dominating and thus cutting off what momentum and credibility the Dudleys might have mustered. Worst of all were the theatrics woven in. The story was that Heyman would murder Paul Bearer by burying him in cement if The Dead Man didn’t take the loss. In a sweve, The Undertaker won, then betrayed Bearer to bury him himself. There might have been some redemption for the bad match and worse angle if The Phenom had, for example, made a sinister heel turn. Instead, he only briefly flirted with the concept of going bad before he brushed off the whole thing with the explanation that he didn’t want Bearer holding him back, distracting him, or providing a vulnerability. He moved on, without consequence, as a face in the WWE Championship picture challenging JBL.

#5. The Extreme Elimination Chamber, December to Dismember 2006

The Elimination Chamber is a fun enough gimmick match. While it could never rate with iconic match types like the Royal Rumble and Hell in a Cell, it featured an impressive structure, was used sparingly enough to feel special, and rarely offered up a bad match.

So it was that it made sense for the Chamber to main event the December to Dismember ECW branded PPV. Let’s make no mistake about it—this was a very bad PPV on the whole, hitting the least sweet spot between WWE’s vision for PG entertainment and still paying lip service to extreme violence. Nowhere was this awkward and poorly executed dynamic more clearly on display than the main event match.

A part of what made this match not just bad, but so disappointing was that there was reason to believe it could be good. The Chamber was set up to deliver at least a decent spectacle of a match, and while it wasn’t exactly an all-star cast of performers, The Big Show, Hardcore Holly, and Test were solid enough veterans, Bobby Lashley was a tremendous athlete and physical specimen, and RVD was still reasonably over. Then there was CM Punk, the WWE brand’s first, and perhaps only, organically over homegrown talent.

That Punk was the first man eliminated from the match didn’t bode well.

From there, the extreme element of the match felt misplayed, as it was far less about innovative violence or vicious use of weapons than the blunt, rote application of plunder. Bobby Lashley would ultimately go over, which I suppose was better than the Big Show retaining, but by that point it also felt like foregone conclusion out of an uninspired match twenty-five-minute match.

#4. Samoa Joe vs. Sting, Bound for Glory 2008

I’ll be the first to admit that my take on this match is very much colored by personal bias. The fall of 2008, I was going through a rough patch in my personal life, and I ordered my first TNA PPV on a lark, in the purest sense of letting wrestling help me escape my own problems and have fun for three hours.

I had followed TNA, not religiously, but off and on for the preceding two-to-three years, and was on board with Samoa Joe as the face of the company. I looked forward to seeing him crush Sting to further cement his spot at as the man—hopefully after pulling one last great match out of The Icon.

While the match wasn’t embarrassingly bad, it also wasn’t very good. Worse, it ended with Kevin Nash turning heel on Joe and costing him the bout. Even as a very casual TNA fan, I could very much see the ending coming—to the point that I assumed I was wrong, because there was no way the company would do something that obvious, not to mention ruin Joe’s first world title reign in such a fashion.

I get that this match should probably fall lower in the countdown, or even in the honorable mentions, but this was the first and last TNA PPV I ever ordered, and the one I single out as the reason I never got hooked on the company. Even more absurd? Despite hanging around TNA for another six years, Joe—one of the hottest “home grown” talents the company ever had—would never win their world title again.

#3. Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal, Backlash 2017

There are worse main event matches than Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal at Backlash 2017. Take, for example, their Battleground Punajbi Prison Match. The latter match, however, worked within the known limitations of the performers and the structure to deliver an OK match within its embedded limitations—particularly if we operate on the premise that WWE was committed to seeing through the Mahal-as-champion experiment at that point.

Here’s the thing—Mahal never should have been champion.

While, in theory, I respect WWE giving someone new a whirl in a top spot, this match exemplified the many ways in which Mahal wasn’t ready as a performer, nor as a kayfabe character. The choice for Mahal to go over in this match was the critical booking mistake that earns the match a top three spot on this countdown. That the match itself did nothing to get Mahal over, besides establishing the efficacy of the Singh Brothers as distractions and the Khallas as a finisher that, despite looking like a transitional move, could apparently incapicate a main event level star.

#2. The Royal Rumble, 2015

The Royal Rumble boasts a long, impressive history. Even the relatively forgettable iterations of the match tend to land near four-star territory. At its best, the match can be downright artful in its layered storytelling, not to mention a fun time capsule of the roster from a given year. As such, it’s little wonder that the match excites wrestling fans, even in a year when there’s not all that much to objectively get excited about.

The 2015 iteration of the Rumble was that rare Rumble that was a complete failure. It was a joyless, uninspired match for which the wrestler fans were most clearly behind, Daniel Bryan, suffered an early and uneventful elimination. Meanwhile, the presumptive favorite, Roman Reigns, whom fans were rallying against, and whom the Philadelphia crowd in particularly clearly hated, won the match and punched his ticket for WrestleMania.

While the factors noted above stand out most prominently, it’s also worth noting that so much of the Rumble built around these two points was lackluster, directionless brawling with few real peaks, fun spots, or imaginative combinations of talent in the ring at a given time. One of the worst indicators for this match was the final four. Besides Reigns, Kane and The Big Show were the dominant monsters for the late stages of the match. Their performance about as blah as the middle-aged big men performances you’d expect out of them at that point in their careers. Worse yet, fans knew there was no chance of either man actually winning. And then there was Rusev, who might have offered a fun false finish a la Santino Marella coming back to haunt Alberto Del Rio in 2011, but whose reappearance and elimination all happened too quickly for anyone to register much excitement.

It’s telling that WWE knew what a stinker it had on its hands, in choosing to book The Rock to try to salvage the match and win over the crowd in helping Reigns on the finish. Even a rare appearance from The Great One wasn’t enough to salvage one of the worst, and, for my money, the worst booked Royal Rumble match of all time.

#1. Sting vs. Hollywood Hogan, Starrcade 1997

Yes, Sting vs. Hollywood Hogan at Starrcade 1997 was bad. It wouldn’t necessarily make this countdown—let alone the number one spot—however, if it weren’t for how awesome the story leading up to this match was, and how highly WCW had set expectations. Here we had two legitimate legends of the business who had only clashed incidentally in the ring up to this point. Now the two had nearly a year and a half of build behind their storyline and were clashing over the world championship, Sting as the top face in the promotion, Hogan as the top heel. While a critic could rightly say that these guys were never going to deliver a four-star match, particularly at that point in their careers and without the support of an artist like Pat Patterson to plot a match around their limitations, this nonetheless could have been a fun enough short match along the lines of the Goldberg-Hogan Nitro match to come.

Even if the match itself landed in two-star-ish territory, you’d guess, going in, that we could rely on the finish. While wrestling fans enjoy surprises, there’s also something to be said for the feel-good moment of a hero prevailing over darkness. Sting beating Hogan clean and decisively at the biggest show of the year felt like a no-brainer and the kind of moment fans would mark out about for decades to come even though they saw it coming from a mile away.

But that wasn’t good enough for WCW.

The signing of Bret Hart really ought to have been kept separate from the main event WCW had invested so much in building. Blow off the storyline at hand. Then Hart-Sting could have been an incredibly fresh match up to build toward over the WCW Championship. Or even if the company did insist on Hogan winning the title back before long, Hogan-Hart, too, would have been a dream match. WCW just couldn’t wait to get Hart involved, though, and opted to program the Montreal Screwjob into the match, with Hogan scoring the win off a fast count (that, for whatever combination of reasons, referee Nick Patrick didn’t actually give), only for Hart to get the match restarted. The finish was thus convoluted, with Sting anything but the decisive victor, and the attention divided between him, Hogan, Hart, and, above all, the confusion on what on earth we just saw.

We could evaluate main events on two separate one-to-ten lichert scales. There’s anticipation and there’s actual execution. The Canadadian Stampede ten-man tag had built to a fever pitch, garnering it an eight or nine for excitement, and it delivered around a nine or ten. The WrestleMania 31 Lesnar-Reigns match had a lukewarm three or four for its build, but, from the core match to the Money in the Bank cash-in arrived at closer to an eight or nine for how it came across.

There may never have been a starker drop off for a main event than Sting-Hogan, which had worked WCW fans into an unparalleled fervor of a ten for excitement, only to land around a one for how it came across. The outcome was brutally bad, and the single worst booked PPV main event scenario in wrestling history.

Which main events would you would add to the list?. Let us know what you think in the comments.

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

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The Magnificent Seven, WCW, WWE, Mike Chin