Let’s face it, Sunday’s Backlash was a complete disaster on every level, a show so bad that it caused the fans in attendance to get up and leave before the main event was even over; a show so terrible that it somehow managed to sink the ratings on “RAW” to one of the lowest levels in modern history.
In fact, it’s safe to say that anyone who even enjoyed the show a little bit should probably be drug tested, and/or cheers for the Yankees.
But, as Vince McMahon would no doubt like to remind us, it’s not the fault of Roman Reigns, even one bit.
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Still, even though Backlash was terrible to levels that could easily be called “historical,” we still haven’t had time to properly process where it lands in the annals of the truly wretched shows that have plagued us over the years. Sure, it caused “RAW” to crash with one bad rating, but there’s been shows so bad they’re brought down regimes. And they’re not even all from WCW!
Well, I mean, they could be. But for the sake of variety, we’ll pretend there’s other companies in contention.
So here then are my picks for the five PPV disasters that were somehow even worse than Backlash, and the fallout that they had on the industry.
WCW Great American Bash 1991
Granted, some of these are shooting fish in a barrel, but not everyone has been watching for decades and had to live through it.
This one is basically the go-to answer when wrestling fans are asked what the worst PPV of all-time is, and for good reason. WCW was already a raging dumpster fire in 1991 as it stood, but President Jim Herd took things to another level by firing Ric Flair as a contract negotiation ploy — while he was World champion. So that backfired on him, as Flair called their bluff and left for the WWF with the belt, just days before the Bash show where he was scheduled to lose the title to Lex Luger.
The replacement main event was hastily turned into Luger facing Barry Windham in a Cage Match for the vacant title, and no one was buying what they were selling with that one. Even worse, Luger hit his stride as a top babyface and long-reigning U.S. Champion, and the match was booked to end with Lex turning heel (because WCW) and taking on Harley Race as a manager. The audience completely rejected everything about the situation, chanting “We want Flair!” throughout the entire show and essentially crapping all over the main event like it was Roman Reigns against Brock Lesnar.
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Now, a bad main event might have been a hole that the show could have dug out of, but everything that preceded it killed them off in advance. The show started with a Scaffold Match where the competitors were prevented from falling off the scaffold due to ridiculous “capture the flag” rules, and top to bottom the show was filled with friends of Flair who had their spirits broken by his firing and were in no mood to put in any effort on that night. The night was topped off by a second cage match that was supposed to feature the Steiner Brothers & Missy Hyatt facing Arn Anderson, Barry Windham & manager Paul E. Dangerously in a mixed match. But then Windham was moved to the World title match, leaving us with Rick Steiner & Missy Hyatt vs. Arn Anderson & Dangerously in a tag match where the Maryland Athletic Commission ruled that man-on-woman contact would not be allowed.
The Fallout: Although Lex Luger was now World Champion, no one seriously thought of him as the top guy in the business, and WCW continued to sink to new lows with their fanbase growing increasingly bitter about Flair’s departure. By the end of the year, Jim Herd was out of a job and Lex himself had grown tired of the business and left to be a bodybuilder for a couple of years.
WWF In Your House 4
1995 was a bad year for the WWF, producing stinkers like King of the Ring 1995 , a show that barely missed the cut for this list. Mostly business was bad and getting worse due to the continued insistence on pushing Diesel as top star and World champion despite all evidence to the contrary regarding his popularity. Good thing Vince learned his lesson and never tried THAT again, huh?
After SummerSlam was mostly a flop, Vince brought in Cowboy Bill Watts as head of creative to try a new old-school direction on top, and that failed and cost Watts his job quickly. By October, business was in freefall, leading to the fourth In Your House show, a failed experiment in itself where a two hour show was presented at a discount rate compared to regular PPVs.
The one in question took place in Winnipeg, featuring Diesel defending the WWF title against British Bulldog after Bulldog’s partner Lex Luger departed for WCW the month before. Now, to call this match heatless would be generous, but the show was further hobbled by a second incident that’s even more famous.
The week before, Intercontinental champion Shawn Michaels was in a bar in Syracuse and managed to pick a fight with a group of off-duty Marines. Long story short, it went very, very badly for him. Now, the exact number of Marines who beat the crap out of him varies based on when the story was being told, ranging from two all the way up to 13. In a later interview, Watts said that had he not been fired before the incident, he would have fired Michaels for getting beat up and making the wrestling business look bad. Yet another reason why Cowboy was so well-loved by wrestlers who worked for him.
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Regardless, Shawn was in no condition to defend his title against Shane Douglas at In Your House, and he tearfully gave up the belt via forfeit. Robbed of that match, we got Douglas being forced to immediately defend his new title against Shawn’s real-life BFF Razor Ramon in a bad match, giving him a title reign of approximately 10 minutes.
But that was just buildup for the disaster that was the main event, as Diesel defended the WWF title against Bulldog in a wretchedly dull match that was so bad that Vince McMahon personally chewed out the two guys after the show, and famously threw down his headset in disgust as the broadcast ended.
The Fallout: McMahon finally took the hint about Diesel, and the era of "Big Daddy Cool" came to an end at Survivor Series the very next month. Unfortunately there’s no WCW around for Roman Reigns to go to these days.
Heroes of Wrestling
Let’s say it’s the golden age of wrestling, at the height of the Attitude Era, and you’re a wrestling promoter with some money who wants to get a piece of that action for yourself. Granted, the business was not as far up its own butt as it is these days, but nostalgia is generally always a safe bet in our so-called sport. So why not buy three hours of PPV time and put together a star-studded array of matches between some of the greatest legends out there? What could go wrong?
Well, besides literally everything.
- First, it turns out that advertising big names for this kind of show can be a problem if they don’t show up.
- Second, retired wrestlers are typically retired for a reason.
- Third, booking a big arena and then being forced to give away enough free tickets to actually have people in the building for TV is typically a bad sign.
- Finally, Jake Roberts.
OK, let’s just skip to Jake.
Granted, everything on the show was pretty terrible (like the Bushwackers facing Iron Sheik & Nikolai Volkoff in 1999, thus ruining the childhoods of wrestling fans everywhere) but the metaphorical cake was taken by the main event of Jake Roberts & Yokozuna against King Kong Bundy & Jim Neidhart. The original match was supposed to be Jake Roberts vs. Jim Neidhart in a singles match, but Neidhart showed up 30 minutes before the start of the show and refused to lose to Jake, fearing that the loss would jeopardize his chances of getting work with the WWF. Meanwhile, Jake showed up to the show like a (barely) walking pharmacy, so loaded that he could barely stand upright for his pre-match promo.
Oh, and his pre-match promo! It was a famous trainwreck of drunken rambling, capped off with the catchphrase that failed to reignite his career: “You’ve got 21, but I’ve got 22.” See, they were in a casino … you know, never mind, it’s not important.
The match itself was somehow even more embarrassing, with Roberts unable to make it out in time to start the match, and then stumbling out late in no condition to wrestle. Roberts spent most of the match’s running time standing on the apron and hitting on underage girls at ringside while rubbing his chest “seductively” and gesturing to his snake between his legs. At least it was actually a snake.
Jake ended up taking the loss because no one else wanted to do so, and then his wife promptly served him with legal demands for $5,000 in child support after the show.
The Fallout: Thankfully this show killed the “Heroes of Wrestling” concept dead out of the gate, but it also sent Jake on a downward spiral that nearly ended with his death before Diamond Dallas Page saved his life with DDP Yoga. The show’s on YouTube if you really want to watch it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
ECW December to Dismember
Speaking of nostalgia, in 2005 and 2006, WWE put on an ECW reunion show called One Night Stand that was particularly well-received, and led to Vince McMahon deciding to revive the ECW brand under the WWE umbrella. There’s always another hour of TV time that needs filling, you know.
The “new” ECW was given to Paul Heyman as his personal project, and many of the original ECW stars were brought back to be featured on the show, like Rob Van Dam and Sabu, plus new up-and-coming stars like CM Punk. This all led to the new ECW presenting their first PPV show in December 2006, called December to Dismember, and that’s about where the positives ended.
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First, there were virtually no matches announced before the show aired, aside from the advertised main event featuring ECW champion Big Show defending against five other guys in an Elimination Chamber match. You know, because people so fondly remembered all the Elimination Chamber matches in ECW or something.
Second, the undercard featured essentially nothing that would appeal to fans of the former ECW, mostly comprised of WWE midcarders beating the original ECW guys in terrible matches.
Third, and most importantly, the entire show was conceived by Vince McMahon not as a way to showcase the ECW brand, but as a way to turn his pet project Bobby Lashley into a big star.
Amazingly, when the crowd had this pet project shoved down their throats at the expense of the people they paid to see (like RVD and Punk), they rejected him completely and turned on the match. Good thing Vince learned his lesson and never tried THAT again, huh?
The Fallout: Where even to begin? This show had the lowest number of buys for any PPV in WWE history, actually scoring so low with 50,000 PPV buys that the company lost money on it. Paul Heyman got into an argument with McMahon before the show, saying that either Punk or RVD should win the main event because at least fans would go home happy, but Vince screamed in his face and insisted that the entire point of the show and only point of ECW was to make Bobby Lashley into a star, followed by some other words that can’t be reprinted here.
Heyman was fired on the spot and sent home, and left the business completely to be Brock Lesnar’s manager in UFC. Meanwhile, ECW never got another PPV, and Bobby Lashley flamed out and was gone by July 2007.
Also, no one was dismembered, so that was kind of false advertising.
nWo Souled Out 1997
And finally, another famous WCW misfire, although I think this one warrants an asterisk because at least it was trying something new.
By the end of 1996, WCW was making tremendous amounts of money on the back of Hollywood Hogan and the nWo, with T-shirts everywhere and the black-and-white brand seemingly unable to do anything wrong for them. The natural progression was to spin off the group into its own promotion within the main promotion, a strategy that WWE later used with “RAW” and “SmackDown” as differing brands. But of course, this is WCW, so they screwed it up.
The general plan was for the nWo to invade and eventually take over “Monday Nitro” for themselves, while WCW launched a new TV show on Thursdays (the idea which eventually became “Thunder”), and the first step in the experiment was to give the New World Order their own PPV show: Souled Out 1997 . The main event was Hogan defending against nWo turncoat The Giant, and the theory was that all the jaded heel fans of the group would buy tickets and cheer on the heels against the WCW babyfaces. But here’s the thing: Wrestling is not the place for high-concept experimental shows. There’s a reason that promoters over the past few decades have been able to predict the behavior of wrestling crowds with reasonable certainty, and this show went against all those rules of behavior. You can’t just tell a crowd of 10,000 people who to cheer for (and lord knows Vince has sure tried, AM I RIGHT?) because you’re just going to end with a confused and dead crowd.
Even worse, the show was styled into an oppressive dark atmosphere, literally covering the arena in black. All the music was replaced with the generic nWo theme and the sarcastic nWo announcer would randomly pop into the matches and make fun of the babyfaces. It was less of a wrestling show and more of an arthouse college film project nightmare come to life — and we were being charged $30 to watch it.
The finishes of the matches were terrible up and down the card, filled with disqualifications, and Nick Patrick as an evil biased referee in literally every match. It was deliberately made to be bad, but not “so bad it’s good”, more like “so bad you question why you spent the money on it and want to poke your own eyes out to improve the color palette." There was only one good match (a ladder match between Sean “Syxx” Waltman and Eddie Guerrero) and the crowd was burned out and bored after about 30 minutes of the show, waiting for the punchline of the joke, which never came.
The Fallout: Well of course there was never another nWo-branded show for WCW, although future ones for the next year or so were branded as “nWo/WCW” productions. The “nWo Nitro” concept was scrapped completely and “Thunder” was turned into a godawful secondary show instead.
However, astonishingly, what this really proved is that WCW was just a bit too ahead of its time with the idea, since as noted, WWE later took the “branding” idea to new heights, splitting the roster into multiple brands in order to create their own illusion of competition, just as WCW had done. As I’ve said before, the show is dark, headache-inducing and filled with stupid ideas, but it’s DIFFERENT and as a bonus doesn’t feature Roman Reigns in the main event, so I think as wrestling fans, you owe it to yourself to watch it at least once.
