Ladies and Gentlemen, it is now time for your MAIN EVENT and in this contest there will be NOOOOOOO disqualifications. Miss you every single day, Fink. In wrestling, your main event is your show, your show is your money, and your money is more precious to you than your goddamn children. The main event is the fundamental underpinning of all wrestling psychology. Hypothetically, every single decision a booker makes is to generate enough hype around that one match that gets your butt in their seat and your money in their wallet instead of a picture of their GODDAMN CHILDREN. It’s about that sensation when you leave the arena. Even a mediocre card becomes a great show if the main event is fire and you leave the building buzzing. Conversely, even a fantastic undercard can be spoiled forever by a stinker of a main event, as you trudge home, butt cursing the seat and ruing the fact that Vince McMahon is currently tucking your money into Shane and Steph’s bunk beds, they have to sleep in the GODDAMN BATH.
We’re truly sorry, these are the 10 Worst Main Events In WWE History.
10. Roman Reigns vs Samoa Joe – Backlash 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEajKm1EMOc
Why does WWE hate the WWE Championship? The title doesn’t ALWAYS have to be the main event, but it mostly should, right? WWE tends to forget this, especially when there’s a respected workhorse holding the ultimate prize in their sport. See also, almost CM Punk’s entire 434 day title run, WWF Champion Bret Hart not main eventing 3 big 5 ppvs in a row in 1994 and the phenomenal AJ Styles. Fresh off a good but unremarkable match at Mania 34, Styles and Nakamura were booked in a No DQ match for the WWE Title. Did that main event Backlash 2018? Did it f**, that honour went to Roman Reigns vs Samoa Joe, nothing on the line, zero stakes, and fresh off Roman being part of the poorly received main event of Mania 34. Fans turned on this match and turned on it HARD, pelting it with chants of boring, chants of beat the traffic and worse of all, you could actually see people getting up and leaving the arena ON CAMERA.You know a main event is bad when you can literally see empty seats that didn’t use to be empty. A totally nonsensical choice for a main, it probably had something to do with the fact that the Styles Nakamura do dq match was booked to finish with both men kicking each other in the dick and being double counted out, and that would have been a worse ending to a PPV, but you could have just, you know, NOT BOOKED THAT EITHER. F***.
9. Daniel Bryan vs Randy Orton – Battleground 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7tYZGHkRSs
Speaking of the Styles/Nakamura match, WWE has a lot of bad habits, but if I was given the power to change just one, it would be their insistence on elongating feuds with PPV non-finishes. It’s the dirt-f***ing-worst. On free TV, not ideal, but ok we know how the game is played. On PPV, WWE is taking my money, and part of that negotiation is that not only will wrestlers fight, but one of them will F***ING WIN. PPV non-finishes are the worst case of fraudulent advertising since the words WWE Superstar Kizarny, and one of the most heinous examples on record has to be the main event of Battleground 2013. The story going in, Daniel Bryan won the belt at Summerslam, but Orton cashed-in after betrayal from the Cerebral Assasshole, Bryan won the belt back at Night of Champions but some b***ocks over a ref fast-count meant the belt was held up as vacant. I’m going to say this next bit in all caps, THE ENTIRE SELLING POINT OF BATTLEGROUND WAS TO FIND OUT WHO WOULD WALK AWAY WITH THE VACANT CHAMPIONSHIP. What happened? The match was a fine enough for 20 minutes and then The Big Show, deep into his airquotes “conflicted” gimmick where he cried every week like a big dumb egg, came out, knocked out the red, knocked out Bryan, knocked out another ref, knocked out Orton and [checks notes] thanks for coming everyone! The show just ended, everyone screamed, THAT’S IT, and worst of all, this was before the Network launched, so the only was to legally watch this show was to put down 50 bucks for it. Absolutely inexcusable.
8. John Cena vs. John Laurinaitis – Over The Limit 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFrriLuRtNs
Whoever thought it was a good idea to put the 50-year-old John Laurinaitis in a main event match against John Cena, please raise your hand. You’re not in trouble I just want to have a talk with you, and also my friends Be-Bop and Rocksteady will be part of this talk, and also there will be no cameras or witnesses. Over The Limit 2012 saw Cena face Johnny Ace in a No DQ match where if Laurinaitis lost he would be fired. Fun fact number 1, John Laurinaitus wasn’t even that good in his prime, and fun fact number 2 this went for 17 human minutes. 95% of that time was John Cena being “just fun to watch” bullying the calcium out of johnny’s skeleton. He poured water on his head and down his pants, he covered him in garbage, locked him in repeated STFs while taunting him on the mic. Look I’m not going to get riled up about scripted wrestling bullying, whatever Johnny was an arsehole, sure, what I will get riled up about is YOU WASTING MY F***ING TIME. I have a finite number of minutes on this planet, and watching Cena doing a punch and judy show with Big Johnny’s corpse is not how I want to spend them. Then everyone’s favourite Main event enhancer the big show comes out and costs Cena the match, thanks mate, another month of this then. And the final cruel punctuation mark to all this? The main event could have been CM Punk vs Daniel Bryan for the WWE Championship. Feels funny to look back on now. Ha ha. Ha ha.
7. Diesel vs. Mabel – SummerSlam 1995
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAqzoIh866A
The mid-90s were a difficult time for WWE, in much the same way that having an elephant slowly stepping on each of my individual testicles would be a difficult time for me. Hogan had gone and the national steroid scandal had forced them to bench all of their cough BIGGEST stars. Without his traditionally beefy boys, Vince scrambled for main eventers who were big in different ways. Diesel was tall, cool, put the belt on him and… erm… Mabel was 400 pounds? That’s the same thing, right? So in 1995, Mabel won King of the Ring, in a tournament that also included Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker and Razor Ramon, so I don’t f***ing know either, leading to the main event of Summerslam, the second biggest show of the year. Diesel vs Mabel. When Kevin Nash is the agile one in a match you have Got Problems. Big Daddy Cool’s title run was widely considered a bust, as he drew so little as champion that WWE had to cancel whole tours of house-shows in 95, but this is the nadir. Slow, clumsy, and with Diesel even getting injured during, because Mabel is one of the most infamously unsafe workers in WWE history. The match stank, and even though it only went 9 minutes, it feels like it’s still going on to this day.
6. Triple H vs Roman Reigns – WrestleMania 32
A bad WrestleMania main event really hurts. All that travel, all that pageantry, a whole week building to one crescendo, then RASPBERRY. The Miz vs John Cena was really bad, and probably was number 11 on this list, ending with a double count-out IN THE MAIN EVENT OF MANIA, and having to be restarted by Dwayne The Dwayne Dwayneson, but at least it was relatively short., Hogan vs Yokozuna was an insult to everyone from the locker room to the audience at home, but at least it was even shorter, and the crowd seemed to dig it. Triple H vs Roman Reigns on the other hand, went for half an hour. 30 minutes of a match no f***er in that building wanted to see. My knickers simply shall not untwist about it. When the match started fans began to cheer heel Triple H, just for something to keep themselves amused, but as the minutes and the minutes and the minutes crawled on, even that enthusiasm died away to perpetual grumbling. WWE muted the crowd, leaving this glacially-paced match to drift on in a bizarre heatless void. Genuinely the most interesting thing for like, 5 straight minutes was the fact that Triple H got a bit of confetti stuck to his forehead, I AM NOT KIDDING. Then Roman won, and we cheered, because we all got to go home, and that should not be the final feeling of wrestlemania weekend. Just a total tone-deaf turd from bell to bell, apart from the bit when Steph got speared though, that was nice. That was something.
5. The Extreme Elimination Chamber – December to Dismember
I mean, to be fair, Vince McMahon could have walked through the crowd and personally handed everyone in attendance a 100 dollar bill and this still would have been the most toilet PPV of the ruthless aggression era, maybe even of all time. Under-promoted, booked with all the hype and spectacle of a Milton Keynes house show and spitting into the open mouth of every cherish memory that the name ECW invoked. Somehow the Chamber match managed to make the PPV 10 times worse, with the most anger-inducing booking imaginable. In the match was Big Show, in the worst shape of his life as a laughably non-extreme ECW champion, Sabu who would at least guarantee a good spot or two, RVD who every single person in attendance wanted to win, CM Punk who was not an ECW alumnus, but still popular, Bobby Lashley who was John Cena without the personality and the most obvious WWE guy on the card, and, for some reason, Test. To clarify, the top 3 people the fans wanted to win were Rob Van Dam at the top, then CM Punk, then Sabu. How did the match pan out? First of all, Sabu got kayfabe injured backstage on the night and replaced by Bob Holly, that’s not a good start, thanks for buying the PPV as advertised everyone. Then CM Punk was eliminated first, oops, then RVD went out next, and at this point the match is broken, then Bob Holly’s elimination was botched, fan outrage just rose and rose until terrible Lashley won, and Paul Heyman, the man who spent the entire day telling Vince that everyone would hate this booking, got the sack because everyone hated this booking.
4. The 2015 Royal Rumble Match
I mean, when a hashtag to cancel your streaming service trends globally, that’s generally the indication of a bad night’s work. Few remember that the 2015 Royal Rumble match actually started off brilliantly. Bubba Ray returns, Bray Wyatt has a nice run of dominance befitting his character, DDP shows up and yogas some punk asses in oblivion like a total SUPERSTARRR, then Daniel Bryan, the fan favourite to win, arrives to rekindle his awesome rumble history with wyatt, everything’s golden, and then YOUR RUMBLE HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN Daniel Bryan gets eliminated like a total rookie, leaving Roman Reigns as the only possible winner and everything just collapses. They massively miscalculated that fans would be able to ‘get over’ bryan’s elimination and shift their support to Reigns, but even then, the booking just gets worse and worse. Kane and Big Show arrive and start very slowly eliminating all of the other superstars like they’re absolutely nothing. Bray Wyatt has been there the longest, one punch, gone, people still like ziggler, one punch, bye. Dean Ambrose is over, oop out you go. Heinous, ugly, soulless booking, then Reigns eliminates both giants, not because he’s smart or powerful but because FOR NO REASON, big show and kane start squabbling amongst themselves what’s wrong with you, roman is right there, finish the job first. They half-eliminate themselves before Roman’s able to push them out, and then the rock helps fight them off. THAT’s your hero’s journey? Enters late, gets lucky, has to have help from someone not in the match. It makes less sense than a ventilated condom and it is F***ing Maddening.
3. Hulk Hogan vs. Sid Justice – WrestleMania VIII
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkYPoqFYIqY
Some main events are bad because of what they are, but some main events are bad because of what they are not i.e. the wrong match being the main event. We saw that with Roman vs Joe. Take that feeling and multiply it by itself until time stops. For a decade, Ric Flair had been the biggest draw in the NWA, for a decade Hulk Hogan had been the biggest draw in the WWF. In 1991, owing to freak circumstances of Jim Herd being a terrible WCW President, the nature boy was now in WWF, WrestleMania 8 was the first Mania with both men on payroll, they were in the same building! Did they wrestle for the championship? NOPE. Flair fought Savage in the middle of the card and Hogan fought Sid Justice with absolutely nothing on the line! HOW. HOW DID THIS DREAM MATCH NOT HAPPEN. Yes I know, they trialed the match on a house show tour and it wasn’t a huge draw, but, like, as an artifact in wrestling history. To have that match happen at YOUR big show, IN YOUR HOUSE. I just… oh god I just can’t. When Hogan jumped to WCW in 1994, guess the first PPV match he had. Yup, Hogan vs Flair at Bash at the Beach doing one of the largest buyrates in WCW history. Well, that sadness to one side, we should probably talk about Hogan vs Sid because even despite the fact that it wasn’t hogan/flair, it also managed to be s*** all by itself. Slow and clumsy, it featured an infamous botched ending where Papa Shango arrived too late for his scheduled run-in, so Sid had to kick out of the unkickoutable atomic leg drop before a messy and confusing DQ finish. To WrestleMania. The biggest show of the year. The first DQ in WrestleMania main event history, and it was botched. Oh and the Ultimate Warrior returned but just… jesus wept…
2. The Undertaker vs. Goldberg – Super Showdown 2019
If s*** main events were ferrero rocher then Goldberg would really be spoiling us. Fastlane 2017 sucked and direspected a young talented universal champion, Super showdown 2020 sucked harder and disrespected a young talented, universal champion, but the true Chris Kirkpatrick of Goldberg’s NSYNC of terrible mains was against Gnarly Charlie at Super Showdown 2019. There are a few factors that make up a terrible main event, but nearly killing one of the industry’s greatest legends is probably up there. Things started fairly well, typical finish spamming, and then Bill ran into a post and at this point everything got real dangerous, real fast. Goldberg suffers a concussion, is losing blood fast, a tombstone comes dangerously close to smashing his head into the mat. Goldberg lifts Nightmare Knightmark up for the jackhammer and falls backward dropping taker right on his f***ing neck. Then Goldberg tries to lift him for a tombstone, both men tumble backwards, before the deadman, finally, mercifully, puts Goldberg away with one of the worst chokeslams of his career. We’re talking Hogan at Judgment Day 2002 levels of bad. When the bout is over, with both men’s auras noticeably tainted by the worst a dream match could possibly go, Undertaker pulls this face. Yeah, mate. Same.
1. Seth Rollins vs. The Fiend – Hell in a Cell 2019
Oh man. How do WWE keep getting Hell in a Cell matches wrong? Literally, it is a giant box where feuds end. It’s a last resort, essentially an unsanctioned match, WWE lock two people inside and say, look, they’re going to keep going until one of them dies and it’s not our fault. Why does there have to be holograms? Why does there have to be Brock Lesnar breaking into the cell and giving both guys a finisher and then the match just ends? WHY DOES A REFEREE GET TO CALL OFF A HELL IN A CELL MATCH LIKE A MASSIVE KAREN? Everything about it was wrong. The Fiend’s red light combined with the red cage blurred everyone’s vision so it looked like it was happening in 360p. The fans were all in on Bray’s exciting new gimmick so all of Seth’s babyface fire was met with boos. Then the agenting. When Bray stood straight up after taking Seth’s first stomp, the crowd popped. Then came sister abigail, crowd popped again, but Seth kicked out. If that had been the pin right there, fans would have liked, even LOVED this match, praising WWE for making a strong new champion. But it went on. And it went on. Rollins delivers stomp after stomp after stomp and the crowd gets tired of it, boos stack on boos. A chairshot to the head. Seth hits a ladder onto a chair onto Wyatt’s head, then a toolbox onto a ladder onto the chair onto his head. It became like if Dr Seuss booked CZW and it’s at this point the fans realised, oh, bray’s lying there and just taking this, bray looks like an idiot. Then Rollins hit all of this with a sledgehammer, the ref decides NO IT IS MY TURN TO BE THE HERO and stops the match. A ref stoppage. In a hell in a cell match. After mick foley flew from the cell, after mick foley flew through the cell, after mick foley wrestled on thumbtacks, to see the match being cancelled over looney tunes bulls*** is not just insulting to everyone who paid to see the match, but WWE cannibalising its own history. Seth’s babyface run was destroyed, Bray Wyatt got made to look ridiculous AGAIN, and the shows ended with the crowd chanting for refunds, to restart the match and, of course, for AEW. For a more detailed breakdown of why the booking didn’t work, check out Laurie’s excellent How the Fiend Borrows From Horror Films explained video on partsFUNknown, but all I can say is this. It was a disaster, booking that was incomprehensible to the point of madness and all it did was make fans less likely to part with their money for the next WWE Main Event. At the end of the day, especially to WWE, what else matters?
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