Pro wrestlers are by and large subject to the whims of the people booking them. There is the occasional case of a wrester getting over to the extent that it changes booking plans, or the fans unexpectedly getting behind someone or rejecting a story strongly enough to compel a shift. Otherwise, though, creative team and in particular a promotion’s management steer the ship and decide whether performers will win or lose and what sort of directions their characters might take on.
There are those cases in which real life can bleed into pro wrestling angles. This can, in particular, be the case when a wrestler runs afoul of management. Sometimes it comes down to someone voicing his disagreement with management, doing something that doesn’t line up well with the company’s values, not meeting the physical expectations promoters had for a talent, or otherwise failing to live up to what the company had hoped. Regardless, the end result can be a storyline that is a direct consequence of that talent’s perceived misbehavior.
Nowadays, with the Internet, social media, tell-all books, podcasts, and even WWE’s own shoot documentaries aired on the Network, there’s more transparency than ever about the backstage workings of the business, or at least fan theories swirling around. That goes for both the current WWE product, as well as more historical mainstream wrestling promotions— most particularly WCW from the 1990s. This article looks at 10 times when WWE angles were actually intended as punishments, and five times it happened in WCW.
15 WWE: Alberto Del Rio Joins The League Of Nations
From an on air character perspective, few men’s WWE trajectories have come across more confusingly than that of Alberto Del Rio from his surprise return in fall 2015 to being released in mid 2016. He re-debuted white hot, answering John Cena’s open challenge for the US title and beating him clean. However, things got pretty convoluted as Del Rio joined forces with former rival Zeb Coulter in the ill defined Mexamerica team. He’d go on to trade the tile back and forth with Kalisto before settling into a forgettable role as part of the awkward League of Nations stable.
The only man to arguably benefit from the League of Nations was Sheamus, who cashed-in Money in the Bank and briefly reigned as WWE Champion during the group’s run. Otherwise, it felt like a placeholder faction for Rusev while WWE figured out what to do with him. And Alberto Del Rio and Wade Barrett? For these two, entering an outdated and directionless stable, only to play Sheamus’s de facto sidekicks felt like a punishment.
Indeed, word is Del Rio was seen as lazy, a party boy, and a bad influence by management—particularly Triple H—and was thus relegated to ineffectual roles like this one while he rode out his contract.
14 WWE: Enzo Amore Goes In The Shark Cage
Traditionally, when a shark cage is used in wrestling, the idea is to suspend a heel—typically a manager—above the ring so he’s visible and can’t interfere in a match. For SummerSlam 2017, WWE made the odd call for face Enzo Amore to go in the cage for his former tag partner turned arch rival Cass’s match with The Big Show. To take the oddness of the dynamic a step further, Amore would slip out of the cage and interfere anyway, only to prove completely ineffectual as Cass dominated him and Show to win the match.
What to make of these choices?
The prevailing theory is that it was all a punishment for Amore, who had heat from management and the locker room alike on account of his outspoken bravado and limited skillset.
Amore is rumored to be afraid of heights, making his time in the cage particularly uncomfortable. Add onto that being booked like a total joke relative to Cass, and the whole scenario does read like management sending a message.
13 WCW: Lex Luger Plays An Idiot
At the front end of the Monday Night War, Lex Luger made a surprise return to WCW. Eric Bischoff has explained in a number of interviews and hin his book that he didn’t particularly want Luger back but, as a favor to Sting, made the Total Package an employment offer. It was a lowball contract he felt sure Luger would lpass on, but he did end up taking it in an effort to prove himself. He made an immediate impact with his abrupt departure from WWE—in the days before non-compete clauses—and surprise arrival on the first episode of Nitro.
Once the initial buzz wore off of Luger’s surprise return, he was quickly booked to play a fool. He was a tweener who largely came across as dumb and arrogant, with his only redeeming quality being that he was friends with Sting.
By all appearances, Luger was booked to look dumb because he wasn’t really wanted by Bischoff at the time. To his credit, Luger played the part well, and would win management’s trust to become a more serious character as time went on.
12 WWE: Baron Corbin’s Cash-In Fails
Typically, winning the Money in the Bank briefcase is one of the most surefire, powerful pushes a wrestler can get, given the overwhelming majority of guys who get to cash-in wind up world champions for at least a brief run. When Baron Corbin won the 2017 men’s Money in the Bank contract, it wasn’t a huge surprise, considering how he'd been booked. In line with that push, Corbin was booked into a feud with top star John Cena going into SummerSlam.
Things unraveled quickly for The Lone Wolf. Shortly before SummerSlam, he cashed in on Jinder Mahal, only for a distraction by Cena to cost him the match.
Corbin might have achieved some redemption if he beat Cena for revenge, but he would instead put over the 16-time world champ cleanly at SummerSlam.
Word is that Corbin had upset WWE management. The company brought in a concussion specialist to speak to the locker room, and Corbin had a beef with the guy from his NFL days. What was supposed to be informative, and a good PR move for WWE turned into an awkward session of Corbin attacking and undermining the special guest’s authority. Losing the push of a lifetime was seemingly meant to put Corbin back in his place.
11 WWE: The Brothers Of Destruction Squash DDP And Kanyon
When the InVasion angle went down—one of the reasons the angle didn’t work was that so many top players were missing. Guys like Goldberg, Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash, Sting, and Scott Steiner sat out in favor of collecting the rest of their WCW money and not rushing into WWE.
As such, you’d think that Diamond Dallas Page would get the red carpet treatment. Alongside Booker T, he was the biggest name who made the jump right away, and was still around the prime of his career.
Word is that DDP quickly gathered heat. While WWE’s style calls for heels to bump and feed—getting up after a face hits them to quickly take more punishment in a hot action sequence—Page was more accustomed to WCW’s style of staying down and selling after he took a move. This tendency reportedly earned DDP heat with The Undertaker, which in turn buried him in the eyes of management. Rather than coming across as a meaningful threat to WWE’s top stars, after his first few appearances DDP was largely a joke. In his last meaningful match, before the character was totally rebooted as a face, he teamed with Kanyon to get utterly dominated by The Undertaker and Kane in a cage match at SummerSlam 2001.
10 WCW: Sting Can’t Beat Hollywood Hogan Cleanly
Starrcade 1997 promised one of the most can’t miss events in pro wrestling history. After a nearly a year and half of build, Sting would return to the ring as WCW’s savior to back down Hollywood Hogan, whose nWo had run roughshod over the company. The booking for a match like this seemed obvious enough. Of course Sting would win, and of course he’d do so decisively. Fans needed this payoff, and there was no better place or time than WCW’s biggest show of the year.
Accounts vary as to the details, but the consensus seems to be Sting showed up for the match of a lifetime looking as though he hadn’t been keeping himself in ring shape when he wasn’t booked to wrestle.
This purportedly opened the gate for Hogan to politick against putting over someone who didn’t look like a champion. There’s still no clear word on what happened during the false finish—Nick Patrick “fast counting,” but really normally counting a pin against Sting, only for Bret Hart to demand the match be restarted. Whether the ref messed up, was convinced not to count the pin quickly by Hogan, or Sting messed up a cue, we may never know. Regardless, it would seem that Sting’s controversial, indecisive win over Hogan was at least partially a result of management losing faith in him because he got out of shape.
9 WWE: Vader Insults Himself On Air
Vader never really thrived during his time with WWE. He scarcely got the opportunity to play the vicious monster heel that had made him a star in Japan and WCW, and within a couple years, he’d been demoted from the main event, to playing upper mid card gatekeeper for acts WWE was more serious about.
At In Your House: Over the Edge, Vader put over Kane as the new monster on the block, and per pre-match stipulation lost his mask. In the aftermath, he’d call himself “a fat sack of s***.” The loss of confidence never really went anywhere as an angle, and felt more like management humiliating the guy.
To wit, word is that Shawn Michaels took issue with Vader and campaigned against him—in particular suggesting The Mastodon was fat and had poor hygiene. Some reports suggest Vader was originally supposed to win the WWE Championship from HBK, early in his run, but that Michaels’ criticism and politicking took the opportunity from him. The loss to Kane was a low point in Vader’s career, and the point of no return for his WWE persona.
8 WWE: Robbie McAllister Gets Buried
The Highlanders are generally a forgotten team nowadays, but there was a brief period when the pair of Scotmen looked like they’d be booked as threats. Things came crashing down for the two of them—and particularly Robbie McAllister—after he was shown on air during a TNA wrestling show, visiting them in Orlando over WrestleMania XXIV weekend.
WWE had put out the word for WWE stars not to visit with TNA, and so McAllister not only doing so, but also winding up on TV was a huge deal at the time.
McAllister was dropped from his role at ‘Mania, and the payday that would have come with it, and the team never won another match on TV before getting released that summer. To be fair, McAllister has claimed in subsequent interviews that he was never happy in WWE and may have subconsciously shown up at the TNA show as a way of getting himself fired.
7 WCW: The Shockmaster Is A Klutz
In the build to Fall Brawl 1993 and the annual War Games match, WCW promised the arrival of a new talent to help the face team of Sting, Davey Boy Smith, and Dustin Rhodes take on Big Van Vader, Sid Vicious, and Harlem Heat. The Shockmaster debuted at a Clash of the Champions TV special, and immediately lost all credibility when he tripped over a poorly placed board and fell down on live TV. Not only was that moment, in and of itself, embarrassing, but his helmet fell off, revealing him to be Fred Ottman, who had inauspiciously wrestled for WWE as Tugboat and Typhoon.
It’s conceivable that the character might have been salvaged were he booked very seriously from there. Instead, WCW built the clumsiness into the character. Tony Schiavone was particularly tough on him from his play-by-play post, sarcastically making a big deal out of it when The Shockmaster successfully climbed through the ring ropes without tripping. The main event gimmick was thus dead on arrival. Ottman worked a handful more spots for WCW, but his run never amounted to anything meaningful from there.
6 WWE: Zach Ryder Gets Humiliated At WrestleMania XXVIII
Zack Ryder accomplished the unlikely in 2011. When his booking stalled out and he was rarely used on television, he turned to a YouTube show and social media to build a groundswell of support. Not only did fans start to chant for him at live events, but the do-it-yourself campaign actually seemed to work, culminating in Ryder beating Dolph Ziggler for the US Championship at TLC 2011.
Ryder quickly lost the title, however.
While he was used on TV, he went on a losing skid that included playing Kane’s victim and playing a foolish sidekick to John Cena.
The nadir of this this downward slide saw him get take the fall in large-scale tag match at WrestleMania XXVIII and subsequently get low blowed by kayfabe girlfriend Eve Torres—dumped and left humiliated on the grandest stage of them all. Most believe that Ryder’s embarrassing booking was a direct result of having the audacity to go into business for himself and get himself over with fans outside the confines of WWE booking—particularly in an era before the company had embraced social media for itself.
5 WWE: Bart Gunn Faces Butterbean
It’s unusual for a performer to be punished for doing his best on the job, but that’s exactly what happened in the case of Bart Gunn. WWE arranged the Brawl for All shoot fight tournament, ostensibly to get Jim Ross’s new signee Steve Williams over as a main event level threat. No one was forced to enter, but Bart was willing and able
Bart was a big, powerful guy, who was tough as nails and decisively won the tournament. His reward? WWE booked him into a real boxing match with real champion super heavyweight boxer Butterbean.
To be fair, WWE probably wouldn’t have minded Gunn winning. To do so would put a feather in the cap of not only Gunn, but the company. Former tag partner Billy Gunn said the company put Bart into formal boxing lessons, theoretically to sharpen his skills, but Billy said it did more to mess with his head. In any event, WWE didn’t seem all that disappointed when the mid-carder they’d never intended to push got squashed in his featured boxing match.
4 WCW: David Flair Takes A Real Whipping
In the heat of Ric Flair feuding with the nWo, WCW brought in his son David to draw some extra heat to the angle. David would ultimately turn heel, join the nWo, and become a full time talent for the company, but one of his early appearances was far simpler. He was there to get beaten up by the heels to add extra sympathy and fire for his father’s character.
A key scene saw nWo members hold down David while Hollywood Hogan whipped him with his belt.
According to Ric, his son was only supposed to be whipped two or three times, but that turned into over a dozen legitimately stiff whips that left his back badly bruised.
The two prevailing theories as to why things veered off course were to show Ric who was boss—as a longstanding part of creative head Eric Bischoff feuding with him backstage—and to toughen and test David who was walking into a featured spot with no real training or hard work behind him.
To his credit, David didn’t complain and earned respect from the locker room for it. Ric claimed in his book that he’d never forgive Hogan for the segment, though the two went on to do business quite a few times afterward, suggesting they made peace.
3 WWE: Piggie James
Mickie James was one of the best female talents WWE had from the mid to late 2000s, but got booked into one of the most humiliating angles of the era. In feuding with the mean girls heel duo of LayCool—Michelle McCool and Layla El—she was poked fun at as “Piggie James.” The angle came complete with the heels recording an animated short to sell James as a pig, and James’s character crying in her embarrassment on TV. The whole storyline was particularly absurd because James was far from fat--she was in terrific shape. All the worse, while James did pick up one revenge victory over the duo on PPV, she quickly dropped the Divas Championship that they warred over back to McCool.
The heart of the matter? James had been involved in an affair with John Cena, the ascending top star of the company. Cena was married at the time, and cut off the arrangement before long, and according to most sources, James didn’t take it well. As a result, she was moved off of Cena’s brand and booked into a less than flattering angle. It’s little surprise James would end up released from the company within a year’s time.
2 WWE: Razor Ramon Puts Over Triple H
From the perspective of 2018, the idea of Triple H beating Razor Ramon cleanly doesn’t seem all that absurd. While Ramon was a major star for both WWE and WCW, he was rarely treated as a main event guy, whereas Triple H is a 14-time world champion who has won WrestleMania main events. Back in 1996, however, Ramon was the upper mid card talent who had dominated the Intercontinental Championship scene for recent years, while Triple H was not yet a serious contender for any title.
And yet, at a series of house shows at the time, Triple H pinned Ramon cleanly. The rationale on this one is simple enough, as Ramon had given his notice—leaving WWE for a big money offer with WCW. It was traditional enough for a departing star to put over others on his way out the door. Given the two men’s relative positions at the time, however, it felt like a bit of an extra insult. Of course, from Ramon’s perspective, he probably didn’t mind given he was real life friends with Hunter as part of the infamous backstage Kliq.
1 WCW: Bret Hart’s Turns Twice In One Night
In the fall of 1998, Bret Hart had been with WCW for nearly a year and had little to show for it. The company was in its signature creative disarray, and Hart never settled into much of a direction or enjoyed any meaningful momentum in that first stretch. After working most of that time as a heel, a September episode of Nitro seemed to see him turn face in a feel good moment that looked as though it might point a new way forward for one of the greatest stars of the era.
Hart would wind up turning back to heel at the end of the episode, revealing it was all a set up so he could attack Sting along side members of the New World Order. It was a deflating moment, and Hart singled it out in his book as poorly planned and directionless.
A part of Hart’s scatterbrained booking, particularly for this confusing night, comes down to management’s perception of him.
Eric Bischoff has commented in several interviews that the Montreal Screwjob broke The Hitman, and he came to WCW a shell of his former self. Hart has vehemently denied all of this, and placed responsibility for his failed WCW run on Bischoff and the other powers that be in the company, but regardless, it seems all of his lackluster booking was a consequence of how the WCW brass saw him at the time.