Minus-Star Match Reviews — page 2

Anyone who has followed WWE since the dawn of the 21^st century knows of John Cena and all the good – and bad – that has followed him.

These days Cena is widely seen as a respected legend who has contributed a lot to the company’s success. But nostalgia is a powerful drug and going into the past too often can taint one’s perception of how things happened. That’s the case with Cena: he has done such a great job with PR that many people forget just how hated he was in his prime.

Long before the name Roman Reigns even existed, Cena was the hated superhero who polarized audiences with his goody-two-shoes act. He was a hero to millions for his never-say-die attitude which, while commendable, was made into something annoying by being so white meat that he came across as preposterous.

As a wrestler, though, Cena wasn’t bad per se; he was serviceable so long as he had the right opponent. During his prime, though, truly outstanding Cena matches were few and far between. More often than not he was shoehorned into average-or-worse matches depending on WWE creative which, by and large, stunk at the time. And today we revisit one of Cena’s worst matches, an abomination created by whatever inept fools brought Vince McMahon’s twisted ideas to life at the time.

Once upon a time there was a longstanding and passionate debate among wrestling fans over who was the worst “Vince” in the business, McMahon or Russo. Both men had legions of passionate and vocal detractors claiming that one or both “ruined” the wrestling business in some way or another. Both men had transformative impacts on the business for better or worse. And there are many people within the wrestling business that have decried both men for coming up with bad creative and promotional ideas that ended up ruining careers and taking pro-wrestling in a more negative direction.

Some people would call Russo a success; some of his bigger ideas during the late 1990s were critical to WWF’s success and his story-driven style (which often came at the expense of actual wrestling) did bridge the gap between the pro-wrestling bubble and the masses. But there was a caveat to his success: as Jim Cornette, Gene Okerlund and many others have noted, Russo was successful because Vince McMahon kept (and tweaked) his best ideas and rejected his worst ones. But once Russo was in an environment that lacked that filtering mechanism he was given carte blanche to do as he pleased, which in turn was a critical factor in WCW’s demise.

One would think that wrestling promoters would learn from past mistakes but pride and ego run wild in this business, as does nepotism. Despite all the warnings, Russo was hired brought in to TNA as a creative writer. This is one of the fruits of his labor.

These days Roman Reigns is considered one of the biggest and most successful wrestling stars of the past twenty years. Over the past four years he has shattered records and become an undeniable international star. But no amount of erasure or revisionist retelling of history will ever remove the fact that Roman Reigns was one of the most hated men in WWE history.

It wasn’t his fault, either; as his most recent run has proven, the man behind the gimmick has possessed the skills to be a believable and compelling villain who can draw and exude a megastar aura with the right creative (and plenty of smoke and mirrors). But Reigns is like a character actor: he’s naturally inclined to fit a very specific role and his shortcomings are exposed when he’s miscast in a role he isn’t fit for.

Such was the case from 2015 when he was given the terrible misfortune of being groomed to be John Cena’s replacement. That resulted in a historic level of hostility and combativeness between WWE and its fans, one that saw many other wrestlers get caught in the crossfire. And today we revisit one of the many matches that saw Roman Reigns become the most hated person in WWE history, all because the man in charge stubbornly refused to acknowledge that his particular vision was outdated and unpopular.

Don’t let the above happy Wyatt picture fool you; this match was nothing to smile at.

Once upon a time Bray Wyatt was heralded as a new version of the Undertaker. He had a unique gimmick, stood out from the crowd, and captivated audiences with his promos and magnetism.

Then WWE creative came along and ruined everything.

Wyatt may have been the wrestling equivalent of a brilliant actor but he was stuck performing in a place where bad scripts and clueless studio executives were the norm. Wyatt’s potential as a new monster or ‘new face of fear’ never materialized in a big way. Worse, all of his big talk tended to lead to overhyped and underwhelming matches, which is what we’re revisiting today.

Twenty years ago Brock Lesnar and Goldberg were two of the biggest stars in wrestling. Everyone wanted to see them clash since they were so alike. And when they did…it was a disaster. An unbridled, unmitigated, unmistakable disaster. It was so bad that it soured fans’ opinions of both men for over a decade. And while their later matches in 2016 and 2017 turned things around for both of them, their first big clash shouldn’t’ve ever been so bad in the first place. But why did it suck? Read on to find out.

Triple H and Scott Steiner had one of the most legendary bad matches of the 21st century. It was roundly lambasted both when it first took place and in the decades that followed. It became symbolic of Triple H at the time: that he was an overrated, overpushed bodybuilder trying to be the Ric Flair of the 21st century by having long forced epics with any opponent just like his idol.

But when it came to bell-to-bell action the closest Triple H came to Flair was having him in his corner and doing some of his dirty work. Part of that was the fact that HHH was literally too big to be Flair; another part was the fact that HHH’s opponent in this match was one of the few people on RAW less mobile than him.

On paper both HHH and Steiner should’ve done great in WWE. Two musclebound behemoths with short tempers and enough testosterone between them to knock out a horde of rampaging rhinos? That should’ve been a license to print money; instead it was a trainwreck so bad it almost destroyed one wrestler’s career and further damaged the other’s.

“Mere words cannot describe this crime against humanity” – Dave Meltzer. Well, I’m about to try.

2004 was a BAD year for WWE. Once WrestleMania XX ended the company lost four of their biggest stars for one reason or another: Goldberg decided to non-renew his contract, Brock Lesnar quit to pursue football, Stone Cold Steve Austin stopped appearing regularly after ‘Mania, and The Rock went off to Hollywood. With the company lacking in top-drawing talent, panic set in and desperation measures were taken. And as history had shown, when WWE reached desperation territory they tended to rely on shock value and going in…unsavory…creative directions.

Regular viewers of RAW weren’t starved for choice when it came to bad gimmicks and questionable-at-best angles. The show featured regular segments involving Kane impregnating Lita and Eugene the ‘special’ wrestler (who was supposed to be the wrestling version of Rain Man but that interpretation didn’t stick), neither of which set the world on fire.

Then there was Stevie Richards a perpetual lowercarder whose biggest claims to fame at the time were being the leader of the Right to Censor stable and managing KroniK in their one and only halfway important match under a WWE banner. After years of wrestling on C-shows like Velocity, Richards was brought back to rekindle his feud/storyline/program with Victoria…by dressing in drag.

Hey, remember Sting? That wrestling icon who retired recently? Well it turns out that he had not one but two of the worst matches in modern times.

Everyone knows his infamous match with Jeff Hardy (in which Sting did absolutely nothing wrong but history has put it on his record as much as Jeff’s all the same), but he also had another dreadful match over 15 years earlier in which he also did as he was told and was panned for it all the same. What happened in this first match? Read on to find out.

For all the talk of The Undertaker being this timeless and reverential character, he has certainly has his fair share stinkers throughout his wrestling career.

On one hand him only having matches ranging from “passable” to “serviceable” for most of his career was to be expected; he was, after all, a wrestling zombie with supernatural powers who only left his feet when he wanted to. On the other hand, he morphed as a wrestler over time, becoming more of a ‘working big man’ as opposed to a token immobile wall. So when he began having good matches by superheavyweight standards any of his shortfalls became more obvious by comparison.

It’s with that in mind that we revisit one of Undertaker’s worst matches to see if all the hate was deserved.

Few people in modern wrestling history have had worse luck than Bray Wyatt.

Since his untimely passing last summer many people both within the wrestling industry and among its fans have lauded him for his creativity and who he is as a human being. We all saw glimpses of that when his character first emerged in early NXT and then on the main roster in 2013. But then it was all downhill from there.

If there was ever evidence for the conspiracy theory that someone at the top of WWE was trying to sabotage Triple H by ruining one of his creative projects, it’s Wyatt’s career. He started off incredibly strongly and then year by year things kept getting worse for him. There was hope that things would turn around for him starting in 2019 when he reinvented himself and created a new alter-ego in The Fiend.

Alas, those hopes proved to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Wyatt had one awful match after another with each passing year. All the promos, hype, and outside-the-box thinking didn’t lead to anything exciting or even logical between the bells. In fact, had it not been for Damian Priest and The Miz fighting off a horde of surprisingly polite zombies, Bray Wyatt might’ve had the historic honor of being the only man to win the Observer’s Worst Match of the Year award twice for wrestling the same opponent on two different editions of the same show.

His 2017 match with Randy Orton was awful, especially since it was a title match and thus had more importance on the card. But was this rematch four-years later any better or worse? Read on to find out.

Before there was Satnam Singh, before there was the Great Khali, before there was Giant Gonzalez, there was Raja Lion, a “wrestler” so bad he made Giant Baba look like Kurt Angle.

This match isn’t particularly well-known outside of small circles of the internet wrestling fandom; in fact, most people – myself included – likely know of this match thanks to Maffew’s Botchamania series. But when you look back at this, it’s one of the funniest bad matches in modern times. There’s not much to it but there’s enough for it to fall firmly into the let’s-laugh-at-how-bad-this-is category. Why is that? Read on to find out.

No legend or Hall of Famer in WWE has a completely unblemished career, as Roddy Piper showed here.

Piper was and is one of the most iconic and influential talkers in WWE history. He was such an intense and genuine wordsmith who showed such passion and dedication to making his promos and rivalries feel real, even if they weren’t. This made him a memorable character, one who would influence an entire generation of wrestlers to try and follow in his footsteps.

But not even someone with as much charisma, personality, and magnetism would salvage one of the worst ideas WWE ever had: putting a wrestler and an actor in a WWE-style boxing match.

When most wrestling fans hear/read the date June 8, 1990 the first thing that comes to mind is the iconic and industry-changing singles match between Jumbo Tsuruta and Mitsuharu Misawa. What often gets forgotten is that the undercard for that genuinely exciting match featured one of the biggest stinkers of the decade and quite possibly the worst AJPW match of all time.

But how was that possible? How could AJPW, a company that to this day is known for showcasing some of the greatest matches of all time, also allow something so bad to tarnish that image? Read on to find out.

Damian Priest and The Miz had one of the strangest matches in years at WrestleMania Backlash…but it’s nowhere near bad enough to be called worst match of the year.

These two guys had a mediocre feud and some mediocre matches that took place during a mediocre period in WWE’s recent history. The COVID lockdowns forced wrestling companies to adapt however they could and in WWE that meant experimenting with new ideas. Some of those ideas worked and some didn’t; which one was this? Read on to find out.

Seth Rollins might be riding high right now as World Heavyweight Champion, but his WWE career will be forever tarnished by this deep blemish of a match.

This match didn’t just stink; it was putrid. Almost everyone hated it outright for how badly it was put together and it’s historically awful finish. If it weren’t for WWE operating on its fans’ alleged short memories and their willingness to move on, then this would’ve also killed the HIAC match as a gimmick altogether.

But just like with matches that get heaped with praise in their immediate aftermath, it’s good to look back at historically bad matches to see if they really were that bad in the moment or if time has changed how the match comes across. In this case, we have a match that was hated when it first took place and now, with the benefit of hindsight…it’s safe to say that the initial fan disgust wasn’t enough of an expression of how bad this was. Why? Read on to find out.

Many people have said that 2000 was one of the best years in WWE history. Well those people must’ve forgotten that this match exists.

Although the company was firing on all cylinders that year and MOST of its product output was solid that year, every company has misses and this was one of them. It took place on perhaps the worst show of the year. It involved two non-wrestlers competing against each other instead of being bit players in an active wrestler’s story. It was filled with theatrics and not the good kind. And even though the entire segment including pre-match hype video and post-match fallout lasted only ten minutes, it was enough to make an entire audience of over 17,000 groan in disgust. But was it really that bad? Read on to find out.

What the hell are Kane and The Undertaker doing in a review involving matches that got NEGATIVE stars?

Well it turns out that wrestling’s most (in)famous match reviewer hated one of their matches that he rated less than a DUD. On paper that seems either impossible or a mistake: Kane (!) and The Undertaker (!!) one-on-one during the Attitude Era (!!!) with Stone Cold Steve Austin as the special guest referee (!!!!). How was it possible for them to have anything less than an exciting match together? Read on to find out.

Some people just aren’t cut out for the wrestling business and Jackie Gayda is one of them.

The fact that when wrestling fans see or hear her name they think of this infamous match is proof positive that Tough Enough was a very bad idea and produced only two long-term success stories. Taking people from the reality TV world and dropping them in a wrestling ring was a doomed venture, but WWE was desperate to get into the reality TV game when it was still hot, no matter the price.

Well they sure paid a steep price in 2002. That was supposed to be a year of rebuilding but it ended up being one filled with sudden changes, panic decisions and a serious lack of critical thinking. Having all of that at once can lead to a serious drop in product quality, which is what happened when someone with less than six months’ experience was thrown to the wolves. But was the match really that bad? Read on to find out.

You know a match is bad when people don’t remember a single thing you did in the ring and only remember something said during the match.

This match between Rebel and Shelly Martinez is widely considered both one of the worst matches in years and one of the funniest. It has been a frequent source of unintended laughter among wrestling fans for almost a decade now. It was so bad that one of the people involved retired from wrestling altogether about a year after it happened.

But was this really that bad, or has its reputation for being unintended comedy softened the negative impact it once had? Read on to find out.

I’m doing something a bit different this time and revisiting one of the WORST matches in modern times. It’s certainly a bold statement to call something the worst ever or to go out of your way to give something a bottom-of-the-barrel rating.

Usually it’s hard to take such ratings seriously; after all, people said similar things about good matches that had bad finishes or storylines that simply had the wrong person winning in the end. With that in mind, let’s take a look back at an infamous match to see if it really was as advertised.