WWE has been doing pay-per-view events for 30 years. That makes me feel very old. And unless I’m forgetting something, I’ve seen every one of those pay-per-views at least once. That makes me feel very…um…something. For the better part of the last 2 decades, they’ve been pumping them out at a rate of at least 12 per year. That’s a lot of shows. At the best of times, there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong. And let’s not kid ourselves, these last 12 or 13 years are often faaaaaaaaaar from the best of times. I love WWE, but they put out some pretty goddamn horrible shit at an absolutely astounding rate. So for that reason, the mere thought of sitting down, going through all that material and coming up with a list of the top 30 worst shows in history is one of those things that makes my brain shut down. The stuff I do remember I hardly want to relive, and the rest I’ve blocked out because it’s cheaper than therapy. But thankfully not everyone is me, which means such a list does exist.
It’s a pretty good list, too. the only thing I take any sort of serious issue with is the positioning of the 3 Wrestlemanias that made the cut. No matter what you say, you’re not going to convince me that Wrestlemania 9 was worse than either 11 or 15, both of which are pretty much the gold standard for garbage. Fifteen was a Russoriffic mess that was only pulled from the deepest depths of hell by Stone Cold and the Rock, and 11 was just boring, awful and sad. To give you an idea of how bad it was, Bam Bam Bigelow carried an untrained football player to a better match than Bob Backlund and Bret Hart, 2 of the more skilled professional wrestlers in the world, could manage to have with each other. Nine, while it could have totally done without that Hulk Hogan bullshit at the end there, at least had a different feel to it with it being an outdoor show, the really good especially for its time Steiners Vs. Headshrinkers tag match and the WWF debut of Jim Ross. The which is worse argument is a tossup between 11 and 15 because they were both differently but perhaps equally wretched, but I feel like 9 tends to get unfairly shat on and I just won’t have it.