There's so much more you could have included with the Fingerpoke of Doom. The plan was to reunite the NWO and have Goldberg feud with them. The only problem was that the next week they ran a spot where Goldberg busted the window of a limo with his arm, which resulted in Goldberg injuring his arm really bad. He was out for close to a year, and the whole angle was scrapped. So the ended Goldberg streak, then did the horrible Fingerpoke of Doom all for nothing.
Yeah, I could have gone further into the writeup but kind of truncated the fallout stuff since I had promised a pick soon and didn't want to hold things up.
Fingerpoke was my #1, and I wasn't really expecting it to get to 3. Arquette not far behind for me. If Fingerpoke had gone at 2 then I was going elsewhere for #4 even though my "elsewhere" may slide for several more picks yet.
Okay, I'll take something that checks off a lot of boxes. Forcing someone to unwillingly go with an uncomfortable storyline; making fun of depression and substance abuse; pissing on the history of one of the greatest tag teams in wrestling history.
I choose Drunk Hawk.
This was in late 1998. Real life Hawk was suffering through some depression-related substance abuse issues and showing up to events wasted. So naturally WWE decides to run with this on their programming, by having Hawk portray a drunk who ****s up his promos and would talk about killing himself. How fun.
Eventually Animal would choose a new LOD partner, Puke (known later as Droz). The most memorable part of the angle was when Hawk appeared on top of the Titantron in the middle of a match and starts rambling. Animal tries to get him to come down, acting all serious and calling him “Mike” (Hawk’s real first name) while Droz climbs up. After Hawk screams that he wants nothing to do with Droz, Droz semi-pushes Hawk backwards off the Titantron. The announcers play this off like someone died.
The very next segment would feature Sable, and pervert Lawler starts going crazy.
Hawk would quickly come back (I think it wasn’t even two weeks later) and say that Droz was the one giving him the drugs. Animal and Hawk would soon be gone from WWE.
I think the first three were correct (in some order) and then there was a pretty big gap. I seriously considered about a half dozen others. A few might even get back to me.
So far, there have been some really, really, really bad angles taken; the sort of things that it boggles the mind that a) someone actually came up with the idea, and b) no one stopped them before they went on air. I'm taking a storyline that 100% should have taken place, and probably should have been the greatest storyline in wrestling history, but it was the execution of the angle rather than the concept which makes it my number 1 pick.
Spoiler:
Ever since Vincent K. McMahon withdrew from the National Wrestling Alliance and went national with the World Wrestling Federation, there had been a bitter rivalry between the WWF and NWA, and later WCW. The rivalry hit fever pitch in September 1995 when WCW created Monday Nitro and put it directly up against WWF's flagship show, Monday Night RAW. For many years fans had dreamt about cross-promotional angles and matches, and this finally became possible when, in 2001, the WWF (effectively) bought WCW. Fast forward a few months and this was the final match of the long anticipated WWF/WCW feud:
The bottom row of wrestlers represents team WCW (well, and ECW, which I will touch upon in a moment). They include Stone Cold Steve Austin, arguably WWF's biggest ever star; the man who a few years earlier had been fired over the phone by WCW and went on to play a major part in helping the WWF win the Monday Night Wars and put WCW out of business. Next in line is RVD, one of the biggest stars of ECW, a company which the WWF had cross-promoted with on more than one occasion during the Monday Night Wars, and had been helped financially by WWF, whereas they had no ties with WCW. Next up, Vince McMahon's son. Then we have Kurt Angle, a man who had literally never stepped foot in a WCW ring. We then have one actual WCW star just for good measure, but the majority of WCW's big players during the Monday Night Wars such as Flair, Goldberg, Hogan and Sting were nowhere to be seen until after the storyline had ended (a whole 13 years later in the case of the latter).
The entire angle was a monumental disappointment which was centred around the McMahons and the big WWF stars, and I could go on for hours, but just looking at that final WCW team pretty much tells the whole story. There have been many ridiculously terrible angles throughout wrestling history that will still be up for grabs later in the draft but nothing matches the disappointment caused throughout the wrestling world by the Invasion angle. I would have snap taken it at #1.
There are a whole bunch of different things I want to take here, but I can't pass this one up.
Spoiler:
Mae Young gives birth to a hand.
I was trying to write this one up well with jokes and commentary but I just couldn't do it. A recap is just better than anything I could come up with.
Mark Henry is sexual chocolate and he's banging Mae Young for a while on the show. There are clips every week of the two of them laying in bed, promos of them together, they come out together for matches, etc. On this night Mark is fighting Crash Holly when Mae Young gives a splash to Crash. Upon hitting the move, she grabs her stomach and the match ends. Later she's on the trainer's table getting yelled at to push and out pops a hand.
IS THAT A HAND?!
A HAND?!
A HAND?!
OH MY GOD ITS A HAND *applause*
meanwhile brisco is vomiting
mark henrys just laughing in the background
theres a fart joke in there somewhere
what was this accomplishing?
idk just watch
edit: Oh yeah, then years later at Raw 1000 they had an update on the hand
Last edited by JimHalpert; 04-14-2017 at 01:33 PM.
an example of something that started out really really really bad and only got so so so much worse
Spoiler:
lita's miscarriage
Spoiler:
so just...wow.
so as the story went lita and matt hardy were dating and kane was trying to get him some of that. ended up kidnapping her, lita found out she was pregnant, matt thought he was the father and proposed but it turned out kane had raped her and impregnated her. kane and hardy had a match where lita had to marry the winner and kane won
enter gene snitsky who hit kane with a chair, kane fell on lita and lita miscarries leading to lita not hating kane anymore and snitsky having his moment in the sun by mocking a woman who in kayfabe had lost her child cuz of him
also along the way trish stratus kept mocking lita until after the snitsky thing she said something about her still being fat from baby weight despite losing the baby. all in all just a total cringeworthy angle from start to finish to post-finish
bonus points for the wwe deciding to turn lita heel by having her turn on kane, you know, the guy who raped her and forced her into a marriage she didn't want, making kane the sympathetic face in a feud against edge. like, that's just hilariously cringeworthy impressive
Please allow me to explain why The Fingerpoke of Doom not only didn't deserve to be drafted #3 overall, it didn't deserve to be drafted at all. It wasn't one of the WOAT. It was effective, clever, and did exactly what it was intended to do. Most people just missed the point.
You have to remember that at the time, the nWo was presented in kayfabe as a rival organization to WCW. Members of the nWo were not members of WCW. They were a group attempting a hostile takeover. (Initially is was strongly implied that they were sent by Vince, but that aspect obviously had to be ditched pretty quickly.)
Therefore, they did not care about the prestige of holding any WCW belt. The only reason they sought after titles was that it gave the group leverage and power over WCW. A close analogy is the show Survivor. There have been several instances in that show where someone from a dominant alliance will give up his or her shot at individual immunity if it also hurts the chances of someone from outside their alliance whom they don't want to win. From the alliance's point of view, it doesn't matter who gets individual immunity, so long as it isn't one particular person.
So it was with the nWo and the WCW World Title. Kevin Nash didn't care a single bit about being champion, so he laid down and gave the belt to Hogan. It was a cute call back to the time Andre tried to give the WWF title to Ted DiBiase, but Jack Tunney vacated the title because he just gave it away without being pinned or submitted. The fact that it pissed off WCW fans who were expecting some nWo on nWo violence and a crack in their front just made the swerve even better. They were heels, and the Fingerpoke of Doom was a great heel move. It put even more heat on Hogan, and putting heat on a heel, so that it is sweeter when the face finally triumphs, is the entire point of wrestling angles.
The Problem was that the final face triumph never came. The nWo never tasted any lasting signature defeat. But that would lead into some moments that are actually worthy of being drafted as among the WOAT so I'll just stop here and say I loved the Fingerpoke of Doom at the time, and still do to this day.