10 Times WWE Totally Flawed WrestleMania
Wrestling the Undertaker IS the main event, Punk!
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00:00 As the latest row to WrestleMania begins to pick up a bit of steam, it'd probably be
00:05 wise for Papa H to take a minute in between his father-in-law booking big meaty men slapping
00:09 meat on the grandest stage, and largely dropping the ball when it comes to his women's division
00:13 to remind himself what can happen when things don't go exactly according to plan at the
00:18 show of shows. Or rather they do, but that plan just suuuuucked.
00:23 So I am Gareth from What Culture Wrestling and these are 10 times that WWE botched WrestleMania.
00:29 10. Roman's reign is booed into existence - WrestleMania 32
00:33 When it comes to the 30 second show of shows, it's hard to mention that 2016 WrestleMania
00:38 without feeling a little bit underwhelmed. Despite boasting one hell of a women's showcase
00:43 over a newly rechristened belt, the majority of the card just felt like a bit of a letdown
00:47 really. So it strangely felt a little bit appropriate that this all-round underwhelming
00:51 lacklustre show went out on one hell of a sour note.
00:54 This wasn't a case of the company just getting completely caught off-guide either, they knew
00:58 what was going to happen. They had Roman Reigns, the person who was getting booed in every
01:01 single arena that he walked into, up against Triple H, who was literally just anybody but
01:06 Roman Reigns. There was a chance here though before this
01:08 event just to pivot ever so slightly and put Dean Ambrose into the mix, maybe in a three
01:12 way or just have him vs Roman for the WWE Championship. But did they take this lifeline
01:17 that would have helped alleviate all the negativity that was no doubt going to be present in the
01:20 stadium? Of course they didn't. Instead Reigns' WWE World Championship reign
01:24 was crammed down folks throats and they more than let WWE know about it.
01:28 Hey, but at least all involved learned from their mistakes a year later though, right?
01:32 9. Not letting the Deadman rest in peace - WrestleMania 33
01:36 Now it was evident on the road to WrestleMania 33 that the Deadman, the Undertaker, was not
01:41 at his absolute best, was he? Because just taking one look at the way he
01:44 entered that Royal Rumble showed you that this man had a dodgy hip and should have been
01:48 nowhere near a wrestling ring. That and the fact that he was tasked with
01:51 trying to get over a person who again had been booed for an entire year made any real
01:55 hope of a critically acclaimed showing like the ones he'd had all the way through WrestleMania
01:59 23 to WrestleMania 30 pretty non-existent. But WWE saw this man at the Royal Rumble and
02:05 was still only all too happy to throw him into the show of shows, and well the end results
02:09 were as painful to watch as they likely were to produce.
02:12 Takers struggled throughout and Romans did much of the literal and physical heavy lifting
02:16 and it was just really excruciating wasn't it?
02:18 And making matters that little bit worse, Roman Reigns himself said that he didn't
02:22 want to win this match, he even requested to lose it, but WWE weren't having any of
02:25 it, they wanted Roman to win, so he did, so the Undertaker lost in what was looking like
02:29 his final match and it was all just a bit depressing.
02:31 And it also kickstarted Mark Calloway's three year mission just to try and go out
02:35 on one hell of a high and we all remember what happened at Super Showdown, so I'm
02:38 gonna blame this. This is what started that.
02:41 8. Hulkamania foolishly runs wild at WrestleMania 9
02:44 Has there ever been a more disappointing conclusion to the show of shows than what went down
02:48 at WrestleMania 9? The answer is no, or maybe not because there was a lot more entries on
02:53 this list.
02:54 After shockingly overcoming the babyface hero Bret Hart in the main events of WrestleMania
02:58 9, Yokozuna was your new champion. And this was a pretty bold move because you had this
03:02 big titanic heel beating the babyface at the end of WrestleMania and people were like "what
03:07 what, a not happy ending? What a move!"
03:10 And this felt like it could have been a fresh new era for WWE going forward, only until
03:14 it quickly became known that it wasn't going to be this because Hulkamania was going to
03:18 run wild brother.
03:19 Yep, that's right, WWE reverted right back to good old tried and tested Hulkster over
03:23 here and things just all got very strange didn't they.
03:27 Because yes, Hogan had issued a challenge earlier that night to the winner of Bret Hart
03:31 vs Yokozuna for the WWE Championship, but nobody in their right mind thought that was
03:34 going to happen straight after Bret Hart had salt thrown in his eyes and he got pinned.
03:38 And then Hogan won the whole thing in like next to no time at all and even dodged the
03:41 salt that somehow felled Bret Hart, making Bret look even more foolish. This entire thing
03:46 was silly, stupid, it didn't help anyone.
03:48 And making matters that little bit worse, instead of doing the favours back to Hart
03:51 like he said he would apparently further down the road, he chose to drop the belt back to
03:55 Yokozuna at King of the Ring, rendering this entire thing pointless. What a pointless waste
03:59 of time.
04:00 7. Trying to follow The Undertaker vs Shawn Michaels, WrestleMania 25
04:05 Some incoming clashes have instant classic written all over them. So rather than trying
04:09 to follow something like, I don't know, Hulk Hogan vs The Rock at WrestleMania 18, the
04:13 smart move would have probably been to just end WrestleMania with something that was always
04:17 going to be as huge as this.
04:18 But of course, WWE foolishly decided to do the complete opposite to that. They put him
04:22 on like third to last, then he had a women's match and a world championship match and they
04:25 both didn't feel anywhere near as special. The crowd was zapped because they just had
04:29 Hulk Hogan vs The Rock.
04:30 And did WWE learn from their mistakes a whopping what, seven years later? No they did not because
04:35 you've been watching this video, they do not learn.
04:37 And on this occasion we have The Undertaker vs Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 25 and they
04:41 put on an absolute masterpiece, a clinic, a masterclass if you will, and they're always
04:46 going to because look who these people are. Look who's involved in the match, but WWE
04:50 didn't have the foresight to see that this was going to happen, so what did they do again?
04:54 They put two matches on after this classic. They put two, you had the world championship
04:58 and the WWE championship, and of course they both just sank. They did not do anywhere near
05:02 as well as they should have done. Triple H himself even sat backstage, looked at Randy
05:06 Orton and went, you know what, I think we're in trouble. Yes they are, yes they were, it's
05:09 all moulding into one because my mind is melting again.
05:12 Thankfully the penny did finally drop a year later because they put these two bad boys
05:15 on last because who is going to follow this?
05:17 Number six, The Ref Counts Ronda's Shoulders After A Never Ending Show, WrestleMania 35
05:22 After having to sit through what was shaping up to be the longest pay-per-view in all of
05:26 WWE history, it's safe to say that many of the fans inside of MetLife Stadium were rather
05:30 exhausted at the thought of having to sit through yet another match. But of course the
05:34 stars involved in that first ever all-women's main event were so damn talented that they
05:37 somehow managed to get everybody back on board because Ronda Rousey, Becky Lynch and Charlotte
05:41 Flair know what they're doing.
05:42 One person who sadly did not know what they were doing though when it came to this closing
05:45 stretch of this epic main event for the ages was the referee because he had one hell of
05:49 a botch didn't he.
05:50 As the match reached its final stages we had Ronda Rousey with Becky Lynch on her shoulders
05:54 for the Piper's Pit, but then when she went for the move, Becky reversed it. And as she
05:58 went to pin her shoulders to the mat, Ronda's shoulders clearly were off the mat. They weren't
06:02 there for a minute, but the refs started counting anyway, so like for the first one and a half
06:06 her shoulders were nowhere near the mat and then she got them to the mat, it was all a
06:08 bit clunky, and even the commentators were like "does that count? We're doing that?
06:12 Okay, let's go with it."
06:13 Now of course everyone knew coming into this event that Becky was going to come out with
06:16 all the belts, the winner takes all the title, everything else, we just knew that because
06:19 that's where the story was going.
06:20 But the nature of just the all-round botched finish has led to WWE pretty much no-selling
06:24 the nature of what actually went down. They just don't really talk about it. They go "yeah,
06:28 Becky won at WrestleMania", people say "how?" and they go "no, no, no, it's not important".
06:31 And just as another little detail, referee Rod Tepater was also fine because he meant
06:34 to call these matches as a shoot, and he did not in this moment and Vince McMahon was not
06:38 impressed.
06:39 5. CM Punk Still Doesn't Get His Main Event - WrestleMania 29
06:44 In another case of WWE's refusal to buck the obvious coming back to bite them squarely
06:48 on the ass, the decision to not give CM Punk the WrestleMania main event he so desired
06:53 definitely ranks as one of the biggest botches in company history. Had Vince McMahon and
06:57 Cole just found a way to squeeze Punk into that main event of WrestleMania 29 alongside
07:02 The Rock and John Cena, then maybe there's a world where Punk would have just stayed
07:06 put. He would have got his main event, he'd think "you know what, I'm happy with this,
07:09 I've done the thing I wanted to do, I'll stay here, I'll earn some money and earn WWE loads
07:13 of money too".
07:14 But rather than just injecting some best in the world into this weird twice-in-a-lifetime
07:18 lie, the call was instead made to just chuck good ol' Phil into a match with The Undertaker
07:22 that was classed as a quote-unquote "main event" by Triple H and Vince McMahon.
07:27 And then we got The Rock vs John Cena again, but this time for the WWE title because that
07:30 promised an even better match than we got the first time around. Spoiler, it did not.
07:34 Undertaker and the chipmagnet most definitely put on a show-stealing performance because
07:38 of course they didn't look at these two people.
07:40 But there's still no getting around the fact that Punk had once again seen his WrestleMania
07:43 dreams evaporate before his very eyes, and this all definitely played into his decision
07:47 to leave WWE right at the start of 2014, that and the fact that Vince McMahon thought "you
07:51 know what, I did that to him last year, this year, I'll put him in a match with Triple
07:54 H, what could go wrong?"
07:56 4. The Wrong Women Walk Out On Top - WrestleMania 36
08:00 An entirely bizarre set of evenings for more than a few reasons.
08:03 The Performance Center show of shows, aka WrestleMania 36, did at least come with a
08:08 fair amount of fun, and that was really needed at the time because remember? Global pandemic,
08:12 crying in my pyjamas every single day and eating way too much ice cream at 9 o'clock
08:16 in the morning.
08:17 However, it did still come with a few painful reminders that Vince McMahon simply did not
08:20 care no matter what was going on in the world at this moment in time. He did not care what
08:24 you wanted, he was still going to do whatever the hell he wanted because Vince gonna Vince.
08:27 Heading into that year's showcase of the immortals, NXT darling Shayna Baszler and
08:31 Rhea Ripley would definitely be in position as two people who could be the future of the
08:34 company, and they were two people that everyone was very much behind because they were fresh,
08:37 they were sparkly, we'd see them in NXT and we thought, "you know what, these two
08:40 ladies can fly".
08:41 And as they were both set to take on horsewomen at the show of shows, it definitely felt like
08:45 a passing of the torch moment was about to go down.
08:47 But oh how wrong we were.
08:49 The two black and gold sensations were both defeated across the two nights, with Becky
08:52 Lynch winning yet again with a roll-up because that's just what she does at WrestleMania.
08:56 Now at least Ripley did find a way to get herself back on track after having her momentum
08:59 completely derailed by whatever the hell that was when she lost to Charlotte Flair and lost
09:03 her NXT Championship.
09:04 Whereas Shayna Baszler is yet to really fully recover from being rolled up on the grandest
09:08 stage of them all and having her WrestleMania moment stolen away by the men.
09:12 3.
09:13 Too Many McMahons
09:14 While it initially seemed like a fairly straightforward main event at WrestleMania 2000, very quickly
09:18 turned into one of the most overbooked pieces of foolishness ever to grace the show of shows.
09:23 After winning that year's Royal Rumble, albeit a little bit controversially, The Rock
09:27 looked set to go one-on-one with his long-time rival Triple H on the grandest stage of them
09:31 all.
09:32 And at this moment in time, Triple H was arguably the biggest heel in the company, Rock was
09:35 the biggest face, it just made sense.
09:37 But that would have been a bit too easy, wouldn't it?
09:39 The attention was ultimately pulled away from this twosome and the big show was thrown in
09:42 there and Mick Foley too because we just need more people and more stars and more star power
09:47 because that's how Vince's brain works.
09:50 And in addition to just overloading the actual in-ring action that was going down in between
09:54 the ropes, they put a McMahon in every corner because nothing sells a WrestleMania like
09:59 four McMahons.
10:01 Now admittedly, giving Mick Foley the WrestleMania main event spot that he definitely deserved
10:05 after putting his body on the line and putting it through hell for years and years and years
10:09 was a nice touch.
10:10 We all love that.
10:11 It's just a shame that it got thrown into such an overstuffed and just sour taste contest.
10:16 And this was all complete with a typical headline-stealing Vince McMahon swerb because of course it
10:19 was.
10:20 And Triple H won the thing so he had a heel coming out on top in WrestleMania and the
10:24 main event for the first time ever just to really sour/sweeten the deal, whatever way
10:28 you want to put it.
10:29 So what could have been one of the strongest show of show closes of all time turned out
10:32 to be little more than a McMahon-obsessed mess.
10:35 Number two, Austin's deal with the devil ends an old timer on a sour note.
10:40 WrestleMania X-Seven Despite quite possibly sitting as the greatest
10:44 WrestleMania of all time, the way that WrestleMania X-Seven ended still has many fans scratching
10:48 their heads to this day.
10:50 So in the main event you had Stone Cold Steve Austin versus The Rock.
10:53 This was the second time they were going at it at WrestleMania.
10:55 They were long-time rivals.
10:56 They were the biggest stars in the company.
10:58 But the plan going into this was to somehow turn Stone Cold Steve Austin heel in his home
11:03 state.
11:04 Stone Cold Steve Austin, biggest baby face of all time, the hero, the face of the company,
11:09 turn him heel in his own backyard.
11:11 Stone Cold could have punched a baby in the face and give the middle finger to the American
11:14 flag inside of the Astrodome and he still would not have been booed.
11:19 This was Stone Cold Steve Austin.
11:20 But did that stop WWE from insisting on going through with one of the worst decisions in
11:24 WWE history and turning the bionic redneck on the WrestleMania stage in the main event?
11:29 No it did not.
11:30 Not even the sight of Austin sharing a beer with his long-time mortal enemy Vince McMahon,
11:34 the boss, the devil himself, could get people to boo him because they loved him because
11:38 it's Stone Cold.
11:39 I don't know how many times I've got to say it, this was Stone Cold.
11:42 Even Austin himself has admitted in years gone by that if he could go back, if he could
11:45 jump into a time machine now, he would change things, he would call an audible because you
11:49 could hear the noise in that stadium, that arena, that moment.
11:52 They were not booing Stone Cold.
11:54 They did not hate him.
11:55 So why not just lean into it and make an incredible WrestleMania moment?
11:57 That's just what you do.
11:59 And hell if he did jump into that time machine, he might have been saved from the absolute
12:02 failed experiment that was the Stone Cold Steve Austin heel turn in General 2.
12:06 1.
12:07 All of It WrestleMania 27
12:10 You may have come equipped with the return of the People's Champion and won hell of
12:13 a war between The Undertaker and Triple H. But outside of those few occasional highlights,
12:17 WrestleMania 27, when you think about it, when those words get thrown into a conversation,
12:21 you get chills, I get chills, I get shivers, I'm shivering right now.
12:24 Stuffing the biggest event on the calendar with a frankly disturbing amount of nothing
12:29 matches.
12:30 And these range from Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler doing whatever the hell that was, to
12:34 the weird Snooki nonsense when they had that six-person tag match with Snooki from Jersey
12:39 Shore.
12:40 This stage was then well and truly set for a truly horrific main event that everyone
12:45 remembers for all the wrong reasons.
12:46 Because despite walking out of the show of shows with the WWE Championship in a match
12:50 that involved him and John Cena, a disturbing concussion and the fact that Rock got involved
12:54 with the match late on completely overshadowed The Miz's massive win.
12:58 With the attention then swiftly turning to The Rock vs. John Cena at next year's WrestleMania.
13:03 Yep, that's right, the most important main event of the year was little more than an
13:07 angle to set up the following year's WrestleMania.
13:10 A waste of time, talent and energy from pretty much start to finish.
13:14 To class this as the greatest botch of them all would be a bit of an understatement, wouldn't
13:18 it?
13:19 So that has been our list of any other times that there would be botched the grandest stage
13:22 of them all, the show of shows, the showcase of the immortals.
13:25 Then let us know all about them in the comments section right down below and don't forget
13:29 to like this video, share it and subscribe to all things WhatCulture Wrestling and follow
13:33 me on Twitter @GMorgan04 and follow everyone here @WhatCultureWWE.
13:42 And be sure to enjoy all of the other WrestleMania content that we have dropping around my lovely
13:46 face at this point.
13:47 If you've not already voted on the Ultimate WrestleMania card, go and do that if it's
13:50 not already been decided.
13:53 In the meantime, just be good to yourself and let us enjoy this road to WrestleMania
13:57 because I want to see my Brock smash into an Elmos and I'm going to smile and pop a
14:00 beard just for that.