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Vince McMahon making himself ECW Champ wasn't even the worst thing about 2007...
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00:00WWE in 2007. Let's be honest, how much do you actually remember from what happened on screen?
00:06As always, if this is when you first got into wrestling, you likely love it,
00:08but in terms of a 12-month period in general, well, it's a bit of a mixed bag.
00:12There's a reason the Battle of the Billionaires happened at WrestleMania.
00:15WWE just wanted to make as much noise as possible.
00:18A big reason for this, of course, was due to the horrific murder-suicide of the Benwell family,
00:22and I'll tell you, I took some time off watching after that.
00:25It was just too hard to process, and yes, it was the worst thing of 2007.
00:29We shall talk about it later.
00:31Otherwise, though, my friends, we will start with some storylines.
00:34I am Simon Miller. Let's go.
00:36Number 10, Teddy Long Has a Heart Attack
00:38There's a horrible and eerie irony to this, but one story WWE did go back to a lot over the
00:43years
00:43was characters acting like they were going to die.
00:46I mean, don't do that, because wrestling is meant to be an escape.
00:48Now, a joy of 2007 with Mr. Long was how obsessed he was with putting heels in matches with The
00:53Undertaker
00:53and randomly putting tag-team bouts.
00:55It's still a meme today. It's very funny in a stupid way.
00:58For some reason, this led to him dating WWE diva Crystal Marshall, so of course, in June, they got engaged
01:04on SmackDown.
01:05Why wouldn't you do that on camera?
01:07By September, they were getting wed when, yep, Teddy suffered a heart attack, inadvertent commas.
01:12Now, I really don't think this is the way when it comes to sports entertainment, but I suppose wrestling is
01:16a soap opera,
01:17and most definitely nobody was talking to each other, because come November, Crystal got released.
01:22When Teddy Long did return to TV, it was like nothing had happened.
01:26No wedding, no cardiac event. I mean, that's really bad.
01:29This was the one time just finishing it was for the best, though, as this screamed Al Wilson, which we've
01:34covered on this series before.
01:36But if you mean, my friends, that was bad enough the first time around.
01:39So yes, it was shock TV, and I don't want to be that guy, but it was no good.
01:42Number 9. The end of the Cruiserweight title
01:44Horn Swoggle got a big old push in 2007, so much so at the Great American Bash, he won the
01:50Cruiserweight title.
01:51This was essentially a scramble with Charvo Guerrero, Jamie Noble, Funaki, Jimmy Wang Yang, and Shannon Moore,
01:56so not many people expected Swog to get the W, and it would have been fine for him to be
02:00the champion,
02:01apart from the fact throughout the whole year, he'd been treated as a comedy figure.
02:05This carried on as well, because co-general manager Vicky Guerrero on the 20th of September SmackDown
02:09just decided, nope, Horn's, you are no longer the champion, because we're going to retire the belt.
02:15That honestly was it as well until 2016, when the Cruiserweight Classic came back, and basically 205 live.
02:21If you want the trivia, the final match for the gold was 31st of August 2007 on SmackDown,
02:26as Horn Swoggle defended against Jamie Noble.
02:28Surprise, surprise, it was sort of just there.
02:31This was the worst ending too, because given this had WCW history,
02:34we were just forgetting about Rey Mysterio vs Eddie Guerrero,
02:37or anything involving Chris Jericho and Dean Malenko.
02:40If you wanted to see WWE not care about the lighter wrestling boom, well, this was it.
02:44WWE did have priors with this, because the Intercontinental title had been merged with the World Belt in 2002,
02:50so really, one that Vince McMahon saw even less in, well, that was Scrooge.
02:53We couldn't have just thought up something more interesting, though?
02:56Apparently not.
02:57Why bother?
02:58Number 8, Edge to the Great Khali.
03:00July 2007, Edge was forced to drop the world title due to a pec injury.
03:04It sucked.
03:05As we know now, that usually means somewhat of a scramble,
03:08and to be fair, WWE is usually very good at sorting this.
03:11If we have an unexpected hole, we can fill it with something last minute,
03:14and exciting, we didn't do that here.
03:17Because we just went to the classic, let's do a battle royal,
03:20and I guess because nobody could figure out how you throw somebody so big over the top rope,
03:24the Great Khali won.
03:26And look, Khali in wrestling makes sense.
03:29A massive man is always going to have a place,
03:31but nobody thought he should be the world champion, and here we were.
03:33Batista was his first challenger,
03:35because big men will always slap man meat,
03:37but that didn't go well.
03:38The whole thing was fighting upstream.
03:40The Great One wasn't helped in the sense we soon turned to Kane,
03:42which was not the right move.
03:44Therefore, after that, it was Rey Mysterio.
03:46Well, we've done the Giants, now let's do David and Goliath.
03:49By Unforgiven, we pushed our hands together,
03:51and it was a three-way with Big Dave and Rey.
03:53By then, I think WWE knew they had to change it up,
03:56and Batista got the win in the gold.
03:58Down the line, Khali would become the Punjabi playboy,
04:01which was equally as bad for different reasons.
04:03I really don't know how anybody thought this was going to work.
04:06Number seven, Rosie vs. Donald.
04:08This has a totally different feel to it these days,
04:10but still, it was terrible.
04:12But in true Vince McMahon fashioners,
04:13Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump had a falling out in real life,
04:16he thought he would use it to kick off the year with a bang.
04:18Brings us to the January 7th roar,
04:20he got two people to dress up as these celebrities and fight.
04:24This was done for one man and one man only.
04:26As always, if anyone booked this today,
04:28there would be a meltdown online,
04:29and the real issue is how desperate this all felt.
04:32Surely it will get some mainstream publicity.
04:35Even if it did, it wasn't going to show wrestling in the right light.
04:37It made it out like sports entertainment was one big joke.
04:40Don't forget this was weeks before the Royal Rumble 2.
04:43Kind of felt like we needed a TV time for angles.
04:45Vince was awful here as well,
04:47as he described Rosie as having lesbianic fury,
04:50whatever the flub that means.
04:51And the audience hated this so much,
04:53they started chanting TNA.
04:55That didn't happen all that much,
04:56so it goes to show.
04:57It's just an absolute joke,
04:58and not in the way it was meant to be.
05:00So bad.
05:01So, so bad.
05:02Number six,
05:03K-Fed beats John Cena.
05:05So we stick with the start of 2007,
05:06because WWE would often feel like they needed to kick the year off with a bang.
05:10How do we attract fans who then may feel like they're locked in for 12 months?
05:14For some reason during this period,
05:15we picked K-Fed.
05:16This would be Kevin Federline,
05:18who went to Raw,
05:19and man, he beat John Cena in a no-disqualification match.
05:22Not even kidding.
05:23And Cena was the current WWE champion.
05:26And as for K-Fed,
05:27well, I don't want to be horrible,
05:28but he's basically known as Britney's wife.
05:30I mean, do you remember how mad we all were
05:32that Travis Scott just happened to walk to the ring slowly in 2025?
05:35Imagine, man.
05:36Just imagine.
05:37Of course, the likes of Imago and Johnny Nitro interfered,
05:39so this was tainted.
05:40But technically speaking,
05:41you could have Kevin as one of John's last opponents during his retirement tour,
05:45and the law would have worked.
05:46That shouldn't be a thing.
05:47Cena was still mega over here as well,
05:49so there was just no need.
05:50It was so wild to see,
05:52but as above,
05:53WWE just wanted mainstream attention so badly
05:55they were even going to sacrifice their top guy.
05:58Get this too?
05:59It didn't work.
06:00I know, shock horror.
06:01Number five,
06:02the Mr. Kennedy saga.
06:03This is such a shame looking back,
06:05but I guess Mr. Kennedy,
06:06Kennedy does have to take some of the blame.
06:09The man won the Money in the Bank briefcase at WrestleMania 23,
06:12and given how he was booked,
06:13you could tell he was going to get the mega push.
06:15Sadly, Kennedy then suffered a shoulder injury,
06:18so WWE had edge beating for the briefcase when we got super sad news.
06:23Ken had been misdiagnosed.
06:25The ailment wasn't as bad as first thought.
06:27He only needed a few weeks rest.
06:29I guess everybody turned around and just went,
06:31whoops.
06:31It was too late for that,
06:32so you would presume that WWE would have course corrected,
06:35but they didn't.
06:36Kennedy did return and went after the Intercontinental Championship when the house fell down.
06:40Not only did he get busted on the wellness policy just weeks after doing an interview,
06:44saying nobody in the company does drugs,
06:46but he also apparently hurt Randy Orton in a match.
06:48Even before then,
06:49the word on the street was he had proven to be a bit dangerous in the ring,
06:52and eventually all this bad news got to Vince McMahon,
06:54and yep,
06:55Ken Kennedy was let go.
06:57It's so hard to underline what a shock this was at the time.
07:00We all had him down as the new guy.
07:02Kennedy was being prepped to be revealed as Mr. McMahon's illegitimate son in 2007, too.
07:06And while that story was dumb,
07:08it was still quite the position to have.
07:10McMahon wasn't going to give that to anybody.
07:12It was a way to move somebody up.
07:14That affected fans as well because Hornswoggle was put into this position instead,
07:18and yeah,
07:19we turned weeks worth of stories into a joke.
07:22Kennedy never really recovered from this either.
07:24It was just a wild catalogue of bad events.
07:26Number 4,
07:27Vince McMahon,
07:28ECW Champion.
07:29This was always going to happen.
07:31Vince McMahon had already made himself the WWE Champion in 1999,
07:35so as he saw the whole ECW brand as lesser than,
07:38yeah,
07:39why not rule the roost over there,
07:41nobody will care.
07:42It was incorrect.
07:43But on the 29th of April,
07:44Vince beat Bobby Lashley in a 3-on-1 handicap match at Backlash.
07:48McMahon's son Shane Anumaga just wrecked Bob,
07:50but still,
07:51this was totally nuts.
07:52Vince was also wearing a do-rag at the time after having his head shaved at WrestleMania,
07:56so it made it even more insane.
07:58And yes,
07:58I get it.
07:59McMahon did this as he wanted to get Lashley over as a mega babyface like Steve Austin,
08:03so let's just copy and paste.
08:05Problem was,
08:06Bobby was way too early on his journey,
08:08doing shortcuts like this actually made it worse.
08:10Don't force things down people's throats,
08:12if somebody has booked right,
08:13they'll get there eventually anyway.
08:15The timing of it wasn't ideal either,
08:16as ECW had only been relaunched in 2006,
08:19and now a year or so on,
08:20Vince was the champion.
08:22In June,
08:23he then lost it back to Bobby,
08:24but still,
08:24what a mad two months.
08:26I don't really know what they thought this was going to do.
08:29Number three,
08:29the limo explosion.
08:31So this would have been bad anyway,
08:32but yeah,
08:33the fallout from it.
08:34Sheesh,
08:35it's all-time awful WWE that made you want to take a break.
08:38It all began with Vince McMahon allegedly telling the creative team,
08:40the Mr. McMahon character needed taking off TV permanently because he was getting old.
08:45He then decided to just finish the dude off,
08:46and the answer to that was killing him on Monday Night Raw.
08:50Therefore,
08:51on the 11th of June,
08:51Vince walked past the entire roster as he got into his vehicle,
08:54when,
08:55brammo,
08:55it exploded,
08:56leaving you to question,
08:57who done it?
08:58Not sure anybody truly cared,
09:00and they were more offended,
09:01this was the route we had chosen to take.
09:03The word has always been,
09:03because WWE ran this on their website as legitimate,
09:06people actually rang up to see if Vince was okay.
09:09All of this was dumb.
09:10Even if what had happened next hadn't have gone down,
09:12this still was WWE going way too WCW,
09:16even more so because yes,
09:17they played it seriously.
09:18Of course,
09:18it didn't last more than a day as the Chris Benoit murder-suicide tragedy took place,
09:22and even WWE knew this couldn't carry on.
09:25Would have been beyond insulting,
09:27but yeah,
09:28even if it was,
09:29I don't think we needed to do it.
09:30Number two,
09:31Hornswoggle McMahon.
09:32We just spoke about it,
09:33but it does need its own entry.
09:35After the Ken Kennedy,
09:36Kennedy issues,
09:37Vince McMahon threw his toys out the pram,
09:39and just made one big long storyline a joke.
09:41Didn't pick somebody else to be his fake son,
09:43he ended it as if it was a waste of time anyway.
09:46This is what I mean about 2007 as well,
09:48because it really was cool Hornswoggle in case of emergency.
09:51Nothing wrong with that in theory,
09:52but one,
09:53it became redundant like all these things do,
09:55and two,
09:55it just wasn't serious,
09:57stow your confidence away,
09:58what else is just going to become one big punchline?
10:01We had Triple H out there during this reveal
10:03to laugh at Vince McMahon too,
10:04and that sucked.
10:05Why is having Swog as a son so funny?
10:08Imagine you were a little person watching this,
10:10wasn't exactly in good taste,
10:11and the joke was rubbish too.
10:13Swogs could now potentially run the company
10:15and fly on the WWE private jet.
10:17Who could possibly care?
10:18Even McMahon got bored of this,
10:20so in February 2008,
10:21he just said,
10:22actually,
10:22Hornswoggle is Fit Finley,
10:23son,
10:24meaning it was five months of nonsense.
10:26We've been told the reveal of this
10:27would change the landscape forever.
10:28My ass.
10:29Let's not get into logic here either,
10:31but Hornswoggle is not a child.
10:34He was a grown ass man,
10:35but he was told to act like he was eight.
10:37This sucked man.
10:38Again,
10:39nobody would dare do it today.
10:41Number one,
10:41the Chris Benoit tribute.
10:42Because this did actually air as a Raw episode,
10:45it does sort of fit into the canon
10:46of what WWE did do in 2007.
10:49Really,
10:49you can take the rest of the entries on this list
10:51and throw them out the window,
10:52because stories are stories.
10:53Even when they suck,
10:54meh,
10:55who cares,
10:55it's wrestling.
10:56It doesn't actually matter.
10:57I don't think anybody will forget where they were
10:59when the Chris Benoit murder-suicide news
11:01came out,
11:02however,
11:02because it was so unbelievable.
11:04It still doesn't feel real today,
11:05and that's down to the fact
11:06it's one of the worst moments in wrestling history.
11:09Forget the year known as 2007.
11:11Whatever the timeline may have been,
11:12WWE still chose to air this episode of Raw,
11:15and at the time,
11:16the idea was the whole family had been murdered.
11:18As such,
11:19you get tribute after tribute to Benoit,
11:21and I don't blame the wrestlers for this.
11:23That was their friend and colleague.
11:24If nothing else,
11:25they too were trying to make sense of it.
11:27Of course,
11:27when the truth came out mere hours later
11:29that Chris Benoit had been responsible,
11:31well,
11:31the whole thing just felt even worse.
11:33Sort of ties into the fact
11:34that you should always wait and be patient.
11:36This muddied the waters even more,
11:37and nobody needed that.
11:38It's hard enough as it was.
11:40As mentioned during the intro as well,
11:42I actually took the rest of 2007
11:43off watching wrestling,
11:45because this was so harrowing to even think about.
11:47It was really difficult to tune into WWE
11:49to escape life anymore.
11:51It was life,
11:52and the constant news cycle referencing it
11:54was proof of that.
11:55It's actually amazing
11:56WWE was able to find their way again.
11:58That's how bad it was.
11:59We can't all talk about it though
12:00if you are going to bring up 2007,
12:02because that would be of disservice
12:04to Nancy Benoit and son Daniel.
12:06It's always important
12:07that we never forget them
12:08or their families,
12:09because I would imagine
12:10they are still dealing with it today.
12:12Now,
12:12if you don't have anything else
12:12you want to talk about
12:13when it comes to 2007 WWE,
12:15make sure you leave us a comment below
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12:22in your life,
12:23but otherwise my friends,
12:24hope you have a terrific day,
12:25and I'll talk to you again soon.
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