The Wrestling Section

(Special thanks to CassT2000  for suggesting this match. If you'd like to see a match covered on the Worst in the World, leave a comment down below.) ... Do I need to go any further? Heading into Fall Brawl 1993, the team of Sting, Davey Boy Smith, and Dustin Rhodes needed a partner to take on the team of Big Van Vader, Sid Vicious, and Harlem Heat. But they didn't just need anyone, they needed someone who was going to shock the world. Enter the Shockmaster, aka Fred Ottman (Tugboat/Typhoon in the WWF) in a glittery Stormtrooper mask. This already looks bad, but it gets worse. Much worse. After Sting announced the Shockmaster as their partner at Clash of the Champions XXIV, the Shockmaster burst through the wall of the "A Flair for the Gold" set. At least, that's what was supposed to happen. Instead, Shockmaster tripped over a piece of wood, broke through the wall, fell right on his fookin ass as Smith said, and lost his helmet in the process. And just like that,...

Special thanks to Otter Empire for suggesting this match. If you'd like to see a match covered on the Worst in the World, leave a comment down below. Heel Michael Cole. Just writing that probably elicits all kinds of negative emotions from you. During the first season of the original NXT, WWE decided to turn Michael Cole from the straight & narrow regular babyface commentator to a cocky, arrogant, annoying heel, constantly running down fan-favorite Daniel Bryan and cheerleading for The Miz. That heel persona would translate over to RAW where he became the spokesman for the Annonymous General Manager who would communicate through a laptop, another terrible idea from WWE. It was a truly awful time to be alive. Now, a heel commentator in itself is not bad. Many commentators have done this successfully in the past, including Cole's longtime partner Jerry Lawler. The difference between Lawler doing it and Cole doing was that Lawler was the color commentator. Lawler could heel ...

Four years. That's how long ago I started the Worst in the World. In that time, I've covered 111 matches...but this is the one I've wanted to cover for the longest time. Back when I made the original list for this series, I came up with 115 matches based on ratings from Dave Meltzer and winners of the Worst Match of the Year Award from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. What I didn't take into account was that quite a few of those matches were house show matches that I would never be able to find...but then there's this match. Unlike those random house show matches, this match was aired on television. It took place in 2006, so there should've been some video of it somewhere. Theoretically, I should've been able to watch this match with ease...but no. It was nowhere on YouTube, nowhere on Dailymotion...this match didn't exist anywhere on the Internet it seems. I probably could've found it if I had found some shady website that would've unloaded...

Last week, I covered Sting vs Tony Palmore from New Japan Pro Wrestling's Battle 7, a terrible match that tried to blend professional wrestling with shootfighting, in this case, kickboxing. This match gave a glimpse into "Inoki-ism", a term used to describe then New Japan owner Antonio Inoki's obsession with trying to combine professional wrestling with real fighting, mixed martial arts specifically, that would ruin NJPW for years until he was forced out of the company. After how poorly this went for Inoki and New Japan, you'd have to be an idiot to try and do what they did by trying to blend MMA and pro wrestling as hard as they did...on an unrelated note, TNA. Years after Inoki was gone from New Japan, TNA tried to incorporate the world of MMA into their company, usually to poor results. Whether that be signing King Mo, who would wrestle a total of zero matches in his first three-year run with the company, to adding Rampage Jackson to the Main Event Mafia s...

This match raises some questions. First off, who is Tony Palmore? Well, he's a professional kickboxer who won gold twice at the World Association of Kickboxing Organizations World Championships in 1978 and 1979 in the +84kg division. He is not a wrestler. That might raise the question as to why he's not only wrestling, but wrestling one of the biggest stars in wrestling in Sting, and how a match this bad could've been held by New Japan Pro Wrestling, widely considered to have the best wrestling in the world in 2020. Well, the answer to that is simple...Antonio Inoki. Antonio Inoki loved shootfighting, so much so that he tried his damnedest to mix it with professional wrestling during his tenure as the owner of New Japan, including pushing for his wrestlers to embark on MMA careers during a boom in MMA's popularity in the early 2000s. Poor Yugi Nagata, one of New Japan's top stars in the early 2000s, was truly fed to the wolves, as his only two MMA fights were los...

...You knew it was coming. After this happened, you knew it would be showing up in a series chronicling the worst wrestling matches of all time. This match isn't even a year old, but it's already gone down as one of WWE's most catastrophically bad matches in the company's history. Seth Rollins and Bray Wyatt's Hell in a Cell match for the Universal Championship won the Wrestling Observer Newsletter's Worst Match of the Year and received -2 stars from Dave Meltzer, the lowest a WWE match has gotten since 2007. To put that in perspective, here are some matches that happened between then that got a better rating than this match: Sting and Abyss' Last Rites match AJ Styles vs Frank Trigg in a worked MMA match WrestleMania XXV's Miss WrestleMania Battle Royal Santina Marella vs Vickie Guerrero & Chavo Guerrero in a Hogpen match  The match where Jeff Hardy got trashed before the main event Santino Marella vs Ricardo Rodriquez in a Tuxedo match J...