5 monumental booking decisions taken at the last minute
In an era where pro wrestling opens it backdoor to everyone through the internet, it becomes almost impossible for the wrestling promotions to genuinely surprise their fans. As a result, they’re more focused on pulling off swerves in the eleventh hour, rather than planning for it and executing it to perfection using long-term storytelling.
Sometimes fans tend to crib about how there are no more long term storylines like in the good ol’ days but when the promotions do extend an angle for over a year, say like they did with John Cena and The Rock or with Triple H and Seth Rollins, people end up finding fault with how predictable the outcomes are.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, is it any surprise then that they choose to embrace the lesser of two evils and go with employing bland-ish storylines and instead focussing on the sting in the tail?
Isn’t it easier for them to make the Superstars look fairly well-matched going into big matches, and pull off an absolute blinder at the last minute?
Well, it doesn’t generally happen but when it does, it rarely fails to deliver the shock value that the promotions are looking for. Here then, are five such instances of last minute swerves that changed the outcome of a big match.
You’d perhaps be surprised to note that not all of them are exactly recent either.
#1 Hulk Hogan vs Nick Bocwinkle at Super Sunday
The year was 1983 and the setting, the Super Sunday pay-per-view of the AWA promotion that was one of the mainstays of pro wrestling in the United States in those days. The champion was a scheming backstage puppeteer named Nick Bockwinkle and the challenger, a young and upcoming phenomenon by the name of Hulk Hogan.
Bockwinkle had wrestled a number of matches against Hogan but was always booked to retain the title through some trifling technicality. While that infuriated the fans – who Hulk Hogan was beginning to draw in copious amounts of – it also set up the final payoff encounter of the two perfectly.
And Super Sunday was supposed to be exactly that.
But in the lead up to the match – which Hogan was initially booked to win, by the way – there were a couple of disagreements between him and the promoter of AWA, Verne Gagne. Hogan wanted a greater slice of the merchandising income, which Gagne was loath to agree to, while the promoter asked for a portion of Hogan’s NJPW money, which the wrestler had no intention of handing over.
As a result, the match had a false finish, with Hogan winning initially but the promoter making his way down to cut short his celebration and reverting the title to Bockwinkle on a technicality, again.
Incidentally, it was such a big anti-climax and the fans felt so let down that Hulk Hogan never wrestled again for AWA. Instead, he joined hands with a young upstart, named Vince McMahon, who had an audacious vision of buying out the territories and taking pro wrestling to the world.