Despite often being derided as second-rate copycats, WCW introduced many highly popular, main event-level stars and concepts to professional wrestling. From WarGames to the Crockett Cup, the company never failed to present creative ideas (or spins on those created by others).
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However, at times WCW missed the mark, booking bizarre matches or stipulations in some of their biggest PPV's most pivotal moments. Some were just forgettable and others downright disastrous, but either way, these are the ten strangest main events in company history.
10 Hollywood Hogan vs, Kevin Nash, The Fingerpoke of Doom: Monday Nitro, 1999
In terms of broad negative impact on the company, the infamous Fingerpoke of Doom gets remembered as perhaps the worst main event in its history. However, we sometimes forget that the result's aftermath notwithstanding, it was also one of the strangest.
The night after Starrcade 1998 new WCW World Champion Kevin Nash offered Goldberg a rematch at the January 4 Monday Nitro. The show would take place at the Georgia Dome, the same venue where Goldberg won the title from Hollywood Hogan that prior August. However, the match never happened as Goldberg was "arrested," Nash challenged Hogan instead, and with a comical poke of the finger from the Hulkster to Big Sexy, that was that!
9 WCW vs. nWo Hollywood vs. nWo Wolfpac, War Games: Fall Brawl 1998
By 1998's Fall Brawl PPV, the WCW/nWo war was still raging. However, it was becoming significantly more complicated with the splintering of the rogue group of invaders into the still-heel Hogan-led faction and the wildly popular babyface Wolfpac founded by Nash.
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Of course, not every WCW loyalist joined Nash in his crusade against his former ally, creating an awkward situation for that year's WarGames. Whereas WCW vs. the nWo was an easy decision the previous two years, if WCW ran with the Black and White vs. the Wolfpac, they'd be excluding top stars (like Diamond Dallas Page) that maintained their independence. What transpired instead was a confusing three-way, and when the company announced that whoever scored the first fall would win a shot at the WCW Championship, it seemed to ignore the point of having teams entirely.
8 Hulk Hogan vs. The Giant: Halloween Havoc 1995
On paper, Hulk Hogan's WCW World Championship defense against The Giant at Halloween Havoc was a standard PPV main event: it featured no official stipulations aside from the title, ending when Jimmy Hart intentionally got the Hulkster disqualified by interfering. However, words here do no justice to the downright comic nature of WCW's booking at the time.
Before their main event bout - a young Paul Wight's official WCW debut - the two also engaged in an infamous Monster Truck Sumo Match, broadcast from the roof of the evening's arena, Detroit's Cobo Hall. Between the trucks, the Giant's "fall" (which somehow left him completely unscathed), and his post-match bear-hugging of his erstwhile victim with the legendary Yeti, the whole show feels like a fever dream upon rewatch.
7 Hollywood Hogan & Eric Bischoff vs. Diamond Dallas Page & Jay Leno: Road Wild 1998
Some vocal fans who have an inherent problem with the involvement of celebrities in wrestling could use a history lesson because, as longtime industry enthusiasts will tell you, Hollywood and the squared circle didn't just become bedfellows in the Hulkamania Era.
With that said, Jay Leno might be the least-believable in-ring competitor in wrestling history this side of Kenny Omega's nine-year-old opponent in 2011. Hogan - who was teaming with Eric Bischoff - sold for the Tonight Show host's armbar approximately as well as he did for Leno's partner Diamond Dallas Page, which was a funny visual but ultimately kind of insulting to the industry as a whole.
6 WCW World Champion David Arquette vs. Diamond Dallas Page vs. Jeff Jarrett, Triple Cage: Slamboree 2000
On paper, the three-tiered cage - featuring stacked enclosures, each smaller than the one beneath it - with the WCW World Championship belt hanging from the roof above the peak was a unique and inventive concept. Initially conceived for the Ready to Rumble movie that featured DDP and Arquette, the structure was like Hell in a Cell on steroids (in a good way).
For the main event of Slamboree 2000, however, perhaps debuting the triple cage in a match based on the film wasn't the best way to do it, but this was WCW in 2000! In fairness, even though Jarrett's usually associated with the company's dying days, the match - which, like the movie, also featured Page and Arquette - was entertaining. Unlike WarGames, there's a reason this isn't a gimmick WWE's revived, however.
5 Hollywood Hogan vs. Ric Flair, First Blood Steel Cage: Uncensored 1999
In March 1999, WCW still saw Hogan and Flair as top draws, and the previous month's SuperBrawl 9 - headlined by their main event - was the third-most bought PPV in the company's history with nearly 500,000 paying viewers.
Soon, however, the company's momentum started turning downward, and booking like Uncensored '99 didn't help. Despite the nWo Elite's reunion only three months earlier, Hogan and Flair concocted one of the least-desired double turns in wrestling history (as nobody was ready to cheer Hollywood or especially to boo the Nature Boy). In a First Blood Cage match, even though Flair bled first, "Naitch" managed to win, but the real losers were the hundreds of thousands of fans who paid to watch the debacle.
4 Hulk Hogan vs. Ric Flair, Yapapi Strap Match: Uncensored 2000
By March 2000, the same two wrestlers who still managed to draw 325,000 PPV buys in '99 managed a paltry one-fifth of that number, as only 60,000 folks were willing to plunk down the cash to see Hogan and Flair go to the proverbial well once more.
This time (and straight out of the Hulkamania Era), the gimmick was a Yapapi Strap Match. Hogan - who was rocking the red and yellow and back with Jimmy Hart during this desperate time in WCW's history - cut deranged promos weekly, explaining the history of this supposed specialty of the Yapapi tribe (which didn't exist). Ultimately, the match itself is more plodding and sad than strange per se, but the finish saw Hogan drag Flair to three corners, hit the legdrop for a pin, then drag the Nature Boy to the fourth and final turnbuckle.
3 Hulk Hogan vs. Vader, (Regular) Strap Match: Uncensored 1995
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You didn't think the Hulkster's bizarre strap match antics began in '99, did you? Maybe Uncensored 2000's booking was a tribute to (or parody of) the PPV five years prior, although the ensuing wackiness was more par-for-the-course in '95 than in the heart of WWE's countering Attitude Era.
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Indeed, the mid 90s featured an altogether different landscape, which probably helps Uncensored '95's (regular ol') strap match not seem so strange relative to its surroundings. Most strangely, it had to be one of the only (if not the only) strap matches in history where the victor earns their win by dragging somebody other than their designated opponent to all four corners, as in this case it was - who else? - Flair doing the honors.
2 Rick Steiner & Missy Hyatt vs. Arn Anderson & Paul E. Dangerously, Cage Match: Great American Bash 1991
The main event - a mixed-tag that Hyatt didn't even compete in - of 1991's Great American Bash PPV is perhaps WCW's all-time strangest, which had as much to do with somebody who wasn't there as the folks on the card.
When Flair took his belt and went home (and shortly to WWE) due to a now-legendary dispute with Jim Herd, it threw the WCW World title picture into disarray, leaving the Nature Boy's scheduled challenger, Lex Luger, without an opponent. Bookers likely knew that the result - Luger defeating Barry Windham with the help of Harley Race and turning heel - would be hated by the fans (who spent the entire night chanting "We Want Flair!"). Hence, the title match was the second-to-last match on the card, with Steiner's short-handed victory meant to send fans home happy - or at least placated.
1 Hulk Hogan & Randy Savage vs. The Alliance to End Hulkamania Doomsday Cage: Uncensored 1996
If there had been ten editions of Uncensored, we could almost source this entire list solely from it alone (although Hogan vs. Randy Savage in a cage in 1998 wasn't really strange, just very, very bad). However, the main event of the March '96 show takes the proverbial cake as the strangest match in WCW history and is perhaps the definitive sign that the Outsiders' invasion two months later couldn't have come soon enough.
Of course, the Hulkster and the Macho Man won, despite the two-tiered stacked cage containing the following opponents: Flair, Anderson, Luger, Kevin Sullivan, Meng, the Barbarian, Z-Gangsta (f.k.a. Zeus) and the Ultimate Solution (a.k.a. Jeep Swenson). Ironically, the alliance between Sullivan's Dungeon of Doom and Flair and Arn never succeeded in taking down Hulkamania, as the only one who could do that turned out to be Hogan, himself.
