100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 21 - Goldust vs. The Ultimate Warrior
Intercontinental Championship - In Your House 7: Good Friends, Better Enemies
It is eight minutes of stalling, followed by a Clothesline, and then a count out finish.
I could just about stop the review right there. I don’t know what else you expect me to say.
Okay, I suppose some context may be appropriate. Goldust injured his knee during a pre-show segment with Ultimate Warrior and was unable to have a proper competitive match. WWE were left with an unenviable decision. Do they cancel the match? Add in a substitute? Make it shorter? Well, rather than cancel the match, WWE decided that the fans paid to see Warrior challenge for the championship, so that’s exactly what they’re going to get. Which in itself isn’t inherently the death knell to this segment. You could easily have Goldust’s new bodyguard come out, take a few bumps for Goldust, do the clothesline finish to Goldust, and then the count out. You could easily wrap it all up in a couple of minutes.
WWE, however, with a series of unfortunate options at their disposal, picked the absolute worst one.
Goldust, quite literally, stalls for 99% of this entire match. He’s cowering away, hiding among the fans and behind Marlena. The “highlight” of this match is Ultimate Warrior stealing Marlena’s cigar, and then sitting in the director’s chair. Goldust’s over-abundant stalling leads to impatient fans, who decide to casually hurl homophobic slurs at him. This is before Goldust gets on the mic and threatens to kiss everyone in the arena. But of course, Goldust definitely is not a gimmick designed to generate heat off the gay panic.
One for the lipreaders. For the curious, his sign he’s holding says “Warrior Smear The Queer”. This kid looks 13 years old.
This does not even speak on the uncomfortable nature of watching a man getting the f-word thrown at him, while a well documented homophobic piece of shit stands in the ring taunting him for 8 minutes.
Eventually, Warrior baits Goldust into taking a seat in the director’s chair, taking a clothesline for his troubles, before getting himself intentionally counted out. If someone was to put this even higher on their list, I honestly wouldn’t blame them. This is a monumental waste of time, perhaps more so than any single match on this entire list. For me, it is so relatively low on this list due to the 20 matches above not just being mostly a total waste of time in their own right, but also having some truly horrific wrestling and stories attached to them. If, however, you believe 8 minutes of no wrestling is worse than 8 minutes of bad wrestling, I do not begrudge you feeling I’ve been slightly generous at having this at just number 21.
I guess if there’s one positive to this match, it’s that the prospect of a genuine Goldust versus Ultimate Warrior match in 1996 may have been even worse than what we actually got. They did have a 13 minute match on Raw a few weeks later, but for the sake of my sanity I did not rewatch that for this process. Ultimate Warrior was well past his sell by date and he looked exhausted just smoking a cigar out there. It’s no surprise he was done in WWE not long after this disastrous run, and only ever emerged in a major promotion again to have the Worst Match of the Year in 1998. 1996 was one of Dustin Rhodes’ worse years, so there’s a possibility that having 8 minutes of no wrestling may have been better than 8 minutes of actual wrestling.
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