100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 29 - Bradshaw & Trish Stratus vs. Chris Nowinski & Jackie Gayda
Raw, 8th July 2002
A match that can simply be summed up in four words.
That Jackie Gayda match.
Four words that immediately conjure uncomfortable memories of this fateful night on Monday Night Raw.
Both Nowinski and Gayda are coming off Tough Enough appearances. Chris Nowinski was the runner up of the first season, while Jackie Gayda won season 2. Maven had some modest success immediately coming out of the first season of Tough Enough, and I suppose WWE thought they could try something similar with Jackie Gayda. Even before the match begins, Jim Ross openly says how inexperienced and green Nowinski and Jackie are. The company knows that this match could be bad, but I don’t think even they could imagine what was about to happen.
The first major botch (at the top of the review) is one I still don’t fully understand what they were attempting. I think it was a flapjack of some kind but it’s so uncoordinated that it’s difficult to be sure. After that the two women are totally lost and sloppily roll around the mat for a few seconds while they try and find their bearings. The crowd immediately turn on the match big time - it’s a ruthless reaction to a single botch, but the botch is so catastrophically bad that I don’t blame them at all.
I don’t really understand why you start with the least experienced people, and whoever produced this match did none of these any favours. In fact the match is mostly a Jackie versus Trish match with a couple of Bradshaw and Nowinski moves mixed in somewhere. I think there’s a grand total of 2 moves by Bradshaw all match. Surely when you’re planning out this match you say to Bradshaw - right you’re the most experienced person here, so carry Nowinski through the majority, then have Jackie do a couple spots with Trish. In fact, it doesn’t take long for Nowinski and Bradshaw to brawl through the crowd - which has led to some speculation that they called that on the fly to get out of the match as soon as possible.
The ending of the match is one of the most iconic botches of all time. It’s featured on just about every botch compilation video on the internet, including Botchamania 1. Trish and Jackie - after what seems like an eternity - sloppily work themselves to the corner with Trish on the middle rope. With Jackie looking away from Trish, Trish jumps off the second rope and tries to hit a bulldog. Jackie is hilariously out of time with the bump, making for one of the great silly visuals in wrestling.
Now in fairness, whichever agent planned that as the finish is, frankly, a fucking idiot. That move is difficult enough for experienced wrestlers, I’ve seen similar moves botched plenty of times (albeit none that comically). Asking a barely trained wrestler to bump for a move she can’t see coming is just asking for trouble.
To make it worse, instead of improvising the finish by, say, picking Jackie up and kicking her in the head, Trish just goes for the cover. Jackie, bless her, has no idea if she should stay down for the 3 off a complete whiff, so she kicks out at 2 and a half. Only for the referee to completely ignore it and put the match out of its misery. Honestly, I feel so sorry for Jackie that she was even put in this position to begin with. She was basically Kendall Hinton out there. And Trish - while competent - was not experienced enough to bring stability to an already messy match.
You know it’s a horrible match when the winner looks pissed off because the final spot was so bad.
Now, I do think this match is here simply on reputation alone. Do I think it’s significantly worse than Tori vs Sable or Maxine vs Kaitlyn, which are the two obvious comparisons to this one that we’ve seen so far? Not really, no. And Tori vs Sable also has the dishonour of being a championship match at Wrestlemania. But this match is universally considered one of the worst in history ever since it happened. A part of that may be due to the rising popularity of the internet when it aired, as wrestling forums were starting to grow in popularity.
This match took place on a particularly wretched episode of Raw with two major noteworthy disasters. The other was Kevin Nash’s torn quad, which became a long-running meme within the wrestling community because of how it transpired on television. It was later revealed that it was another case of production malpractice from this very show as Kevin Nash wasn’t meant to wrestle on the event having just returned from a torn bicep, and therefore didn’t have his gear. Once he found out he was scheduled to wrestle, he got Disco Inferno to send his gear on a flight to the arena. Unfortunately, Disco did not pack Nash’s knee brace, and a torn quad followed.
Imagine being part of the online wrestling community when such a disastrous show aired. The aftermath of the Jackie Gayda match became a hot topic in the community. Reports came out about people crying backstage, fearing for their jobs. Trish was pissed off, but later said she regretted how she reacted after the match. This ended any short term plans they had for Jackie, who would not make another televised match for over a year. In the end, this match’s legacy and infamy was enhanced because of the time it aired, and the surrounding intrigue as backstage rumours circulated around it. It has since become an obligatory answer for any and all “worst match in WWE history” questions posed online for the last 22 years.
Personally, I think this match is far too inconsequential to be much higher than this. Is it perhaps the least technically sound match on the list? Quite possibly. However it is a 3 minute Raw match that is only remembered because its reputation was allowed to plummet as internet wrestling communities grew. I imagine on a given episode of Raw from the Attitude Era you could probably find other matches of similar quality. But this one is the one that, for better or worse, has stuck in the minds of fans ever since.
I’ll leave with the wise words of JR to conclude this match:
“Mercifully, it’s over”
Up Next - It pains me to put a Taka Michinoku match this high.
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