100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 39 - Jerry "The King" Lawler vs. Rowdy Roddy Piper
King of the Ring 1994
“This is the New Generation! This is what it’s all about! This is the WWF as only we can deliver” - Gorilla Monsoon.
I think there’s an argument that this is the weirdest WWE pay-per-view main event of all time. Sure, there’s some early WWE PPVs where the show might be main evented by a random tag match, but by 1994 the company was well into its groove of pay-per-view events. It was clearly established that the final match was the one that the company generally valued highest. Off the top of my head, No Mercy 2016 was headlined by a regular Bray Wyatt vs Randy Orton match over both a triple threat WWE Championship match, and the Miz vs Ziggler Title versus Career match. But even that, odd as it were, could be justified because the main event was going head to head with the Trump versus Hillary Clinton debate. Then there’s the 2012 John Cena main events over Punk’s WWE Championship defences which were regularly criticised, but at least you can argue that Cena was the biggest star in the company.
Nothing about this makes sense as a main event. Maybe, at a stretch, you could say it’s because it’s Piper’s return match after 2 years out of the ring. In a vacuum, this could be generously described as a strange choice.
With the full context of 1994 this goes from strange to outright baffling.
At this time WWE began pushing the “New Generation” of its product. This was WWE’s response to losing Hulk Hogan - a replacement of old relics in favour of exciting young talent. On this very show, Bret Hart and Diesel had a phenomenal WWE Championship match that would have made a fine main event. Owen Hart would win the King of the Ring tournament while also setting up a main event feud with Bret that would carry on for much of the year. Again, this would have been a fine, logical main event and would complement the direction of the company as well as being thematically fitting for the event itself.
Instead, we have two men in their 40s who haven’t wrestled in a year (or longer in Piper’s case) in a bad feud where one guy was too busy filming his movies that he couldn’t make any live appearances on Raw. In his stead, Lawler brought in a scrawny Roddy Piper impersonator to mock Piper on the King’s Court. While this would normally be a one-off segment never to be referenced again, the geniuses that were booking 1994 WWE decided that this scrawny figure would be the centrepiece - not just of a Monday Night Raw segment - but the pay-per-view match itself.
You see, despite the Piper impersonator being brought in to mock Hotrod himself, Piper would bring him down to the ring with him as support. Perhaps in the shadow of the steroid trial, Vince wanted the scrawniest man he could find front and centre of his pay-per-view. That would be a fine conspiracy theory if Piper wasn’t completely shredded here and probably hadn’t been adhering to strict internal WWE policies (to put it politely). It’s difficult to believe this is the same guy that would look so out of shape just a couple of years later in WCW.
But hey, perhaps the match itself would compensate for an out of place main event and a shoddy storyline. Certainly there’s a universe out there where these two had a match in their prime, and it could have been a tremendous hate-filled brawl. As you can probably gather by its ranking on this list, 1994 WWE was not this world.
The match itself is quite awful, surprisingly so because you’d expect even an ageing Piper and Lawler to produce something half decent through sheer willpower and experience. The problem however is that they wrestle a bizarre slapstick kind of match that feels so out of place in the world of 1994 WWE. Here we have a show that featured 123 Kid versus Owen Hart in what I would affectionately call the greatest 4 minute match of all time, featuring some of the cleanest offence seen to this point in mainstream professional wrestling. Yet this show - a centrepiece of the “New Generation” is headlined by two older wrestlers having a demonstration in corny, childish wrestling. Every spot in this match feels exaggerated, and if I didn’t know better I feel like both men were taking the piss.
The idea is that if Piper wins, he’s going to dedicate the win to dying kids in Canada (this was legitimately part of the storyline going into the match). Somehow along the way in his two year absence since Wrestlemania 8, Roddy Piper had turned into a charitable, selfless man. Even going as far as to protect the impersonator when Lawler tries to attack him. This leads to a frankly embarrassing section where Lawler is kicking at the impersonator. Rather than doing the logical thing and attacking Lawler, Piper decides to martyr himself by lying on top of the kid. If it weren’t for the kid, this would have been nothing more than an elongated squash. His only purpose was to somehow make things harder for Piper, and to annoy me to immeasurable degrees.
The finish is so hilariously bad it almost beggars beliefs. The referee stupidly gets in the way of an Irish Whip, which is the sort of horrible contrived ref bump that makes me glad WWE has gotten a lot smarter to these. After Lawler hits Piper with a foreign object, he covers him with his feet on the ropes. Despite clearly putting zero weight on Piper, Piper has to pretend he can’t kick out for an obnoxiously long time while the referee starts the most exaggerated count you’ve ever seen. At the very last second, the Piper impersonator finally decides to knock Lawler’s feet off the ropes, breaking up the pin. Moments later, Piper is able to pick up the win for himself after an ugly looking back suplex and a cover that would make Steve Austin at Summerslam 97 blush, finally ending this geriatric affair.
It is impossible to discuss King of the Ring 1994 without mentioning Art Donovan. Bless him, he is mostly ignored by the commentators at this point in the show. Art Donovan, for the unaware, is a former NFL footballer from the Baltimore area where this show was taking place and was the special guest commentator alongside Gorilla Monsoon and Randy Savage. If you’re ever wondering why WWE doesn’t do outside guest commentators much in their history, then Art might just be your answer. At King of the Ring 1994, his commentary is infamously bad as it becomes abundantly clear early in the show that he has never watched wrestling a day in his life. And after this match, I wouldn’t blame him if he never watched it ever again.
Up Next - Somehow this is only the 2nd worst NXT match in history.
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