100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 72 - Jake "The Snake" Roberts vs. Rick Rude
Wrestlemania IV
Get used to this sight, this hold lasted 2 minutes…
Wrestlemania 4 might be my least favourite show ever. I’ve only managed to sit through it in one sitting once before, and even that made me feel narcoleptic. With 16 matches, it has the most of any single Wrestlemania show ever - even tying with Wrestlemanias 36, 38 and 39 - which of course were all two night shows. With a massive 16-man tournament for the vacant WWE Championship, this show is bloated with matches, and most of them are pretty bad. There might have arguably been worse Wrestlemanias in terms of average match quality, but no show truly sucks the life out of you like this show. It’s apparently only 3 and a half hours long according to the Network, but that cannot possibly be true because it feels like a 5 hour show.
Slap bang in the middle of this cure for insomnia is this match. When you’re already exhausted after sitting through your Dino Bravo and One Man Gang matches, you think - hey, Jake Roberts and Rick Rude sounds pretty cool, right?
And you would be utterly, hopelessly, mistaken.
Jake Roberts and Rick Rude would spend much of 1988 feuding with one another as Rude tried to court Roberts’ wife Cheryl at ringside in one of the most memorable WWE feuds of the 1980s. Unfortunately this match occurs before that feud truly kicked on, so we do not get a heated affair befitting that feud. Instead, with it being the first round of the tournament, the only heat is from the natural popularity of both men.
The commentators go to great lengths to emphasise the fact that these are 15 minute time limit matches, and given this is the first round the competitors should be looking to end the match quickly. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to remind the wrestlers of this.
This one lasted over 90 seconds
This match makes the list because it is so devoid of logic from two wrestlers that honestly should know better when it comes to making matches make sense. If there wasn’t a time limit, I’d just put this down as a really boring match, but with the time limit, nothing here makes any sense. The pace of this match is excruciatingly slow, and both go back to rest holds. And more rest holds. And more. And at this point I should note that all the gifs in this review are from different restholds, and certainly aren’t all of them in the match. And Gorilla Monsoon again reiterates that they know its a 15 minute time limit. It honestly needs to be seen to be believed how poorly worked and structured this is. To the point that crowd is impatient, and start chanting boring towards these two popular wrestlers. Rude responds by going back to the chinlock because that's how you respond to boring chants. Somewhere mid 00s Randy Orton is watching this match thinking “damn this is a lot of chinlocks”.
Oh, some improvement - this one only lasted 1 minute!
This is such a classically Rick Rude match. He's one of the most frustrating wrestlers of all time to me. Back when we had the Wrestlingclique forum, I argued against him being one of the best North American wrestlers of all time and matches like these are a prime example. Sometimes you'll watch him have some of the best matches of Warrior's career, or a classic against Ricky Steamboat. And then other times he'll have a long match such as this that bores me to tears.
Nope, no improvement. We’re back to 2 minutes here.
Eventually the referee announces that the match is over and it’s a draw. No build up, no announcing that they’ve only got a short amount of time left. The referee just decides that that’s enough and it’s a draw. There is no urgency by either man as the time limit goes to expire, which makes this feel like one of the most phoned in matches on the entire list. It’s bizarre that Rude’s crowning achievement as a worker was a match with a time limit where the clock was a huge factor in the psychology of the match (vs. Steamboat at Beach Blast 1992). And yet, here’s this match where the clock becomes the very thing that places it among the pantheon of worst WWE matches ever.
Roberts meanwhile is not a guy that is considered a high end talent in terms of workrate. In fact if you ask what Roberts is great at, you usually get two responses: mic skills, and in-ring psychology. The latter is undeniable. The former, at least going solely by this match, is a different conversation.
Jim and Fuji will be happy to know that this is the final Jake Roberts match to make this list. So spoiler - no Wrestlemania 7 blindfold match with Martel. I am firmly in the camp that that match is actually damn fun and one of the most underrated matches in Wrestlemania history. This is the worst match I’ve seen of either man within WWE. For Rude you have to go to his match against Masahiro Chono at Halloween Havoc 1992 in WCW (basically this match, but somehow worse and somehow more restholdy) to find something worse than this. For Roberts, you have the more depressing Heroes of Wrestling - the low point of his wrestling career.
Don’t worry, though, if you survived this match you’re treated to … Ultimate Warrior versus Hercules.
Run. Run away now.
Up Next - on a show where fans have debated for 30 years about which was the best match on the card, one thing is for certain: Lex Luger is a loser.
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