Saddest/Most Embarrassing Indy Show You've Seen?

[Burst]

Inspired by some of the... interesting... show posters in the Indy Rip-Off Gimmicks thread, what are some shows that you've been to which couldn't even live up to their ramshackle posters? Stuff like indies one step removed from backyard wrestling, wrestlers in no shape to perform (either in the Jeff Hardy sense or the Scott Steiner sense), awful equipment, or an overly carny or trashy atmosphere.

I can't really share an example as I've only ever gotten to go to one indy show and it actually was pretty good with some decent names and good promoting.

[Big Poppa Pumpkin]

I saw the now 'Rockstar' Spud doing a Spike Dudley ripoff gimmick in like 2002, he was far and away the best thing on the show, but the ceiling in the room they were performing in was so low that it was pretty hard for he and the other 'cruiserweights' to do their moves off the top rope. The UK Pitbulls, two obscenely fat bald men, also defended their tag team titles on the show. The main event was someone called Spadge or Snatch or Scratch or something basically doing a Triple H impression versus some guy who I can only describe as 'some guy' for the WORLD TITLE. The Triple H guy won (duh).

[Hit Girl]

TNA Impact

[LexExpress]

I've seen the UK Pitbulls as well, they were the "star attraction" on the poster as I recall. They did not live up to that billing. 

I saw Jake the Snake at a local indy show circa mid 2000s. He looked absolutely awful and it was just sad.

I think the saddest show I've been to was a tiny regional promotion in north west England. A teenage lad doing a Jeff Hardy/Joker type dealy went up on the top turnbuckle to do something and slipped and fell to the outside, hitting his head pretty badly on the wooden floor. The place was evacuated and he was taken off in an ambulance. He turned out to be alright, but I just remember thinking, imagine if he's badly hurt - for the sake of 40 people in a community centre paying £4 a go. I mean, not that it's better to get hurt in front of loads of people, but yeah. Sorry, that got a bit dark 

[Deleted]

Sept 1, 2015 13:59:43 GMT -5 Hit Girl said:

TNA Impact

Backyard promotions don't count.

[keezy]

I've been to one of the "American Wrestling" shows, yes the ones with bad cosplays of WWE wrestlers. We had Undertaker, Rey Mysterio and the Scottish equivalent of British Bulldog vs the American heel team of Sting, Road Warrior Whichever and a Right To Censor/IRS type guy. Undertaker and Rey were obvious knockoffs down to music, name and moves, but Sting and Road Warrior didn't seem to understand their gimmicks as well and were just goons to the semi-IRS. We also had a surprisingly solid women's match that didn't feature knockoffs or cheap patriotic gimmicks for some reason.

The ring announcer was the full package, he announces, commentates and starts chants.

It was mostly kids there and WWE tickets over here are expensive (I paid about £200 for two Smackdown live event tickets in 2010), so if anything good comes from it then it's cheap local fun.

[2coldMack is even more baffled]

A show in a redneck skate park, that was, in fairness, standing room only. ....Of course, that's because there only about a half dozen chairs laid out. The rest of the 20 or so fans had to sit on stacked up blue gym mats to watch such classics as The Judge and Black Ninja vs. Peanut and Big Country.

[ERON]

A local indy fed ran a show in the small suburb where my dad lives a couple years ago and plastered posters all over town with the Undertaker front and center flanked by a bunch of local talent, clearly designed to fool people into thinking that the Undertaker would be appearing at the show. The fine print at the bottom of the poster stated, "Get your picture taken with a life-size cardboard cutout of the Undertaker!" My dad fell for it and was quite disappointed.

(And then to top it all off, I went to a Monday Night Raw later that same summer, and the Undertaker made an unannounced surprise appearance after they went off the air.)

[Joe Neglia]

There was an indy in the late 90s just outside of Tyler, Texas I would attend called IWA. Was held in an American Legion hall with ceilings about 10 or 11 feet high, only name on the cards was Calvin Knapp. First couple of shows were fun, crowds of maybe 50-60 at first, but by the third show maybe 15-20 per show (there was one show where I'm pretty sure I was one of only two paying customers, the rest of the crowd were all relatives of the wrestlers). The faces would emerge from the hallway that led back to what they were using for a dressing room, but the heels had to sneak out the back exit and enter through a side door. A side door that often got stuck and the heel knocking to have someone let him/them in could be heard. I remember there was a cowboy named Durango, the face Country Dog, the heel Mad Dog Billy (think he was the promoter), and Alexander the Great (the skinniest kid that ever skinnied). Alex was the main babyface and was supposed to be a high flyer, but because of the low ceilings, he never could do much. There was a "loser eats the can of dogfood" match between the two Dogs. Oh, and one heel actually tried to use a "blood packet" on his forehead for juice. Dipping his finger in cherry soda and pressing it on his face would have got more effect. I actually convinced them to let me be part of the show, and it was a unique experience. When I showed up that night, the doorman wouldn't let me in without buying a ticket, my managing gig consisted entirely of standing still outside the corner for ten minutes (I had been instructed I couldn't do anything, just walk out there with the heel and walk back), and the night ended with me cleaning the back rooms they had used. The next month, they were gone.

Not terribly long after that, I was in Hastings in Tyler and saw an ad for a wrestling show nearby with a couple of local names I recognized, being held that day about half an hour later. Drove out to it, realized I was in a residential neighborhood. Despite my misgivings, checked it out even though it was looking more and more like a backyard fed. Turns out, one of the local feds was buying a ring from some guy, and they decided to have a show in his backyard before taking it. So it was local pros doing a backyard show. Turnout was maybe 10-15 but I'm certain I was the only one there that wasn't a friend of someone working the show. It was actually a pretty decent show, outside of the opening match, in which they let the ring's owner don a mask and wrestle his 14 or 15 year old son. I have the show on tape somewhere, can't remember anyone except the Overboyz being on it.

Also around that same time period, a local trading card store advertised an appearance/signing by "NWO Sting" - which I took to mean Jeff Farmer and apparently everyone else took to mean the actual real Sting. When he showed up (an hour late), he was neither. Turned out to be some local guy named Nick something who worked border indies and lucha shows who claimed to be some luchadore named Kro 2000, but the promo pics he had of Kro 2000 looked nothing like him either.

[MWC]

It was actually a TNA House Show from 2014. A friend and I decided on just a whim to make the 1 hour drive to Sioux City for the show. Thank God we only bought the cheapest tickets possible $15ish.

They heavily advertised Samoa Joe for the show. He was one of the main reasons we made the trip. At the start of the show, they announced that "by doctors orders" Samoa Joe would not be on the show. He did appear, but was "banned" from wrestling.

Madison Rayne def Gail Kim.
Eddie Edwards over Samuel Shaw. BroMans interfered leading to...
The Wolves def BroMans.
Gunner def James Storm

1 Hour Intermission....Yes. really. The entire front part of the show took 45 minutes. Then they had the balls to come back and introduce the main event of the night. They seriously went to the main event.

Magnus def Bully Ray and Bobby Roode in a triple threat match. ~15 minutes.

Night over. 2 hours total, 1 hour of wrestling. 1 hour of intermission.

[Surfer Sandman]

Went to an indy show where their ring fell apart right in the middle of a match.

The sad part is that this was not the only instance.

[Brood Lone Wolf Funker]

I watched Angel from the Baldies loose to a man whose gimmick was a Great White Shark. That same show had The Iron Shiek turn face against Nikolai Volkoff for the night

[honsou]

I went to an Indy show in Homestead, Florida (South of Miami, middle of nowhere basically), in a bar where there were about 20 people and 10 of them clearly were just there to drink at the bar and weren't even looking at the matches. They had a DJ play all of them entrance themes and he constantly was scratching the records...even when it was clearly the wrong decision to do so. The co main events were Norman Smiley vs some guy, which was actually pretty fun. The other one was The Sheik vs...hillbilly man. The match basically involved The Sheik stabbing the hillbilly guy with various objects and throwing him at me and my friend. We actually had to run away from the action constantly to make sure we weren't bowled over.

[thegame415]

I saw a show that had like three singles matches, mostly guys who were training nearby, so the matches were awful. During the main event, everyone from the other matches randomly ran out screaming and got in the ring, suddenly making it a battle royal.

Also, while I wasn't there, I feel bad for anyone who has paid to see a show with Living Dead Girl.

[Dragonfly]

My answer always remains the same: PWX Burgh Brawl 12, April 2008.

Before I go into detail, I need to dive into the backstory. Things started to go downhill the previous July, when their booker committed suicide. They were able to limp along until that November, mainly due to the strength of their two year-plus promotion-wide story. Once it ended, they were out of options. In an act of desperation, the owner talked Sterling James Keenan (Corey Graves) into jumping from IWC to PWX. (IWC and PWX exclusivity was a big thing at the time. It still exists, but has been softened considerably since former IWC owner Norm Connors retired.) It was a big deal that he left. So big, he was treated like Hulk Hogan arriving in WCW. In his first match with the company, he beat three mainstays to get a shot at the NWA title.

He lost his match against Adam Pearce, but that didn't mean he didn't win any titles. By the time Burgh Brawl rolled around, he was PWX (then NWA East) Heavyweight Champion, FNW Heavyweight Champion (FNW was co-owned by his father), 1PW Heavyweight Champion, Zero1 United States Champion and the champion of some Ohio promotion no one had ever heard of. He had so many belts that he needed an entourage to help carry them. The show began with SJK, his real life brother Samuel Elias (Buddy Stretcher in FCW) and top student Ashton Amherst coming out to deafening silence. The seventeen people (not an exaggeration) in that picnic pavilion (also not an exaggeration) could care less. It set the mood for the evening.

The first match was barely a blip on the radar. The second match fared a bit better, but was only due to Gregory Iron. The third match, a title match for the NWA North American Tag belts, tanked due to the fact the champs just didn't care. Hell, not caring and phoning it in was their gimmick at the time. (This is not a joke.) It just went on and on like this, match after match. There was a mid-card title change... nothing. There was an appearance by hated (and smoking hot) manager Krystal Frost. (Think Catrina from Lucha Underground sans the magic stone.) Nothing. Inexplicable fan favorite/walking sleeping pill/promoter's son Jim Ross gets his ass handed to him by the heels. Nothing. Supposed company savior SJK goes over the last two champions, one of which had held the title for a record 470 days, as clean as a sheet. Less than nothing. The only person other than Iron that was able to get anything resembling heat was the ring announcer, but that was only because he kept calling a well-known, "never misses a show" fan Super Mario.

The main event was Burgh Brawl, a Royal Rumble rip off match they had been doing for years. It was the worst Rumble-esque match I had ever seen. It was filled to the brim with people no one had ever heard of. There was at least a half a ton of humanity in that ring at one time, 750 pounds of it coming from two guys: Kid Cupid (450) and The Bulldozer (300). It was so bad that the ring started to break. The head ref had to go under the ring to fix it... while the two fat guys were still inside it. The match ended when future PWX champion and one-time whipping boy for The Decade in ROH Chris LeRusso eliminated Ohio-based journeyman Patrick Hayes. All seventeen of us turned to the entrance as SJK's music played. We waited for SJK to confront the new number one contender. And waited. And waited. He never showed up. Turned out that Sterling had left an hour ago. The show ended with LeRusso looking as disappointed and confused as we all were.

It was the last PWX show my wife and I would see live for over a year. Our return show, The Second Annual Sean "Shocker" Evans Memorial Tournament, was easily one of the best Indy shows we have ever attended. So I guess it's true: What a difference a day fifteen months and a brand new booker makes.

[saintpat]

Sept 1, 2015 22:03:38 GMT -5 MWC said:

It was actually a TNA House Show from 2014. A friend and I decided on just a whim to make the 1 hour drive to Sioux City for the show. Thank God we only bought the cheapest tickets possible $15ish.

They heavily advertised Samoa Joe for the show. He was one of the main reasons we made the trip. At the start of the show, they announced that "by doctors orders" Samoa Joe would not be on the show. He did appear, but was "banned" from wrestling.

Madison Rayne def Gail Kim.
Eddie Edwards over Samuel Shaw. BroMans interfered leading to...
The Wolves def BroMans.
Gunner def James Storm

1 Hour Intermission....Yes. really. The entire front part of the show took 45 minutes. Then they had the balls to come back and introduce the main event of the night. They seriously went to the main event.

Magnus def Bully Ray and Bobby Roode in a triple threat match. ~15 minutes.

Night over. 2 hours total, 1 hour of wrestling. 1 hour of intermission.

To be fair, that's about 3X as much wrestling as they do on a 2-hour TV show.

[Oh Cry Me a Screwball]

Watching half of the audience leave during a Nick Aldis vs. Chris Mordetzky match at the most recent GFW tapings.

[Deleted]

Sept 1, 2015 23:24:55 GMT -5 Oh Cry Me a Screwball said:

Watching half of the audience leave during a Nick Aldis vs. Chris Mordetzky match at the most recent GFW tapings.

Wait, that happened?

[Mozenrath]

Sept 1, 2015 22:26:26 GMT -5 honsou said:

I went to an Indy show in Homestead, Florida (South of Miami, middle of nowhere basically), in a bar where there were about 20 people and 10 of them clearly were just there to drink at the bar and weren't even looking at the matches. They had a DJ play all of them entrance themes and he constantly was scratching the records...even when it was clearly the wrong decision to do so. The co main events were Norman Smiley vs some guy, which was actually pretty fun. The other one was The Sheik vs...hillbilly man. The match basically involved The Sheik stabbing the hillbilly guy with various objects and throwing him at me and my friend. We actually had to run away from the action constantly to make sure we weren't bowled over.

Norman Smiley's been at it for so long that he could probably show up at my house at 5 AM and tell me to wrestle him in the kitchen, and he could carry me to something decent.

[willywonka666]

These threads make me wish that the Little Rascals did an short where they set up a wrestling event