Monday Night Wrong: David Arquette wins the WCW World title in 2000

Scott Keith

Monday Night Wrong: David Arquette wins the WCW World title in 2000 image

Editor's note: In a new weekly feature here on Sporting News, we take a look back at some of the all-time worst moments in wrestling history.

What better (worse?) way to start than the most infamously terrible World title reign of all time: David Arquette.

WCW always had a celebrity problem, in that they wanted mainstream attention and big celebrities like WWE did, but they never knew how to use them once they got them. Although established sports stars Dennis Rodman and Karl Malone were big successes in the short term back in 1997, fairly soon the company started branching out into using other celebrities. More specifically, celebrities who weren’t athletes, like Jay Leno in 1998, and rapper Master P in 1999.

By 2000, Ted Turner’s empire had been swallowed up by Time-Warner, and then a merger with AOL, and WCW was essentially at the mercy of corporate executives who were more concerned with brand synergy and cross-promotion. WCW was a TV show on a TV channel they happened to own, and they wanted to leverage that.

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One of the many parent companies of WCW was Warner Bros., a movie company, an idea that was floated around frequently was making a movie about wrestling and using the wrestling company as a tie-in. After what felt like only a few weeks in development, this project became "Ready to Rumble," a movie so bad that it’s a subject in itself. Like, how do you a make a movie about pro wrestling and have Oliver Platt as the undefeated world champion?

Regardless, the lead of the movie was David Arquette, not exactly an A-list celebrity at that point, and more well-known for being married to Courtney Cox. The idea of the movie was that he played a wrestling fan that embodied the worst stereotypes imaginable: He was uneducated, downright ignorant, and believed it was all real. The movie ended with a ridiculous “triple cage” gimmick match to settle the World Title, and WCW booked their own version of the match for the "Slamboree" PPV in May 2000, with Arquette expected to be involved somehow.

“Somehow” turned out to be the episode of “WCW Thunder” that aired on the Wednesday before that show, where the WCW World Title was randomly put up for grabs in a tag team match, due to some particularly spurious hand-waving by the creative team, with champion Diamond Dallas Page teaming with Arquette to face Jeff Jarrett and Eric Bischoff.

Why was Arquette put into this position? I don’t even know. Since when can you win a World title by pinning someone on an opposing team? Really, we’ve asked too many questions as it is. Let’s go to the footage.

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Thankfully, this title reign didn’t even make it past the "Slamboree" show, with Jeff Jarrett winning it from Arquette in the dreaded triple cage match. For his part, Arquette has been very cool about it over the years, understanding his place in history as a complete joke champion, and even showing up on WWE shows years later holding up a sign that says “Former World Champion." He also donated all the money he made from the title reign to charity.

Regardless, his four days as champion stand as perhaps the low point in the history of WCW. Plus, the movie was a complete flop, so we didn’t even have that to save things. Although it did give the world the Hollywood debut of John Cena in a three-second background scene, so at least there’s that.

Scott Keith

Scott Keith Photo

Scott Keith is the overlord of Scott's Blog of Doom at www.blogofdoom.com, and has authored 5 books on pro wrestling, now available on Amazon and in discount bins near you! He lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with his wife and ridiculously cute daughter.