Wrestlers Who Were Mercilessly Booed

Professional wrestling fans are entitled to their opinions. After all, without fans, the business itself would likely cease to exist. People around the world pay their hard-earned money to attend shows to cheer their favorite heroes, boo their least favorite villains, and leave knowing that they got their money's worth. However, the wrestling business is not that simple.

At various points in time, more specifically since the creation of the internet, fans have become more vocal about what they can tolerate and who they want to see perform. A talent who has been withering away on the undercard despite being technically gifted can often get a huge groundswell of support from the audience, to the point where wrestlers who have done nothing to offend anyone will receive heavy backlash because they aren't the person they want. On other occasions, a company will handpick someone to be the next top star, which has often resulted in the fans turning on that star because they either don't want to see them, are getting pushed too much, or aren't as good as someone else who hasn't been given the same chances.

With that in mind, it's time to take a trip around the world of wrestling and see examples of some of the industry's biggest stars getting booed out of buildings. Whether that was because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, they insulted the fans to the point of causing a riot, or simply because the fans told the company in unison, "We don't want this person, we want that person." 

It's been ten years since this happened and considering everything that Roman Reigns has been through, this is probably something that "The Tribal Chief" looks back on and laughs at.

When The Shield went their separate ways in 2014, fans were firmly behind Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose as the guys who would be the next in line to lead WWE into the future. Add in the likes of Daniel Bryan, who the fans had already willed into a WrestleMania main event, and you could already see who the WWE Universe wanted to route for, and Roman Reigns was not one of those people. He remained in his Shield gear, kept his Shield entrance and song, and was handpicked as the next face of the company, despite fans noticing that he wasn't as good as many people originally thought.

All of this culminated at the 2015 Royal Rumble when Bryan was eliminated after 10 minutes of action, Rollins wasn't even in the match, and Ambrose was eliminated by Kane and The Big Show, making it painfully obvious who was winning it. Once it came down to Reigns and Rusev, it was plain obvious that Reigns would pick up the biggest win of his career at that time, and the crowd hated it. Not even a cameo appearance from a babyface Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson could save Reigns from being showered with boos.

The decision received so much backlash that #CancelWWENetwork trended worldwide on Twitter, and likely played a part in Rollins cashing in his Money in the Bank contract at WrestleMania 31. Newer fans won't understand the hatred fans had for Reigns, and no one acknowledged him in 2015.

In some ways, what Batista went through in 2014 could be seen as the prequel to everything that happened to Roman Reigns one year later. But this wasn't the WWE Universe hating Batista because he was an unproven, cherry-picked performer, he was a former Royal Rumble winner and a six-time WWE World Heavyweight Champion after all. No, the WWE Universe hated Batista because he wasn't Daniel Bryan.

The YES! Movement had become so impossible to ignore that many people thought there would be no other option but for WWE to give in to the fans' demands and put Bryan in the main event of WrestleMania 30 and have him win. However, this is WWE under Vince McMahon's leadership, a man who once said to his own fans, "You like what I tell you to like," so that wasn't going to happen. Everyone waited with bated breath and were on the edge of their seats, waiting for Bryan to emerge at number 30, but Rey Mysterio came out, and everything seemingly fell apart. Fans immediately lost interest, with the most ironic part of it all being that Roman Reigns was the man the fans rallied behind to stop Batista — who everyone knew was going to win — from winning.

Despite breaking Kane's famous 2001 record of 11 eliminations with 12, Reigns was no match for "The Animal," who won the match to a chorus of boos, the likes of which he was not used to. These boos would not go away, not even after WrestleMania 30, where Bryan got inserted into and won, as he committed the ultimate crime of wearing blue gear, meaning that for every WWE fan who went to see "Guardians of the Galaxy" that summer, they would whisper to the person next to them, "psst ... Bluetista," or "psst ... Bootista."

Most of the entries on this list are examples of wrestlers being booed out of the building when in storyline they weren't meant to. With that said, this one is too good not to include because it's a fairly safe bet that even Elias and Kevin Owens didn't expect the boos they were to receive.

On the October 1, 2018, edition of "WWE Raw," Elias was set to cut a promo alongside Owens ahead of their upcoming tag team match against John Cena and Bobby Lashley at the Super Showdown pay-per-view in Australia. Owens, ever the type to point out the plot holes in all of WWE's stories, stated that Cena and Lashley didn't really make sense to him, to which Elias agreed. Elias then went on to say that it's like how having a basketball team in Seattle (where the show was taking place) doesn't make sense either, which on the face of it simply reads like another typical "your local sports team is terrible" throwaway line, but on this night, Elias struck a nerve.

The two men were met with what could only be described as an avalanche of boos the likes of which fans of WWE hadn't witnessed for years. To make things worse, Elias then said that Oklahoma is a place where it does make sense, which was poking fun at the fact that Seattle lost their NBA team in 2008, only for it to be relocated to Oklahoma and be rebranded as the Oklahoma City Thunder. The boos were so loud that Elias and Owens had their microphones turned up in order to hear themselves, and even that didn't help. This was a freak moment that no one saw coming, and one that led to Paul Heyman applauding Elias when he got backstage.

Younger fans might not remember this, but there was a point in time when people were genuinely excited to see Chris Jericho wrestle. One could argue that as recently as his first reign with the ROH World Championship in 2022, fans were engaged with what he was doing. But as fans started to notice him latching on to young, hot talents and sucking them into "The Jericho Vortex," fans finally reached their breaking point with AEW's first World Champion.

Rumors and accusations that spread at the end of 2023 didn't put Jericho in the good books of people, but once it was clear that he was going to remain on TV, the AEW fans had enough, with the Dynasty pay-per-view in April 2024 being the best example of how much people wanted him to go away. Chants of "F**k you Jericho," "Please Retire" and boos acted as the score to Jericho's FTW Championship match with Hook, another young talent who had a lot of buzz at the beginning of the year after his AEW World Championship match with Samoa Joe.

Jericho won the match and the FTW Championship in the process, and also turned the negativity into a brand new gimmick, The Learning Tree, complete with a new Fozzy entrance theme because fans didn't want to sing Judas anymore. His feud with Hook continued for another four months, with each reaction getting worse by the week, to the point where some attribute Jericho to being one of the main reasons why AEW's ratings and attendance figures declined throughout 2024. These days, the booing has calmed down because people are just over him at this point, which in its own way is worse than being booed out of the building.

Speaking of AEW fans booing people out of the building, the biggest babyface in the business today, "The American Nightmare," Cody Rhodes, was at the receiving end of their boos too. For those who have seen Cody wrestle only in WWE, showing them the reactions he was getting from fans in the final full year of his time with AEW is something that could warrant its own YouTube channel.

Rhodes helped found AEW in 2019 and was more than happy to be the face of the company. However, the white-meat babyface act that he had been portraying for two years had started to wear thin by the time fans were allowed back into buildings following the COVID-19 pandemic, and this was never more evident than in his feud with Anthony Ogogo. The feud is easily one of AEW's worst feuds, with Rhodes turning it into the US versus the UK, and also about stopping racism.

Things got worse for Rhodes as he got booed even more when he was Malakai Black's first feud in AEW, with the first-ever Grand Slam edition of "AEW Dynamite" being the biggest example of Rhodes being rejected by the fans as 20,000 people booed him. His feud with Black evolved into a feud with Andrade El Idolo, where even after putting himself through a flaming table, fans still threw his weight belt back at him when he threw it into the crowd. Rhodes is now treated like a god in WWE, and while he claims he was a heel in 2021, he probably didn't expect the level of hate the AEW fans hurled at him.

It's not just fans in the United States who will boo someone for the fact that they either aren't worthy enough to be in a specific spot, or they aren't someone else, as the fans of NJPW booing Tetsuya Naito ended up turning him into the ungovernable megastar he is today.

Back in 2013, Naito was being positioned by NJPW as the next main event star to go alongside Hiroshi Tanahashi, Shinsuke Nakamura, and Kazuchika Okada, the latter of whom had such a meteoric rise the previous year that the company thought they would do it with someone else. However, wrestling isn't that simple, and despite winning the 2013 G1 Climax tournament, the fans could not care less. As Wrestle Kingdom 8 approached and it was clear that Naito would be getting a shot at the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, the reactions for him got worse, with his match against Okada at the Tokyo Dome not being received well by fans.

Naito's title match wasn't even the main event as the fans had voted for Tanahashi and Nakamura's match to go on last instead, solidifying Naito's role as a failure in the eyes of the fans. The boos stopped when he went on a brief trip to Mexico where he reunited with his old friend La Sombra [now known as Andrade in WWE] to become part of Los Ingobrenables, before returning with a new look and attitude, one that flipped the bird to all of the fans who had rejected him. Even though he did get heel reactions when he came back, fans were won over by Naito's tranquillo attitude, and Los Ingobrenables de Japon went on to become one of the most popular groups in NJPW history.

This is the only other example on this list that isn't someone being booed when they weren't meant to, but an example where the boos could have legitimately escalated into a full-blown riot.

Jerry "The King" Lawler had played a heel in various territories during his career, and even though he is considered a legend in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, he had managed to work up crowds all over the country to the point where fans were willing to physically attack him. However, this example came long after his prime years in the territories, one where the heat Lawler had was taken to the extreme.

At ECW's Wrestlepalooza event in 1997, Tommy Dreamer finally beat his long-time rival Raven for the first time, but the moment was short-lived as Rob Van Dam and Sabu attacked him from behind. RVD and Sabu had made a number of appearances on WWE TV around this time, and just when Dreamer looked to have gained the advantage, Lawler arrived and the ECW Arena almost went into meltdown.

Various members of the ECW locker room tried to take Lawler out to no avail, with Taz eventually being the company's savior. But the reaction that Lawler got when he said, "This bingo hall ought to be built out of toilet paper because there's nothing in it but sh*t" was so volatile that Lawler himself mentioned on "The Rise and Fall of ECW" documentary that the whole segment was legitimately dangerous as he feared he would get jumped after the show. The WWE invasion of ECW eventually fizzled out by the end of the year, but the night Jerry Lawler invaded the ECW Arena was cited by Paul Heyman as his all-time favorite moment in ECW history.

From one version of ECW to another, and perhaps the only night where WWE's rebranded version of ECW felt like the original.

By mid-2006, fans had already started to turn on John Cena. The Chicago crowd at WrestleMania 22 was the first notable example of fans booing everything Cena did in the ring, but it was taken to new heights at ECW One Night Stand 2006. Cena defended his WWE Championship against Rob Van Dam, who cashed in his Money in the Bank contract ahead of time to give himself the home-field advantage. But in retrospect, a home-field advantage doesn't even come close.

The moment Cena's music hit the Hammerstein Ballroom, the fans did not let him settle at all. He walked into the match as if he was going into a war, like a wounded animal being thrown into a pack of wolves. Such was the animosity the fans had for him that whenever Cena threw his shirt into the crowd, it was thrown back every single time, with the last throw coming from an actual member of ECW security. The level of hatred running through the building on this night reached a point where when the fan sign that read "If Cena Wins, We Riot," was shown, you genuinely believed that it would happen.

Chants of "Cena Swallows" and "You Can't Wrestle" sang out loudly, and as a response to the latter chant, Cena hit a Fisherman Suplex, only for the fans to chant "You Still Suck." Cena was booed a lot throughout his career, and even though the crowd at Money in the Bank 2011 for his match with CM Punk was close to making the list, this was the ultimate anti-Cena crowd.

Concluding with the most recent example of fans letting a wrestling company know that they hate the person is Hulk Hogan's appearance on the January 6, 2025 episode of "WWE Raw." The show was a historic one as it was WWE's debut on Netflix, and to attract as many eyes to the product as possible, some of the biggest names in WWE history dropped in to say hello. The Rock, John Cena, and The Undertaker all received warm welcomes, but Hogan didn't, and it's not hard to see why.

Back in 2015, Hogan landed himself in the hottest of waters when a sex tape that was filmed in 2007 surfaced online that saw Hogan going on an anti-black rant where he used multiple racial slurs, stated that he had a problem with his daughter Brooke dating a black man, and openly admitted to being a racist to a point. Wrestling fans have long memories and that scandal has stuck with Hogan since it happened, hence why he was also booed heavily at WrestleMania 37 when he hosted the event with Titus O'Neil, who was cheered massively. 

The other main reason why Hogan got such a bad reaction was his very public endorsement of US President Donald Trump. While other WWE stars like Logan Paul and The Undertaker have also endorsed him, Hogan has appeared at multiple political rallies during the lead-up to the 2024 Presidential Election. Given his track record, fans weren't going to forgive "The Hulkster" just because his beer was a sponsor for the show, and even though he was reportedly surprised and disappointed at the reaction, Hogan is still going to appear on WWE TV throughout 2025 regardless of merciless the boos might be.