Reception
Fans in attendance instantly voiced their disapproval of the tournament. Chants of "Boring!" and "We want wrestling!" were audible during the segments.
The tournament resulted in a number of legitimate injuries -- Steve Blackman and Road Warrior Hawk were unable to work in usual WWF capacities for a while after. Savio Vega aggravated an old arm injury and would never work for WWF again.
UFC veteran Dan "The Beast" Severn pulled out of the tournament because he said he had nothing left to prove
Jim Cornette has described the tournament as "the stupidest thing that the WWF has ever done". He argues that the WWF misjudged the appeal that legitimate fighting would have to their audience, considering that the WWF had aggressively promoted the idea that their matches were "sports entertainment" with scripted finishes. Furthermore, because the fighters were trained to work professional wrestling matches and not to fight, they risked both injury and the possibility that a defeat would hurt their marketability. Cornette also criticized the WWF for failing to use the tournament to promote Bart Gunn as a new star wrestler.
Read more about this topic: WWF Brawl For All
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)