Worked Shoot

"We felt that something had to be done. And it was done in a manner in which people are still talking and asking questions about it — the right questions about it — to this very day. 'Who knew about it? What did they know about it? When did they know about it?' Nobody knew about it. Just Paul and I, and on that night, Shane."

— Tod Gordon, ECW founder, on Shane Douglas seceding from the NWA (Forever Hardcore: The Documentary)

In Professional Wrestling parlance, a "work" is anything scripted (i.e. anything that's part of kayfabe), while a "shoot" is anything "real" (i.e. not scripted). Put them together and you have the worked shoot; something that is definitely part of the act, but attempts to trick the viewer into thinking (if only for a second) that it's real.

A worked shoot plays off of a wrestler's real life, and it breaks many pro wrestling conventions, in an attempt to convince the viewer it's totally different from anything else that's going on. Since a worked shoot so often borrows from real life elements, it can be difficult to tell where the shoot ends and the work begins.

Worked shoots may be a reaction from pro wrestling bookers to the apparent death of kayfabe and the "outing" of pro wrestling as scripted; they're an attempt to put that genie back in the bottle, to make fans think it's real again, just for a second. Of course, they must eventually spill over into wrestling storylines, but until then...

An alternate definition is a wrestler taking the planned storyline and using it to express their real feelings — thus shooting during a work, for a worked shoot.

When trying to figure out if something is a worked shoot, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is the wrestler's microphone on?
• Are the cameras focusing on them?
• Are they claiming that this is a shoot, or that "this is not a work?"
• Are they using "insider" language such as face, heel, mark, smark or booker?
• Was their entrance music cued?
• Are members of the staff nowhere in sight or making no attempt to stop them?
• Do their actions make sense in the context of a storyline (e.g. crazy wrestler rebelling against the company or out for revenge)?
• Is their vocabulary roughly equivalent to their usual, scripted speaking pattern?
• Are highlights of their actions shown, mentioned, or otherwise recapped by anybody else on the program?
• Is Vince Russo booking?

If you answered "yes" to more than half of the above questions^note Especially that last one, then don't worry: that wrestler's "shoot" was all part of the show. Remember that the default response to something completely unexpected happening is to cut away and pretend it never happened.

This can also be applied to entire matches and promotions. Japanese wrestling once had a tradition to stage "shoot fights", but most of them were actually worked matches with many degrees of realism. Years after, the promotions who followed the "shoot-style" movement featured matches designed to look like Mixed Martial Arts bouts, and many of them put actual MMA fights into their cards to blur the lines between kayfabe and reality. Even outside of Japan, the World Wrestling Federation had a similar system of real fights called Brawl for All.

To tell apart between a real shoot fight and a worked shoot, you have to question:

• Firstly, are the wrestlers selling (or No Selling, but always in a theatrical way) each other's hits?
• Are they nonchalantly taking strikes which could be easily avoided or parried in a legitimate fight?
• Do they spend time in fully locked submissions doing nothing more than Theatrics of Pain only to miraculously revert it afterwards, instead of immediately searching for escape or reverting it before the locking?
• Are they fighting in a slow, meditated pace with innocuous rest holds and pauses, instead of a fast, instinctive rush?
• And lastly, are they using any sort of recognizable Wrestling Psychology which would be weird or improbable in a real fight?

Again, if you have answered affirmatively to three or more, then you are watching a worked shoot fight.

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Examples:

Trope Maker

• It is believed to have been originated by Jerry Lawler, Jimmy Hart, and Andy Kaufman, with the long-running Lawler/Kaufman feud. Qualifies as a worked shoot because some of the stunts Kaufman and Lawler pulled, like getting into a fight on the set of David Letterman's show, managed to convince a lot of people who weren't usually fooled into believing kayfabe. This was revisited during the filming of Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, with Lawler and Jim Carrey getting into a fistfight on-set. As the story was told, Carrey had gone into method-actor mode, would only answer to "Andy" on the set, and started picking fights with Lawler in order to get into Kaufman's head. This didn't spill over into the wrestling ring, unlike most worked shoots, but it did get a lot of airtime on WWE programming. While Carrey was doing publicity for Man on the Moon, he was visited by Tony Clifton, resulting in a fight and Clifton actually urinating on scene with a gag penis. The journalists gathered seemed to realize that it was a worked shoot, however. Seen here. Finally, most of Kaufman's career consisted of worked shoots, like faking a British accent and reading The Great Gatsby instead of performing his comedy routine because he was "sick of your lowbrow American humor." The night he hosted Fridays was another such moment, and he was so infamous for this behavior that even tabloids refused to believe he actually had cancer.

WWE

• In his first interview with Vince McMahon since winning King of the Ring, Hunter Hearst Helmsley stated, "This should've happened last year, but it didn't due to your politics." Clearly referencing the infamous "Curtain Call" incident with The Kliq, which resulted in Helmsley being punished when he was supposed to win King of the Ring that year.
• The WWE Brawl for All was made out to be legitimate shoot fighting where nothing was scripted, but behind the scenes, "Dr. Death" Steve Williams was "scripted" to win, and there were accusations leveled about the judges fudging the scores to favor Williams in his matches. Whether this is true or not^note And it probably is seeing as how they were so confident in Williams winning that they paid him the winner's purse before the tournament started, the plan was derailed by Bart Gunn, who defeated Williams by KO and disrupted the entire planned work. Bart Gunn proceeded to win the Brawl For All Tournament, and was in turn set up in a match against professional boxer Butterbean at WrestleMania. Accounts differ as to whether this was a punishment for winning when he wasn't supposed to, or whether booker Vince Russo actually expected Gunn to win. Gunn would be KO'd in less than a minute, and was fired as soon as he made it back to the locker room.
• CM Punk's onscreen feud with John Cena and off-screen contract squabbles in the summer of 2011 were turned into one giant worked shoot. After declaring he was leaving WWE on TV, he then cut a promo — christened by the wrestling community as the "Pipebomb" — where he bashed WWE for being Merchandise-Driven and firing his friends like Colt Cabana^note Cabana had had a brief, unsuccessful run as Scotty Goldman. To say that Punk and Cabana are no longer friends would be a massive understatement. His mic was cut during the middle of his promo to "silence" him and he was promptly "suspended" for his words, only to be reinstated the following week at Cena's request (WWE actually announced the reinstatement five days earlier, possibly to suggest further that the suspension was real). Punk then beat Cena at Money in the Bank and ran out with the WWE Championship, only to keep popping up at WWE promotional events, inciting smarks in the area and daring new WWE head Triple H to hire him back. Sure enough, once WWE appointed a "new" WWE Champion, a re-hired Punk appeared on Raw to challenge with the old belt.
• A.J. Lee cut a (fittingly, considering their later marriage) CM Punk-esque promo during her run as the Divas Champion, and she used it to great effect, tearing apart the supposedly "plastic, interchangeable" Total Divas women who seemingly hadn't earned their spots on the roster like she had. Despite supposedly being a heel, it just got her over even further.
• One example that helped catapult wrestling into pop culture was the "Gold Record Incident" in February 1985, where Roddy Piper interrupted an award ceremony on MTV with Lou Albano and Cyndi Lauper, smashed Albano's commemorative record over his head and then body slammed Lauper's manager David Wolff. The whole thing was so realistic that a NY cop rushed into the ring and tried to stop Piper, which made him mess up his slam and actually hurt Wolff. The whole thing was a setup for the "War to Settle the Score" special, which itself was a setup for the original WrestleMania.
• The on-screen apparent death of WWE chairman Vince McMahon may have been an unintentional worked shoot. WWE was very up-front about the fact that it's only the character "Mr. McMahon" that died, and the real Vince was alive and well (though for at least a few hours, WWE.com claimed that Vince was "presumed dead"), but that didn't stop some news outlets from running the story as real within a couple of days after it happened, and it didn't stop some finance columnists from all but accusing WWE of securities fraud for faking the death of the chairman. The storyline was scrapped, however, when the Chris Benoit incident happened, forcing McMahon out of "death" to address it.
• They tried to turn the obviously scripted stage collapse accident on McMahon in 2008 into a worked shoot. He can be heard saying "Paul, I can't feel my legs." (Paul is the real first name of McMahon's son-in-law, Triple H, and he generally refuses to let anyone use it.) Then they pretty much just forgot about it.
• When Donald Trump "bought" Raw, despite the fact that Raw is a TV show, not a corporate subsidiary, the company did a poor job signaling that he didn’t really buy the company. There were some official press releases from the USA Network that seemed to imply the whole thing wasn't an angle, and there were also press conferences held by Vince and Trump reiterating the storyline. Any long term plans for this arc were scrapped on next week's show with Vince "buying Raw back" for twice what he was originally paid because the storyline was affecting the company's stock.
• Not all worked shoots are full of hate and violence: Stan "Uncle Elmer" Frazier's wedding to Joyce Stazko on a 1985 broadcast of Saturday Night's Main Event, was the real thing; Roddy Piper's attempt at disrupting the ceremony and Jesse Ventura's snide commentary were kayfabe, but the couple remained married until Frazier's death in 1992.
• In 1997, Shawn Michaels engaged in a series of "unscripted" incidents, including an entire tirade against The Undertaker that was edited out of a later Raw broadcast. Rumors flew left and right that Michaels was trying to get himself fired in order to go to rival WCW and join his friends Scott Hall and Kevin Nash in the nWo; in fact, the entire thing was a set-up to the birth of D-Generation X. This particular incident arose first as a dare by a fellow wrestler (and real life friend of Taker), and then Michaels decided to have some fun. The guy conducting the interview, Jim Ross, was none too happy about it, but the Undertaker took it better.
• Matt Hardy discovered that his girlfriend Amy "Lita" Dumas was cheating on him with fellow wrestler Adam "Edge" Copeland, and when he started to talk publicly about it, he was unceremoniously fired. After he slowly built a rabid fanbase using the sympathy from this incident on the Internet, he suddenly began appearing on Raw again, jumping over the barricade and attacking Edge, then being carried out by security while screaming things like, "I thought you were my friend, Johnny Ace!" (a reference to WWE executive John "Johnny Ace" Laurinaitis). Soon enough, the truth came out; Matt had been re-hired, and plans were in place for a storyline based on the problems between Matt and Edge (even though this meant retconning a year's worth of storylines in which Lita was Kane's wife). To this day, fans still debate whether the infidelity that started the whole thing was work, or shoot. Realistically, there's little question it was initially a shoot - WWE didn't talk about it, and you know that WWE.com would have been full of stories about it if it was a work. Note that the second Matt showed back up on Raw and bragged about it being "a shoot" on his blog, any illusion that he was acting independently was broken.
• Joey Styles's rant on sports entertainment before "quitting" the commentating job on Raw was a working shoot. This became more obvious as he later became the commentator for the WWE revival for ECW and there was no way in Hell Vince McMahon would have let him on TV if he legitimately bashed him and his whole company off the cuff on live TV.
• Chaz Warrington dropped his horrible Beaver Cleavage gimmick via worked shoot. While pretending to cry to his mother because he didn't want to wrestle "some guy named Meat", he abruptly said "I can't do this" and walked off screen. Marianna yelled "Chaz, we're live!" and then the feed cut abruptly to Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler, who apologized for the "creative differences" and said the match wouldn't take place. In reality, Chaz actually thought the vignettes were amusing.
• The ECW One Night Stand 2005 pay-per-view plays it straight with one promo and subverts it with some commentary later on. The first instance was a Rob Van Dam promo where he claims he's shooting and talks about how important the night was and how, to him, missing it is worse than missing WrestleMania. The subverted part is during Joey Styles' infamous remarks about Mike Awesome (calling him a "Judas" for the way he left ECW for WCW while still champ, and wishing that a Suicide Splash had actually killed him). Mick Foley points out it's a shoot (which, as mentioned above, is typically a sign that it's a work), but Joey really did get in trouble for his comments after the show. And let's not forget Paul Heyman's promo on the Raw and Smackdown wrestlers sitting in the private box, where he makes reference to the Edge/Lita/Hardy stuff mentioned above ("Hide your wives, it's Edge!") and tells JBL that he only got a world title run "because Triple H didn't want to work Tuesdays."
• The Miz:
  • He actually did several of these throughout 2010 during his reign as the United States and later WWE Champion. He referred to the real life bullying he suffered in the locker room at the hands of JBL.
  • His rant against Daniel Bryan on the August 23, 2016 edition of Talking Smack leaned into the Reality Subtext of The Miz being accused of wrestling like a coward and using the "soft WWE style", in contrast to Bryan being forced to retire from the ring as a consequence of the high-risk style he'd been using since his indie days. The argument got so heated it caused news outlets to speculate on whether both men had gone off-script or not.
• When Ken Shamrock was new in WWF, they booked a Pancrase-style match between Shamrock and one of his students from the Lion's Den, Vernon White. The match was billed as an exhibition, but during the match, White supposedly "tried to turn it into something it wasn't supposed to be" and shoot kicked Shamrock, which caused Shamrock to snap and ground n' pound White unconscious. The match was a work from top to bottom, though. Ironically enough, Shamrock was involved in a number of worked matches in Pancrase. He did a job to Masakatsu Funaki to drop the Pancrase title (before facing NWA champion Dan Severn in a UFC bout; since the NWA was "fake" wrestling, Pancrase would have lost face if Shamrock lost), and it's believed that he dropped a match to Minoru Suzuki when fans needed to believe a Japanese guy could hang with him. He also tanked a match to avoid an injury before facing Royce Gracie in a rematch, and "carried" several other opponents to more exciting finishes than would have happened in a pure shoot.
  • In fact, his experience for works came from when he was a Pro Wrestler, it was at Fujiwara Gumi shoot-wrestling promotion where he met future Pancrase founders Funaki and Minoru Suzuki. After he found success at the UFC representing "shootfighting" (Pancrase-style fighting), a former Fujiwara Gumi alumni Bart Vale used a worked victory over Shamrock to hype himself up as an All American shootfighting^note In fact, he copyrighted the term "shootfighting" and founded the International Shootfighting Association) (ISFA), which prevented independent people from promoting the combat sport and MMA legend back in the United States. His actual MMA record is a pitiful 1-2.
• The Undertaker:
  • While he was leading the Ministry of Darkness, the idea that Mark Calaway, the man behind the gimmick, was beginning to really believe in the Satanic cultist stuff was floated a couple of times. Most notably when Ken Shamrock cut a promo in the ring where he called "Mark" out and threatened to beat a sense of reality into him.
  • Following Over the Edge 1998, Undertaker came to the ring in street clothes and delivered a promo where he seemingly aired Mark Calaway’s legitimate grievances with the company and Vince McMahon such as his short title reigns. He then segued into complaining that Vince was exploiting his “family troubles” for storyline purposes, trying to push the idea that Mark and Glenn really were half-brothers with a lot of bad blood between them, even if their characters were fake.
• After Cody Rhodes was fired on Raw, the Professional Wrestling Syndicate announced that as soon as Cody's 90 day no compete clause ran out he would be competing for them, which Rhodes confirmed on his Facebook page while putting over all the PWS talent he wanted to face. Of course his "firing" didn't even last 90 days.
• On the Raw following The Undertaker's shocking defeat by Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania XXX, Paul Heyman decided to "shoot from the hip," and talked about Taker's legitimate concussion during the match as well as Vince McMahon leaving the WrestleMania set to make sure he was alright. While the whole promo was very obviously a work, it involved a lot of events that would normally be kept out of kayfabe.
• An inadvertent one happened during the 2015 Elimination Chamber match for the Intercontinental Championship. When Sheamus was supposed to be released from his pod, the door got stuck, which visibly disrupted the match and led to wrestlers stopping and audibly directing each other as if improvising a new plan for the match. After throwing a fit for several minutes in his pod, Sheamus suddenly stops and lifts up his necklaces from the floor of his pod, as if he had deliberately gotten himself stuck in his pod.
• On the Raw following the 2015 Elimination Chamber, Kevin Owens, after defeating John Cena cleanly, mentioned how despite all the years it took for him to make it to WWE, his son looks up to Cena as his hero. He also mentioned the issues Cena's detractors have against him.^note For example, he referred to Cena as "Super Cena" during his promo.
• WWE realized that fans were starting to understand what the "X" sign means when a ref puts his arms in a cross above his head.^note If you don't, it's when a genuine injury has happened in the ring and the ref is signaling that someone needs legitimate medical attention. So there have been a number of instances where it's fairly obvious the event was scripted but the ref still does the gesture anyway.
• At one point during The Miz and Dolph Ziggler's 2016 feud for the Intercontinental Championship, Dolph threatened to leave WWE if he couldn't beat The Miz for the title at No Mercy. Ziggler, being no stranger to working fans himself, later tweeted that after No Mercy he would accept bookings through an outside agency. Between this and The Miz's repeated potshots at Ziggler's entire in-ring career, including his time in the Spirit Squad and near-forgotten stint as Kerwin White's caddy, this seemed to imply that his exit from WWE was legitimate. It wasn't.
• When AJ Styles won the #1 contender's match for the WWE World Championship held by Bray Wyatt, Randy Orton, who betrayed Wyatt a week ago, set out to challenge Wyatt as the winner of the Royal Rumble. Ultimately, Styles and Orton had a match to determine the true contender, which AJ lost. Frustrated, he lashed out backstage at Shane McMahon, going as far as driving him head first into his car's window. For that, he was "fired" by the GM Daniel Bryan, and AJ's profile was moved to the "Alumni" section of WWE.com. After that, Shane challenged AJ to a match at WrestleMania 33, "reinstating" him as an active superstar.
• The face-off during the contract signing between John Cena and Roman Reigns in the lead-up to their match at No Mercy 2017 saw both men cutting promos on each other laden with reality subtext, as they brought up pretty much every real life issue fans have with them that make them such Base Breaking Characters. Cena called out Reigns for being a half-baked, corporate-manufactured Expy of him, Reigns criticised Cena for burying the careers of other young up-and-comers, Cena criticised Reigns for being given all the opportunities in the world but not managing to even get as over as him, and both men used booking terminology such as describing each other (and even themselves) and being "protected". It's uncertain exactly how much of the promos were scripted and approved backstage in advance and how much saw them improvising; certainly a part where Reigns visibly forgets his lines and Cena rips into him with "It's called a promo, kid, if you wanna be the Big Dog you gotta learn to do it" wouldn't have been preplanned, but Dave Meltzer was thoroughly convinced that pretty much all of it had been personally cleared by Vince in advance^note The real kicker of that promo was Cena telling Reigns "I'm still here because you can't do your job!", in other words saying that Reigns was a failure as a top guy and wasn't drawing enough money. No word on if Vince approved that line. It was unquestionably given away to be at least mostly a work when John rebutted Reigns' accusations of him having a "golden shovel" by saying "they (the fans) hold the keys, they always have, they always will".
• In the build-up to Wrestlemania 34, Roman Reigns cut several promos on his opponent Brock Lesnar, calling him out for several issues fans and other wrestlers have had with him (having no passion for the business or respect for the fans, working a part time schedule, only caring about getting paid, being protected by the management). The fact that it's coming from Reigns, whose X-Pac Heat far exceeds Lesnar's, is no small irony.
• A few weeks before Summerslam '18, Carmella delivered a heartfelt, emotional speech to Becky Lynch about how the latter always helped her out in NXT and that it was an honor to wrestle against her at the PPV. She then offered a handshake... just before James Ellsworth's music played and Carmella blasted a distracted Becky with the title belt.
• In July 2019, after almost two straight years of being the personal Butt-Monkey to Shane McMahon, Kevin Owens had enough. In a promo designed to echo the original pipebomb, Kevin blasted Shane for taking up television time over the actual wrestlers on Smackdown. He named people like Ali, Liv Morgan, Buddy Murphy, and Apollo Crews as talent that had suffered, and ripped Shane a new one over his "Best in the World" moniker. Shane played along by cutting both of the microphones off (well, until Kevin stole commentator Byron Saxton's headset), and finally had KO escorted from the building.

WCW

• An example of a worked shoot gone awry is the "Loose Cannon" gimmick Brian Pillman did in WCW. Pillman said and did things that seemed specifically designed to tweak the noses of management, such as when he ended a PPV match (an "I Respect You" match against booker Kevin Sullivan) about a minute in by shouting, "I respect you, booker man!" Subsequently, he was "fired", and he convinced WCW to really release him from his contract in order to make the illusion complete; then, freed from contractual obligations, he went to ECW instead of finishing the storyline.
• WCW saw another Worked Shoot backfire when wrestler/booker Kevin Sullivan put together a storyline that had his (on-screen and real-life) wife, Nancy "Woman" Sullivan, sleeping with his rival, Chris Benoit. Sullivan was from wrestling's old school, and he made sure that Woman and Benoit traveled together, were spotted entering each others' hotel rooms, and otherwise spent a lot of time together in public, just to drive the angle home. The problem? After spending all that time together, Nancy fell in love with Benoit, and left Kevin for real to marry him. This led to Woman being moved into a non-speaking role as a valet for Ric Flair, and Benoit kicking Sullivan's ass in match after match, along with fighting his way through Sullivan's Power Stable the Dungeon of Doom, culminating in Benoit defeating Sullivan in a "Career vs. Career" match at WCW Bash at the Beach 97. Sullivan was replaced as booker in early 1999 by Kevin Nash shortly after the Fingerpoke Of Doom and roughly 8 months of terrible booking, which was then followed by the much worse booking of Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara in October 1999. Benoit left the company in January 2000 when Sullivan re-gained the head booker position, as Benoit feared that Sullivan was still holding a grudge. Worse yet for WCW, his friends Perry Saturn, Dean Malenko, and Eddie Guerrero all left for fear of becoming collateral damage; the quartet formed The Radicalz in the WWE, where Benoit and Guerrero became huge stars. To Sullivan's credit, Benoit said on the Hard Knocks DVD that for all the animosity he held toward Benoit, Sullivan remained a consummate professional in the ring and never tried to hurt Benoit in any of their matches.
• The worst-ever Worked Shoot for WCW was when the company started shooting on itself, complete with the user of insider terms during the show.^note For example, when Kevin Nash and Goldberg cut "shoot" promos and the commentators acted like it's a shoot. There was also rather explicit mentions of predetermined match finishes on purpose while the cameras are still rolling during the show. Unsurprisingly, this came at a time when Vince Russo was writing for WCW. The stupidity culminated at the wretched New Blood Rising show, where WCW promoted a match between Goldberg, Kevin Nash and Scott Steiner who were going to have a "real fight". Midway through the match, Goldberg "stopped co-operating" and walked out on the match, with the announcers criticizing his lack of professionalism. Nash and Steiner then proceeded to "improvise" a finish, with the announcers praising how professional they were. Soon after, they ran Fall Brawl promos talking about how Goldberg "refused to follow the script". This was one of the factors that led to WCW going out of business less than a year later.
• Bash at the Beach 2000 was almost as bad. Hulk Hogan was pulling his creative control card and insisting on beating Jeff Jarrett for the title while Vince Russo and Creative were set on Booker T ending up with the belt. The negotiation between Hogan and Russo ended with this: Russo would tell Jarrett to lay down in the ring to make Hogan win in a way that would make Hogan look bad, Hogan would leave in a huff, and then Russo would come back out by himself and reveal everything that went on backstage to the fans just so he could nullify Hogan's win and put the belt back on Jarrett - with no one but Russo and Hogan actually knowing it was all a work. As a result, Jarrett was obviously incensed but went along anyway, but the end result in not telling the announcers was them actually saying on the air "This is not part of the script!" and then saying Russo was not "in character" when he cut his promo, which itself was supposedly the reason Hogan later sued Russo for defamation of character (the suit was dismissed in 2002) and walked out of the company despite having a contract. Most sides involved have essentially admitted the whole thing was a worked shoot turned half-work half-shoot, but it doesn't help matters that multiple people involved in the angle have provided different accounts of how what happened in the ring came to be: Hogan (in his 2002 book) and Russo have given different accounts where the only agreement is the finish was agreed to hours before the match took place, while Eric Bischoff has stated the decision was reached days earlier.
• On the very first WCW card Russo booked, Buff Bagwell and former tag partner Scotty Riggs shot a backstage segment where Riggs informed Bagwell that he (Riggs) would be winning the match, and Bagwell reacted with disbelief - and then when they actually had the match, Bagwell used a small package pin and "wouldn't let go", winning the match. A couple weeks after that Bagwell was in a match against La Parka. He no-sold everything, then took a dive from the "run into someone's feet in the corner" spot and "threw" the match.
• The tendency for WCW staff not to be informed of plot developments led to some hilarious situations where, when something genuinely unexpected happen, the staff would assume it had been planned and just not told them. Most notably, a fan dressed as Sting jumped a barricade and started to interfere with a match and the commentators, so used to not being told about changes, assumed it was meant to be the real Sting.
• WCW once attempted to save an angle with a worked shoot. Dustin Runnels' new character, Seven, was hyped in a series of creepy vignettes that left the unfortunate impression that he was a child abductor. Turner Standards and Practices axed the gimmick, and in an attempt to get some use out of Seven's elaborate entrance and costume, had Dustin interrupt his own debut, rant about how Goldust had caused him to be stuck in silly gimmick characters, and swear vengeance on WCW for firing his father, Dusty Rhodes.
• This quote, taken verbatim from a 2000 WCW broadcast, from Tony Schiavone, of course, "We do not wrestle in WCW." Note that the company's name was World Championship Wrestling. For those wondering, the quote was from a Hulk Hogan-Billy Kidman backstage brawl that ended with the Hulkster throwing Kidman into a dumpster and then ramming it with a Hummer.

ECW

• One of the most famous worked shoots was a interview made by Cactus Jack, known as the "Cane Dewey" promo, during his time in ECW. The promo was inspired by a sign Cactus Jack saw during a match against Terry Funk, which read "Cane Dewey".^note Dewey, Mick Foley's son, was 5 years old at the time. Cactus Jack became somewhat disillusioned with the wrestling business at this time and, at the advisement of ECW promoter and booker Paul Heyman, channeled that into his feud with Tommy Dreamer, which had Cactus Jack, then a heel, being against the "Hardcore" wrestling style, and attempting to get Dreamer, who had a hardcore gimmick, to leave ECW for Ted Turner's WCW.^note Which was at that time reviled by ECW fans.

TNA

• Vince Russo continued to do worked shoots in TNA. One particularly atrocious worked shoot was the scene where Mick Foley goes backstage and meets Vince Russo and the writers. Foley tells them that they're doing a great job, and asks if they can write a scene where Dixie Carter returns his phone calls. Foley was clearly not happy about having to break the fourth wall in this fashion.
• At TNA Turning Point 2007, Samoa Joe was supposed to team up with Kevin Nash & Scott Hall in a match against AJ Styles, Tomko & Kurt Angle. However, Hall no-showed the event. Joe was asked before the match to go out and cut a promo to announce their replacement for Hall, Eric Young. However, Joe used the opportunity to bury Hall and voice his frustrations against the company for not properly using the younger talent and giving more breaks to the older, more established stars, frequently shooting nasty looks at his partner Kevin Nash and his opponent Kurt Angle while talking. Kevin Nash was shown to be visibly upset by Joe's words, as was TNA President Dixie Carter, who was sitting in the front row. Towards the end of his promo, Joe looked down into the crowd where Dixie was sitting, noticed she wasn't happy and said "Are you mad? No, go ahead, fire me. I don't care." After the match, Joe and Nash had an argument backstage that nearly became physical and the next day, Joe apologized to the TNA locker room for his comments.
  • Not everyone in the crowd was sympathetic to Joe: Karen Angle (Kurt's then-wife) was close enough to the microphone that the words "Shut up! Stop being a crybaby!" made it over the air. Of course, Kurt was one of the people to whom Joe was referring, so Karen wasn't exactly unbiased in the matter.
  • Reportedly, Joe was only supposed to take a shot at Hall and bring out Eric Young as Hall's replacement, but realized midway through that he'd been handed a live mic on a TNA PPV and decided to air some grievances as well.
• Scott Hall's first pro wrestling appearance after no showing several TNA and WWC events was for Juggalo Championship Wrestling, where he was a founding member of the "juggalo World order". Hall challenged the jWo to go "on the road" and invade either WWE, ROH, TNA or UFC. They decided to start with TNA, by buying front row tickets to the "Turning Point" event. TNA officials actually thought JCW was actually threatening to interfere with the show and even Samoa Joe was worried because he thought they might have been there on behalf of Hall, who he had dissed. Sheik Abdull Bashir thought the jWo was a welcome part of the show and started to "fight" with 2 Tuff Tony, which security interfered with and had the jWo expelled. The "invasions" of the other three companies never got past the planning stages.
• Kurt Angle's feud with Jeff Jarrett was started on the premise that Kurt's wife Karen was cheating on him with Jarrett, wanted a divorce, and would likely get custody of Kurt's kids. This was all technically true, but Kurt and Jeff actually coming to blows over it wasn't. Kurt reportedly got upset when TNA actually brought his children on camera for a recorded promo cut by Jeff.
• After Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff's hostile takeover, Hulk Hogan cut a promo about ending kayfabe and how everything anyone other than himself had done up to that point was worthless and fake.
• After a scheduling dispute caused House Of Hardcore to lose a booking to TNA, Tommy Dreamer decided to explain the wrestler's absence as the result of Dixie Carter's meddling due to her fear of his promotion. A fan took a picture of House Of Hardcore's packed arena while Dreamer was giving his speech and sent it to Dreamer's phone, leading Dreamer to upload it to the internet to create more interest for future House Of Hardcore shows. Dixie Carter was legitimately offended by this, and when Dreamer got home on his computer he saw why. He had been tilting the phone at the wrong angle and only saw half of the picture. The other half was the mostly empty arena of a TNA show happening at the same time. Not wanting to bury TNA that deeply, Dreamer showed up on TNA television to make this feud with Carter "official", as an apology.
• When the sports company Anthem acquired TNA and Jeff Jarrett's Global Force Wrestling, it decided to merge them into one brand under the GFW name. At the shows, this was gradually demonstrated by having the GFW associated talent assault those associated with TNA/Impact Wrestling, defeat them in matches, unify their title belts and gradually take over everything until all was GFW. Basically a shoot turned work. However, the Anthem suits had a falling out with Jarrett, who took the GFW brand name with him out the door, so the Impact wrestlers rallied and got their company back.

Other Professional Wrestling Organizations

• In 1957, the NWA ran an angle where several member promotions took different sides in a dispute over whether Lou Thesz or Édouard Carpentier had won a match for the World Heavyweight Title. This was supposed to be building to a big match but then Montreal promoter Eddie Quinn left the alliance, leading to NWA President Sam Muchnick declaring Thesz the official winner, ending the "dispute".
• The phrase was also applied to what is more popularly known as "shoot wrestling", a Japanese wrestling style reminiscent of MMA (in fact, many early UFC participants like Ken Shamrock or Dan Severn were veterans of groups employing this style). Although outcomes were predetermined (the "worked" part), holds and strikes were generally applied in a realistic manner (the "shoot" part). Many of these later became full-shoot MMA organizations.
  • Worked shoots were somewhat endemic to Japanese professional wrestling. First, there was Antonio Inoki, who won a series of (fake) shoot fights with fighters of various martial arts disciplines (and drew a real fight with Muhammad Ali, doing serious damage to Ali's legs in the process despite goofy restrictions on his side.^note Ali was under the understanding that the match would be a work, and only found out 15 minutes before bell time that Inoki had planned on fighting for real - the rules were then cobbled together in that 15 minutes before the match started. One of them was that Inoki could only throw kicks if one knee was in contact with the ground, leading to a surreal fight where Inoki laid on his back and kicked Ali's legs a lot.) Then in the 1980s, several wrestlers in Inoki's New Japan promotion with real martial arts backgrounds felt that they were being forced to lose to inferior opponents. Two of them (Satoru "Tiger Mask" Sayama and Akira Maeda) formed the Universal Wrestling Federation, which was the first shootwrestling promotion. The shootwrestlers eventually made their way back to the mainstream promotions, and New Japan to this day still has a heavy emphasis on matwork and submissions due to their influence (and almost all major promotions in Japan go to clean finishes for the same reason). Several promotions down the line, shootwrestlers such as Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki felt they were being forced to lose to inferior opponents, and formed Pancrase, which did away with the whole predetermined outcome thing, and set the stage for Japan's next cultural fad (and America's MMA PPV phenomenon.)^* technically Sayama's Shooto was the first MMA company, formed because he didn't want to play politics, which is to say he didn't want to share the money he felt was his right as the most popular wrestler. But Shooto failed because, as Sayama soon discovered, real fighters were just as capable of playing politics as any pro wrestler.
• Gabe Sapolsky burying Chris Hero on commentary when he made his first appearance for Ring of Honor, leading Hero to call Sapolsky an ungrateful bastard and boast that his match drew more than any that ROH ever did with Kenta Kobashi. This led to a serious escalation in the CZW feud.
• Jim Cornette banning Low Ki for life from Ring of Honor. It worked because Low Ki does have a history of leaving promotions when he doesn't get his way, being hard to deal with or being too stiff, the reason his banning was for supposedly giving Cornette an injury. In fact, it might have worked a bit too well, as people started to hate Cornette and ROH personally for it. And not in the "come to the show on the off chance someone might beat Cornette" way.
• Ring Of Honor also ran angles involving CM Punk and Tyler Black threatening to take the Ring Of Honor World Title Belt with them to WWE. This was also done in Full Impact Pro, only in this case the threat was to take the Florida Heritage Title to Japan.
• Kevin Steen burying Ring Of Honor on their official message board while putting over Pro Wrestling Guerilla after being sent out of ROH by El Generico.
• In Yoshihiro Tajiri's SMASH, there was "The World Famous" Kana writing a manifesto on how to save Joshi pro wrestling. This somewhat backfired, as most fans either wondered why she had gone off on this tangent or just equated it to all the heel promos she had already cut in 2010. Other pro wrestlers and promoters were the people most upset, to the point it actually set back her bookings for a couple years and led to flanderization of Kana being a sneaky, manipulative, arrogant megalomaniac for the next half decade.
• In WSU, there was Tina San Antonio's absence from a show being explained as her faking an injury to tryout for WWE, leaving her tag team partner Marti Belle to fend for herself.
• When the World Wrestling League was starting up, the World Wrestling Council's Facebook page started filling up with criticism of the newer promotion. Then Carlito Colón, one of WWC's three owners, became a WWL regular and later still the two companies became affiliates.
• In WSU, there was DJ Hyde firing a good part of the roster and banning Jessicka Havok for life after she decided to work at a TNA event. In this case it worked because many women had left the company when he took over, coincidentally or otherwise. ^note They left because of Drew Cordeiro becoming their boss, and some came back when Hyde took over. But Hyde has an evil boss gimmick, so he incorrectly takes the blame for getting rid of wrestlers.
• At the G1 Supercard, co-produced by New Japan Pro-Wrestling and Ring of Honor, the indie wrestlers formerly known as Enzo and Cass jumped the guardrail and stormed the ring. There was actually some genuine confusion in the moment as to whether it was a work or a shoot, as Enzo had shoot gatecrashed Survivor Series that year. Additionally the camera cut away immediately and they were quickly removed by security like they were genuine intruders, rather than them being allowed to cut a promo, milk the crowd or attack the match participants. The next day ROH announced that it was a work and that the pair had signed with the promotion as "nZo" and "Big Ca$", despite both men being mired in personal and legal issues that should preclude working with any major company. This drew scorn from the fans, especially when it was revealed that ROH had not informed NJPW of the plan ahead of time. They were released without ever working a single match for ROH.
• On June 1, 2022, MJF, with it publicly known that he's unhappy with his contract, cuts a worked shoot promo on AEW Dynamite trashing most of the roster (throwing particular shade to AEW executive VPs The Young Bucks) and concluding by telling AEW owner Tony Khan "FIRE ME! FIRE ME, YOU FUCKING MARK!" before his mic is cut. He didn't return to TV for three months, and Khan "No comment"-ed every time he was asked, leading many to believe this was just a plain shoot rather than a worked one.
  • It was finally confirmed as a worked shoot — or possibly a shoot that became worked — at All Out on September 4, when he won the Casino Ladder Match as the masked "Joker" (thanks to massive outside interference) to guarantee a future shot at the AEW World Championship. After CM Punk defeated Jon Moxley to reclaim the world title, The Joker took off his mask in a video, revealing himself as MJF, who then came out live on stage to stare down Punk and gesture that the belt would soon be his^note Though with Punk being injured during that match, and suspended for what happened after the match, MJF had to settle for beating Moxley for the belt. As it turned out, MJF's absence conveniently coincided with filming for The Iron Claw, an upcoming biopic of the Von Erich family focusing mainly on Kevin, with MJF playing Lance Von Erich, briefly a kayfabe-only member of the family.

Other

• A rare non-wrestling example: on Celebrity Deathmatch, George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg try to stage a fake deathmatch for the purposes of gambling fraud, even though they were close friends in real life. This backfires when Paul Newman and Robert Redford notice how phony their 'fight' is and challenge them to a real one. Newman and Redford win.

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