Everyone like surprises, as long as they’re good and don’t aggravate any pre-existing heart conditions. And to be fair, wrestling has had its share of well-crafted surprises over the years, such as WCW’s reveal of The Third Man, or basically every time The Rock shows up unannounced. However, there have been a great number of times where surprises in wrestling have turned out to be disappointing, unfulfilling, or just really terrible, and those are the ones we’ve chosen to focus our attention on today.
10. Jimmy Snuka
By and large, mystery partners in wrestling suck. This is because if they were any good, nobody would bother with keeping them a mystery, because there’s more money in promoting a big return rather than keeping the audience guessing. Inevitably, any mystery partner will either be unsurprising, disappointing, or both. Such was the case at the 1996 Survivor Series, where WWE was hyping up a mystery member of the Survivor Series team led by Savio Vega. The fact that the team already contained Vega, Flash Funk, and Yokozuna (in one of his last matches before he was fired for being way too fat) should have suggested that the match (and consequently the mystery partner) wasn’t going to be all that important, but they were making it sound like a big deal, talking about someone who was incredibly important in the history of Madison Square Garden, where the PPV was located. Of course, in the end, the mystery partner was revealed as Jimmy Snuka, already well past his prime, and while he got a decent nostalgia pop, he didn’t exactly help the ongoing perception that WWE was still stuck in the past compared the a hot WCW product. Meanwhile, the match ended in a No Contest finish when everyone just started brawling, and was quickly forgotten.
http://www.wwe.com/videos/jimmy-snuka-makes-surprise-appearance-survivor-series-1996 Source: WWE.com