10 Most Ridiculous Lawsuits In Wrestling-2

2. The Panda Beats The WWF

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It’s part of wrestling history now, but at the time, this was a massive, huge deal: the day the WWF was defeated by the WWF. This is the reason so many of your wrestling DVDs had an odd blurring effect on older footage for so many years.

Back in the 1990s, the World Wrestling Federation was contacted by the World Wildlife Fund, the charity that protects animals, over the similarity in their initials. WWF had wwf.com, and was expanding their market share on an almost monthly basis at the time – and when there’s global recognition involved, there’s money involved.

In this case, fairly reasonably, the World Wildlife Fund argued that, as a charitable cause, global recognition was more important to them and to the world at large than it was to an American professional wrestling promotion. They had more of an identity abroad as well – the WWF was muscling in on the panda’s turf, not the other way around.

At the time, Vince McMahon agreed, completely voluntarily, to keep the use of the disputed initials ‘WWF’ to a minimum in overseas markets where the panda was better established – which was, more or less, everywhere. This gentleman’s agreement kept the matter out of court for nearly a decade, until ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, The Rock, the Attitude Era and the WWF’s defeat of WCW in the Monday Night War resulted in WWF’s presence worldwide expanding exponentially. And naturally – because it’s Vince McMahon – he ignored the gentleman’s agreement he’d shaken hands to a decade earlier, and threw the WWF brand about overseas with mad abandon.

The next thing he knew, the panda had suplexed the WWF right into court, obtaining a ruling that the wrestling promotion had to abide by the previous agreement. McMahon, realising how much that would hamstring his now genuinely World Wrestling Federation, and not being one for half measures, opted for the dramatic option of changing the name of the company and completely rebranding… hence the WWE.