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8 things you didn't know about the Hardcore Title
BY RYAN MURPHY
You know what made the Hardcore Title so fun — apart from the giddy abandon of the 24/7 rule and the surreal sight of Al Snow and Hardcore Holly fighting for it in the Mississippi River? It was the championship’s complete lack of pretense. Where every other sports-entertainment prize was presented with bloated pomp, the Hardcore Title wasn’t encumbered by legendary lineages or epic main events — it was just a good excuse for guys to whack each other with garbage cans.
The honesty of the Hardcore Championship’s insanity made it WWE’s most entertaining piece of hardware during its brief existence. And while it was relevant for less time than Chumbawamba, the busted title still managed to create some unique sports-entertainment records that stand to this day. With “extreme” on the minds of everyone in the WWE Universe, WWEClassics.com offers up eight things you may not have known about this unpredictable hunk of metal.
Raven held the Hardcore Title a record 27 times
Sure, Ric Flair’s 16 World Championship victories will forever stand as an unbelievable feat, but The Nature Boy will have to come out of retirement if he wants to match the title-winning prowess of Raven. A former ECW standout who often pushed a shopping cart full of weapons to the ring in WWE, Raven held the Hardcore Title on 27 separate occasions — a record not just for the Hardcore Championship, but for any title in WWE.
The grungy lowlife from The Bowery beat Steve Blackman on the Dec. 22, 2000, episode of Raw to win his first title. His subsequent reigns were always brief — his longest lasted 31 days — but gritty bouts like his WrestleMania X-Seven title defense against Kane and Big Show were impossible to forget. Raven won the Hardcore Title for the final time on Aug. 17, 2002, putting him five reigns ahead of runner-up Crash Holly.
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