You thought the finish to the main event of the Oct. 15 Night of Legends pay-per-view was ... strange? So do the people on the creative team at AWE, who according to several front-office sources were as surprised as everybody else at the conclusion of the Kevin Nash-Ricky Morton match.
"When we saw Nash walking toward the curtains, I think we were all expecting Kevin to turn around and walk back to the ring. Then he walked by us and went backstage. Yeah, that caught us by surprise," said one source, who reported that a visibly upset AWE CEO Marvin Ward and Nash had a lengthy meeting following the pay-per-view.
In June, Ward brought Nash in as his tag-team partner to face The Rock-n-Roll Express at the Night of Legends event. A storyline that was to put Ward on the shelf with a broken arm following the house show to set up the need for Nash to find a replacement with a surprise return by Ward at the pay-per-view was re-routed because of lingering concerns about an injury to Ward's shoulder that had ended Ward's in-ring career in 1997.
Diamond Dallas Page was inserted as the mystery partner, but was only in the ring for a little more than two minutes of the main event, when Ward, in character, came down to the ring and announced that he was making the match a one-on-one, no-disqualification match with Nash and Morton and sent DDP and Robert Gibson to the back.
That was done at the request, both from a storyline and backstage perspective, of Nash, who not surprisingly gained early control over the much smaller Morton and dominated the action almost from start to finish - if you can call how the match, and the pay-per-view, ended a "finish."
Nash powerbombed Morton and, instead of going for the cover and the almost-certain 1-2-3, left the ring, to the surprise even of special guest referee Ronnie Garvin, a former NWA World Champion, who after seeing Nash leave the ring area and walk backstage declared Morton the winner by countout.
Nash, who had been balky with AWE officials all day, at one point creating a stir backstage in refusing to pretape a promo for his main-event match that was to air during the pay-per-view, was apparently speaking from the heart when he grabbed the house mic during the match with Morton and admitted that his participation in the event was "all about the money."
There had been concerns all along that Nash might be hard to work with, according to one backstage source, but all indications through the day of the Night of Legends show had been that Nash was more than willing to work with Ward and the AWE creative team on the completion of a storyline that had been laid out six months ago.
"I think the word 'screwjob' comes to mind. Yeah, folks here are still pretty upset that this would happen in the main event of our first pay-per-view," the source said.
You're in luck. The AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view is still available for viewing on InDemand, DirecTV and on Internet PPV.