As the spring of 1992 turned into summer, WWE’s business in the United States was in its steepest decline since Vince McMahon took the company worldwide. Things would have been bad enough had WWE simply experienced the devastating publicity of the sex and drug scandals and the resulting loss of business from more sensitive family audiences. But that was hardly the only problem.
The promotion was already expecting the usual drop in attendance after the storyline peak of WrestleMania. Box office kingpin Hulk Hogan had taken a hiatus that now looked to some viewers like fleeing in disgrace. Meanwhile the Ric Flair-Randy Savage feud had lost steam with Savage having captured the WWE title at the first attempt and the storyline mystery over Miss Elizabeth’s involvement already cleared up. And the return of the Ultimate Warrior against first Sid Justice and then Papa Shango drew disappointing crowds, with the outlandish nature of the Shango “voodoo” angle appearing turning off fans.
There were even theories that viewers were deterred by the distinct pattern of topline wrestlers shrinking almost overnight as the company’s new steroid testing procedure took hold. Indeed, Warrior’s dramatically different appearance even caused some viewers to speculate he was now portrayed by an imposter.
Whatever the causes, business stateside dropped dramatically, with some shows even having to be cancelled after poor advance ticket sales. Gates were soon down by more than 30 percent year-on-year and much of this decline had come in the space of a couple of months.
Take for example the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, which was one of the company’s regular haunts. February’s show attracted 6,039 fans; in May just 4,000 showed up; come June it was down to 2,800; and by the end of the year, one event drew just 1,900.
And yet in May at least, the Capital Centre was still penciled in as the venue of SummerSlam. That booking was about to change, with truly historic consequences for wrestling fans in the United Kingdom…
While many people mistakenly believe Sky TV launched in 1989, it actually dates back seven years before this when it launched as a single channel known simply as Satellite Television launched, making it technically older than Channel 4. The Europe-wide channel was aimed at local cable operators but with no UK takers the only way to receive it in Britain in 1982 was via a giant satellite dish in your garden. Not surprisingly the channel hit financial difficulties, leading to a buyout by Rupert Murdoch in 1984 for just £1. He soon began striking deals with cable carriers, making the renamed “Sky Channel” a viable business.
By April 1984, Sky was already showing wrestling on Saturday nights, and it is believed this was WWE programming. What is known for definite is that when WWE revamped its television product in 1986, moving from tiny regular venues in Pennsylvania to tapings in major arenas around the country, Sky Channel was on board. It aired the newly rebranded Superstars of Wrestling from the beginning and later picked up sister show Wrestling Challenge.
The channel also aired many of the promotion’s special events and pay-per-views. In a June 1988 press release it said WWE programming “judging by SKY’s mailbag and phone count is an obsession with British cable TV viewers. A previous WWF Wrestlemania special on SKY out-rated all other stations in UK cable TV homes, including BBC 1 and ITV.”
By this time WWE had also picked up limited coverage on more mainstream British television. Technically WWE’s first exposure in the UK market came as far back as July 3, 1976 when the usual World of Sport wrestling slot was replaced with footage from the Muhammed Ali-Antonio Inoki “boxer vs wrestling” debacle from Tokyo. The show also included highlights from WWE matches at Shea Stadium (where the Ali match aired on closed circuit) including boxer Chuck Wepner against Andre the Giant.
When Joint Promotions’ exclusive contract to supply programming for the Saturday afternoon ITV slot expired at the end of 1986, officials struck a new deal under which the slot would be shared between Joint and All Star Promotions, with occasional broadcasts of WWF events.
The first WWF broadcast, three weeks into the new year, was a specially produced show with Gene Okerlund and Al Hayes introducing three taped bouts: a British Bulldogs vs Hart Foundation match from Boston Garden, a Kamala squash match from a Superstars of Wrestling taping, and a lumberjack match from Madison Square Garden 11 months earlier with Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage.
The contrast was stark. Rob Butcher, who later became a wrestling writer as well as importing and trading videos of US and Japanese shows, explains that “everyone at school the next week was raving about how in American wrestling you can stand around the ring and beat the crap out of whoever you like. Hell, it was no holds barred chaos: a distorted dream come true to a bunch of 14-year-olds.”
It’s often been said that the glamour of the WWE shows helped bring down the small-time looking British broadcasts. That effect appears to be grossly overstated however: this was the only WWE show in the slot during 1987, and the promotion was featured just three more times in 1988 before ITV pulled the plug on Saturday afternoon wrestling.
The warm response to the WWE shows was enough to earn a slot in the middle of the night in some ITV regions. Though billed as Superstars of Wrestling, the shows were made up of house show matches from major US arenas that had originally been televised for local US cable networks.
But the “big bang” for WWE in the UK came in 1989 when Murdoch repackaged Sky as a network of channels available through the newly launched Astra satellite. As well as viewing on cable, it was now possible to receive Sky broadcasts on an affordable dish that could fit on the side of your house.
The renamed Sky One continued to air both Superstars of Wrestling and Wrestling Challenge, while sister channel Eurosport picked up Prime Time Wrestling (the forerunner to Raw.) Whereas shows had previously been several weeks out of date, Sky now aired the broadcasts the same week as in the US. Indeed, in January 1992 some fans found themselves confused when Superstars of Wrestling aired on a Friday night and reported the Mountie’s Intercontinental title victory over Bret Hart — the time zone difference meant that the match in question hadn’t actually taken place at this point!
WWE had already toured Europe on several occasions, but in October 1989 it made its UK debut, quickly selling out the London Docklands Arena (shown live on Sky) and adding a second date at the Birmingham NEC.
The promotion’s popularity continued to grow in parallel with Sky’s growth. In the spring of 1991 it returned for an eight day “UK Rampage” tour, not only selling out every show but adding a matinee event in Manchester. Every night featured a victorious appearance by the recently-returned “British Bulldog” Davey Boy Smith, who was undoubtedly a key part in the promotion’s continuing success in the UK.
By this stage fans could buy home videos, play with action figures, complete sticker albums, and even phone special premium rate phonelines dedicated to individual wrestlers on the tour. It’s not known how many people opted to pay 45 pence per minute to hear the latest news about the Warlord.
Apparantly unconcerned about burning out a market, WWF returned to our shores in October for four more events. Having chosen to run a televised show at the Royal Albert Hall (in which Davey Boy Smith won a headlining battle royale to win a tea urn), the promotion concluded demand would be so strong, it actually held a lottery to decide which fans could buy tickets for the event. A show the following day at Wembley Arena reportedly sold out in just 56 minutes.
Some astonishing figures were being bandied about at the time, and they are still impressive even if taken with a Mr Fuji-sized pinch of salt. According to the Sunday Times, the WWF magazine was now selling 200,000 copies in the UK, while licensed merchandise was grossing £12 million a year. Harvey Goldsmith, who promoted the tour, chose anecdotes over statistics to make his point: “I’ve heard many stories of parents in Britain having their furniture ruined by kids doing running powerslams over the sofa.”
WWE wasn’t alone in trying to ride the wrestling fad. WCW programming had debuted for ITV viewers in London at the start of 1990, expanding nationwide in September of 1991, though still in an early morning slot suitable only for students, insomniacs and those with unfettered access to a video recorder.
WCW attempted touring in early December, drawing a mere 3,000 on their first night at London’s Olympia, blamed by some on rumours that Ticketmaster had been pressured by WWE into not dealing with the event, leaving fans having to deal directly with the arena. Whatever the cause, organisers were panicked into offering a four-for-one ticket deal for the remaining two nights at the venue, which attracted increased crowds of 4,500 and 5,700, if not increased revenue. Fortunately for WCW the tour, which also took in Sheffield and Dublin, had been sold for a fixed fee to local promoters meaning the company didn’t feel the financial pain.
There were even early attempts at independent tours. The National Wrestling Federation advertised on WWE programming on Sky to promote a tour of major venues including Wembley Arena. The little known (to UK fans) line-up of the likes of the Sheik, Ivan Koloff, Wendi Richter and the Fantastics failed to attract much interest and the shows were quietly cancelled. Later in the year “National Wrestling Promotions” promised shows at Wembley, Blackburn and Dundee, along with a residential convention in Dorset featuring the Soultaker, Bob Orton, Angelo Poffo, the Bolsheviks and the Lightning Kid. Again, fans weren’t buying.
Other promoters took a more unorthodox approach to the problem of not having familiar names. As early as May 1992 long-time British grappler Johnny South had been repackaged as the “Legend of Doom”, clad in the same gear and facepaint as Road Warrior Hawk. He would continue using the gimmick for around a decade, joined on occasion by Ricky Knight, who later noted that although not his proudest moment in-ring moment, it was among the most lucrative.
Doink knock-off “Dunk the Clown” was also a familiar face in the 1990s, though the craze for full-blown unauthorized “tribute” shows didn’t really take off until the second WWE boom at the turn of the century when fans could supposedly see everyone from a bogus Scotty 2 Hotty to the creatively named Raymond Stereo.
Meanwhile the real deal continued from strength to strength in early 1992 with the European Rampage tour again selling out almost every night. Running two touring shows across the continent meant that on consecutive nights WWE was able to draw $300,000 gates at Wembley Arena, around triple what would be expected in a major US city at the time. By the time the tour moved on to Germany, WWE had to send a private jet to replenish stocks of merchandise.
The success of the tour was enough to convince WWE officials that it was time to change the plans for SummerSlam. While American viewers were still being told the event would take place in Landover, the truth came out on European versions of the show during the Event Centre slot. This was a segment in which Sean Mooney introduced short localised promos of wrestlers talking about upcoming house show bouts in the viewer’s area; in the gaps between European tours, British viewers simply saw generic promos about the main feuds.
Mooney revealed the show would take place in Europe and for the next few weeks the segment featured wrestlers speculating on the venue, the most ambitious suggestion coming from the Natural Disasters who tipped the Colosseum in Rome. In fact the decision had already been made and on June the 9th a press conference made it official: with the assistance of Goldsmith, SummerSlam was coming to Wembley Stadium.
Even those who had got wind of the venue were surprised by the line-up. WWE television had implied the show would feature the main feuds stemming from TV angles that year, with one reported line-up on European broadcasts having Savage vs Flair in a WWE title rematch, Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels for the Intercontinental title, Money Inc vs Natural Disasters for the tag titles, Warrior vs Shango, Legion of Doom vs Bevery Brothers, Undertaker vs Berzerker, Sgt Slaughter vs the Mountie and Nasty Boys vs Owen Hart & Koko B Ware.
It turned out the promotion had decided to rewrite the card completely, likely through a combination of wanting to appeal to the local market and deciding the bouts that were flopping at US arenas wouldn’t do any better on pay-per-view.
Flair, who received some of the blame for the poor gates, was dropped from in-ring action on the show altogether (though briefly reported as wrestling Sgt Slaughter at the event.) He was replaced against Savage by Ultimate Warrior, while Hart’s challenger was to be Davey Boy Smith, making for an unheard of double all-babyface main event and giving added meaning to the promotional tagline “The SummerSlam You Thought You’d Never See”.
There was also a date change. With a Monday evening PPV slot locked in stateside, the timezone issue made a live broadcast impossible. With this in mind, WWE decided there was no point trying to attract a child-heavy crowd on a schoolnight and opted to have the live show two days earlier, on a Saturday evening, leaving plenty of time for editing the show if needed.
With no World Wide Web, fans had two options for getting tickets: hit the phone or hit the stadium. Most opted for the former, with claims that BT had recorded a new record with 25,000 simultaneous calls to the Wembley box office. Meanwhile some fans camped overnight at the stadium, while those who turned up on the day faced a five-hour queue.
Originally WWE claimed the entire event had sold out on the first day, though this turned out to be an exaggeration. The event did likely set records for the most tickets sold on a single day, and somewhere in the region of 60-65,000 seats went in the first week. It appears the “first day sellout” claims were an attempt to create demand for closed circuit broadcasts in arenas across Europe for fans who didn’t want to wait for the TV broadcast. Eventually the promotion dropped this idea and announced a few extra seats had been made available, though in reality there were actually around 15,000 still up for grabs.
Either way, when the big day finally came, the building was as good as full. WWE’s internal records show the actual attendance as 78,927, though the promotion announced it on the night at 80,355. Given that WrestleMania III’s paid attendance has been hotly disputed, and leaving out two shows in North Korea where attendance was a political rather than capitalistic affair, SummerSlam 92 was possibly the biggest crowd to ever pay to see a wrestling event, and at worst number two.
So impressive was the crowd, WWE chose to open the PPV broadcast with a montage of fans waiting outside the stadium. The results make for nostalgic viewing today, with a sea of neon polyester, foam fingers (WWE broke its own record for one-day merchandise sales), and teenage girls in terrifying levels of make-up proclaiming their love for Shawn Michaels.
Most memorable of all though was a young boy who not only ticked the retro entire checklist (Big Boss Man baseball cap, shell suit, horrendous pudding basin hair) but issued perhaps the most baffling line in vox pop history: “The British Bulldog’s gonna win, whether he wants to or not!”
Quite what the lad meant is hard to decipher. There’s no reason Davey Boy Smith would have not wanted to win. Even if that had been the case, he could simply have taken a dive or walked out for a countout loss. In effect, the child was claiming a match would somehow be influenced so that, whatever he and the British Bulldog desired and expected, Bret Hart would lose. And that could surely never happen.
Inside the building, the set-up was not quite as elaborate as today’s stadium shows, with wrestlers simply emerging from a curtain. A scaffolding setup held a canopy above the ring in case of rain (which fortunately turned out not to be an issue) and housed video screens for those in the stands, though many fans remember these being useless for the first couple of hours as they were barely visible in sunlight.
There were no London buses or red phone boxes to be seen, though the various sections of seating on the pitch were arranged in the shape of a Union Jack. And perhaps most sadly, victorious grapplers in title matches were not invited to climb the famous 39 steps to be presented with the belt. Instead the Royal Box housed only a series of bugle players who performed a fanfare to start the show.
Spectacular as the sight of a packed stadium was, not all fans were happy when they took their seats. Future British wrestling manager and commentator Dean Ayass recalls that “As a customer of the UK distributor of WWF home videos at the time, I was sent a leaflet in the post by them advertising a special advance ticket hotline where tickets would be on sale 24 hours ahead of the general public. I hung on the phone for however long it took and finally managed to book tickets for me and two mates – front row! I was ridiculously excited. I had even made a countdown calendar a fortnight in advance where I tore off a sheet a day.
“So we all headed off for Wembley, dressed the part, with banners made up and everything, looking forward to seeing the show and trying to get ourselves on worldwide TV too.
“Unfortunately, our seats turned out to be front row….of the second tier in the stands. People all around us had been in the exact same situation. We spoke to stewards, but they had no interest in it. The seats we thought we had, front row, were occupied by other, much happier people.”
One fan who was happy to sit anywhere in the stadium was fourteen year old Steven Hayworth who had been watching wrestling for a couple of years at the time. Sat in the stadium, Ultimate Warrior-style paint on his face (a prime example of how “I had no idea how detrimental being a wrestling fans was to my other pursuit of getting a girlfriend”), he tells FSM he remembers “walking to ringside and seeing Bobby Heenan and Vince McMahon and being blown away to be on the same planet, let alone in the same vicinity as them.”
By the time the main event concluded Hayworth “just had that feeling” that decided his destiny was to be a pro wrestler. While no doubt many children had the same idea that day, Hayworth stuck with his dream, achieved it, and would one day perform just yards away at Wembley Arena under his professional name of Nigel McGuinness.
The event was also a career changer outside of pro wrestling. Having seen the large crowd on hand, a young A&R executive for the BMG record company called Simon Cowell began wondering if the interest fans had in WWE performers could be exploited in the music world. He proposed a cash-in album that would be marketed solely on the strength of the WWE brand rather than any pretence of musical competency.
The resulting WrestleMania: The Album, produced with pop maestros Mike Stock and Pete Waterman, was largely made up of remixes of wrestler entrance themes, a couple of highly engineered pop songs and a baffling ballad sung by Bret. It flopped in the US, but made it to number 10 in the UK charts. Even more amazingly, the single Slam Jam hit number four in the singles charts. It was enough to convince the industry to listen to Cowell’s judgment, and the rest is pop history.
Without the usual PPV time constraints, the live event ran just short of four hours. Three matches — Nasty Boys/Mountie-Bushwhackers/Jim Duggan, Shango-Tito Santana, and Berzerker-Tatanka — were cut from the TV broadcast and later shown on Prime Time Wrestling. Meanwhile Sky Sports also cut out a Repo Man vs Crush affair to take a mid-show break in which Richard Keys hyped up Sky’s coverage of the newly-formed Premiership, a vital promotional message as the channel was switching to an encrypted, subscription-only format the following day.
To be fair, the spectacle of the show outweighed the in-ring action in many bouts. The Undertaker made an impressive entrance on a hearse, while the LOD riding motorbikes down the aisle to a massive ovation is often cited as one of Animal and Hawk’s career highlights. There were even a couple of non-wrestling moments on the show: a rare presentation of WWE legends saw the official acknowledgement that Pat Patterson had returned to the company after the spring scandal, while an appearance by Roddy Piper with a bagpipe band is believed to have been a way to get him a TV performance in the UK, qualifying him for an Equity card.
With potential showstealer Shawn Michaels vs Rick Martel falling a little flat, two matches carried the event. Warrior and Savage had a bout every bit as athletically impressive as their WrestleMania VII classic, albeit without the emotional story of Elizabeth’s return. On this occasion the drama lay on the mutual distrust of the two men, who both believed Flair’s advisor Mr Perfect would be in the corner of the other. In fact Flair and Perfect had fooled both men, attacking Savage at ringside to give Warrior the countout win but not the title. Just three days later Flair beat an injured Savage to capture the belt.
On many shows that would have been the match of the night, but nothing could compete with the British Bulldog’s own title challenge. Smith was led to the ring by Lennox Lewis (then just a couple of months away from a win over Donovan “Razor” Ruddock that would indirectly earn him the world heavyweight championship). Also at ringside was Diana Hart, who was both the wife of Smith and the sister of Hart and had been heavily featured in the build-up, the storyline being that the title rivalry was tearing the family apart.
Somewhat dubiously, Diana Hart claims her involvement in the angle was a late replacement for the originally planned conclusion in which Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, would present the Intercontinental title to the winner. According to Hart, this idea was dropped after a scandal in which the Daily Mirror published photographs of a topless Ferguson having her toes sucked by a financial advisor. There’s no evidence to support this claim: indeed, the photographs appeared less than a fortnight before the show, long after Diana Hart’s involvement had been made clear on television.
Dean Ayass still remembers Smith’s entrance to this day: “The noise was literally deafening. It got to the level where all you could hear was a high-pitched constant wall of noise. My ears were ringing for hours after the show because of it.”
Perhaps surprisingly the crowd wasn’t unanimous in its support: while Smith was the overwhelming favourite, Hart had his backers, as can be heard in the duelling “Bull-dog/Hit-man” chants that broke out late in the bout. It was certainly a night for Hart to remember himself: with Smith apparently overwhelmed by the occasion (and perhaps less than level-headed for other reasons), Hart took control of the bout, putting together a classic and even creating a genuinely plausible nearfall with a German suplex towards the end.
But there could only be one winner, and when Smith scored the pinfall by countering a sunset flip to end a genuine classic, the crowd unleashed a thunderous response that continued as both Bret and Diana Hart congratulated the Bulldog and celebrated amid a barrage of fireworks.
Not all the post-match celebrations were quite so productive: both Hawk and Berzerker disappeared after the show and missed the flight back to the US, with Hawk quitting the company altogether.
When the final numbers came in, WWE officials were disappointed to discover the PPV buyrate for SummerSlam had dropped by 44 percent on the previous year. While there were several reasons for this (including Hogan’s absence, the promotion’s loss of popularity, and a rise in the PPV price), and while the live gate and merchandise made up for the loss of PPV revenue, Vince McMahon appeared to convince himself that an overseas taped event just didn’t cut it on PPV, which explains why he hasn’t repeated the exercise two decades later.
WWE certainly didn’t give up on the UK as a source of income however. It was back running live events in the country just a matter of weeks later, testing out a new strategy of Japanese style lengthy main events with clean finishes, with Flair’s title defenses against Hart and Savage pleasing the more hardcore fans of the time. The following year WWE made four UK trips, totaling an unprecedented 25 live dates in venues as diverse as Wembley Arena and the Whitley Bay Ice Rink.
Within a couple of years, however, the fad had dropped away and much of the company’s UK following went the way of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Gladiators. It wouldn’t be until the end of the decade that the next wrestling boom hit Britain and attracted a new generation of fans.
But for both the long-time follower and those whose interest peaked at Wembley Stadium, SummerSlam 92 remains an experience that will never be forgotten.
