Of all the differences in Transatlantic culture, perhaps the strangest to British eyes is that citizens of the United States often eat ham (in other words, gammon) for Christmas Day lunch. That’s because turkey is the centrepiece of the dining table when families gather for a celebratory meal on the last Thursday of November, known as Thanksgiving. With many people also taking the following day off work and hitting the shops for sales marking the start of the Christmas shopping season, it’s arguable Thanksgiving is a much a major occasion as Christmas itself.
On both days, once the table is cleared, families traditionally look for entertainment: on Thanksgiving it’s usually either NFL or college football, while on Christmas it’s whatever it takes to take your mind off the return to work the following day (there’s no Boxing Day holiday in the US.)
But for much of the 1960s through 1980s, that post-gluttony entertainment often came in the form of live professional wrestling. Nearly every regional promotion held major shows on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas night, establishing a tradition and building up major matches that appealed to fans who didn’t make a regular habit of attending live events. Thanksgiving in particular worked well for promoters: they generally didn’t run major weekly venues on a Thursday, so could book the extra show without disrupting their regular schedule. In some cases these events weren’t just a collection of big matches: they were turning points in the history of the business.
For wrestlers of the era, holiday shows meant a bumper payday that came at a price: gift exchanges and dinners would either be held early in the day or skipped completely with wrestlers rushing off to the arena rather than relaxing with families. To give just one example, Ric Flair worked at least one show on every Christmas Day from 1976 through 1990, sometimes working an afternoon show as well.
When he was lucky these dates would be in his home territory, but as NWA world champion he could be booked anywhere in the country, meaning family meals were out of the question with the need to catch an early flight. And there was little celebration after the main event concluded: “Everyone else on the card had left, so you were the only one there. You showered, got dressed, walked into an empty parking lot, started your rental car, and either went back to the hotel or the next town.”
Three such appearances came in Dallas where, in 1981, then-World Class booker Gary Hart had tested a theory that running occasional “supercards” could draw a larger crowd. In his autobiography My Life In Wrestling he noted “we had to inspire our casual [television viewer] fans to want to see us live. With that in mind, I felt that if I promoted a big show properly, I could get these fans to see us in a building like Texas Stadium or Reunion Arena a few times a year.”
Initial experiments bore that theory out, with the $50,000 gate more than three times the usual level. At first the plan was to simply hold one such “Star Wars” show every three months, but after a hugely successful show on Christmas Night 1982 (in which Ric Flair beat Kerry Von Erich after referee Michael Hayes slammed a door on Von Erich’s head, kicking off the Freebirds-Von Erich feud), the promotion decided to also run the big arena events on four public holidays: Thanksgiving and Christmas, plus Independence Day and Labor Day (a September holiday somewhat equivalent to the British May Day.)
Between the various title challenges of the Von Erich brothers to World champions Flair and Harley Race, and the ongoing feud with the Freebirds, the holiday events were major draws for several years. However, after the deaths of David and Mike Von Erich and a gradual loss of top-tier talent, the promotion began slumping until the final Star Wars show on Christmas 1987 drew just 2,623, a crowd that wouldn’t have filled the weekly Sportatorium venue, let alone the 18,000 seat Reunion Arena.
It was Jim Crockett’s promotion that was the true king of the holiday show, however. While the Mid-Atlantic territory always rejigged its schedule to hold cards in Charlotte, North Carolina and Greenville, South Carolina on Christmas Day, with the former show a fundraiser for the city’s “Empty Stocking Fund” appeal to provide presents for impoverished children, it was Thanksgiving that was the promotion’s biggest night of the year.
Having ironically run the first of its fortnightly Greensboro Coliseum shows on Thanksgiving Night 1961, the promotion held a special event at the building every Turkey Day for the next 25 years, the longest such unbroken run. (The AWA ran every Thanksgiving night from 1960-87 save for a year off in 1972.) It soon became anticipated as the biggest show of the year, with a Funks vs Briscos bout in 1972 and Ric Flair’s battles with Blackjack Mulligan in 1978, Ole Anderson in 1981 and Roddy Piper in 1982 each in turn setting a new building attendance record.
In 1983, the Thanksgiving show would be more than just another big card: it would be a major step towards the pay-per-view era. Earlier in the year, a Greensboro bout featuring Ricky Steamboat and Jay Youngblood vowing to never team again if they couldn’t win the tag titles from Sgt Slaughter and Don Kernodle not only sold out the Coliseum but saw an estimated 6,000 fans turned away at the door and caused a major traffic jam.
That led Crockett to believe that the right angle and matches could draw interest across the territory at a level that exceeded a single arena’s capacity, making closed circuit — in which the shows were beamed live to paying audiences at cinemas or in arenas fitted with giant screens — a viable option. While both the WWF and Los Angeles promotions had regularly used a theatre to accommodate overspill crowds from Madison Square Garden and the Olympic Auditorium respectively, the idea of airing a single card in multiple venues was a new one. The closest thing had been the 1976 Muhammad Ali vs Antonio Inoki bout from Tokyo which had been beamed to venues across the US, with each arena holding its own matches as a “live” undercard.
To build up the show, dubbed Starrcade, the promotion switched the world title from Flair to Race before having Race put a bounty on Flair’s head, collected by Bob Orton and Dick Slater. Flair came back from what was billed as a career-ending injury and challenged Race in the main event of the Thanksgiving show, with support from a Greg Valentine vs Roddy Piper dog-collar bout and a tag title match pitting Steamboat and Youngblood against the Briscos.
The show went off as planned, despite Vince McMahon offering Harley Race $250,000 to no-show and jump to the WWF without notice but with the title. Race noted that McMahon didn’t take his refusal well: “…without saying a word, he pivoted his foot and swung around to face me, then dove at my legs in an attempt to take me down.” While Race easily fought off that attack, it wouldn’t be the last such sabotage attempt against Crockett.
As well airing in most of the regular venues across the Mid-Atlantic territory, Starrcade 83 was also broadcast in Puerto Rico, explaining the inclusion of a Carlos Colon-Abdullah the Butcher undercard match. The show again sold out the Greensboro Coliseum and attracted somewhere in the region of 30,000 additional viewers on closed circuit (including 12,000 at Flair’s “home venue” in Charlotte), making it by far the biggest audience ever to pay to see a single event. It also drew a total of $650,000 in ticket sales, again destroying all records.
Despite the fact that the hype led to a significant drop in the next few “ordinary” shows at the Coliseum, it was clear that the days of fans in the building being the main way to make money from a show would eventually be over. Within 16 months Vince McMahon was taking the first WrestleMania nationwide on closed circuit before first adding before turning his attention to cable TV audience via pay-per-view.
Starrcade remained on closed-circuit, returning to Greensboro for the next three years: the 1985 and 1986 events were on a split-venue basis with bouts also held in Atlanta, now part of an expanded Crockett territory. The added exposure, including home video releases, meant some of the bouts from this era have become legendary, most notably a brutal Magnum TA-Tully Blanchard “I Quit” cage match and a scaffold match pitting the Road Warriors and the Midnight Express, memorably built up in vignettes where Hawk and Animal dropped watermelons from the scaffold to show the potential risk to their opponents. In the event it was Midnights manager Jim Cornette who took the most damaging drop: with bodyguard Bubba Rogers (later the Big Bossman) failing to catch him, Cornette blew out his knee. He did at least get some consolation in a $10,000 payoff for the bout, compared with just $150 for a house show two days earlier.
In 1987, Crockett was facing serious financial problems: wage bills were rising as he felt forced to offer lucrative guaranteed contracts to keep key performers from jumping to the WWF, while ad revenue was on the decline after TV ratings fell off a cliff towards the end of the year, a pattern blamed (fairly or otherwise) on the decision to give Ronnie Garvin a title run.
Ironically Garvin had only been given the belt to set up the main event of Starrcade which Crockett had decided to make his first pay-per-view event, attempting to follow the successes of the WWF in the same field. Vince McMahon had other ideas.
The WWF countered by announcing its own PPV event for the same date, the first ever Survivor Series, featuring a series of five-on-five elimination matches. At first that didn’t appear a problem for Crockett: he rescheduled Starrcade for the afternoon rather than the evening, with cable operators preparing to offer a double-header package for fans who couldn’t get enough Turkey Day grappling.
However, McMahon responded by demanding that cable companies carry no other wrestling events in the 60 days before or 21 days after a WWF PPV. Unwilling to risk the golden payday of WrestleMania for the unproven NWA shows, all but a handful of the 400+ cable companies complied with the ultimatum. Crockett was forced to rely on closed circuit revenue, taking in $1.3 million for the night when he’d expected to get as much as $10 million. The night is widely cited as one of the final financial blows that led to Crockett selling the promotion to Ted Turner the following year.
To make things worse, a decision to move the show to Chicago to appear more major-league not only failed to pay off at the box office, with a crowd of just 8,000, but was seen as an insult by fans back in the Carolinas.
The battle was far from over. Crockett had another attempt at PPV with the Bunkhouse Stampede two months later, only for the WWF to air the first televised Royal Rumble on the USA Network the same night. Crockett had his revenge the following April when the first Clash of the Champions on TBS went head-to-head with WrestleMania IV, likely contributing to a near-40% drop in PPV buys from the previous year. The two groups had one more head-to-head clash with WrestleMania V and Clash of the Champions VI the following April, but were otherwise persuaded by cable operators to avoid the mutual sabotage.
Enforced truce or not, Crockett wasn’t taking any chances with Starrcade in 1988, moving the event to December where it remained until the closure of WCW in 2000. That left Survivor Series free to become the new “Thanksgiving Tradition” over the next three years. In 1991 WWF moved the show to Thanksgiving Eve, most likely to allow an extra day’s gap in an experiment that saw Undertaker win the title from Hulk Hogan in a controversial match, setting up another pay-per-view, dubbed Tuesday in Texas, just six days later. It was a test to see whether a hot angle could bring back a paying audience so quickly, which proved a failure when the latter show did less than half the business of the former. Survivor Series remained on Thanksgiving Eve for another three years before moving to the traditional Sunday PPV slot in 1995 and eventually losing any connection to Thanksgiving.
In the territorial days and during the national expansion of the 1980s and 1990s, the WWF lacked a real Christmas wrestling tradition. It held arena shows on Christmas Day until 1986, but not in a regular venue. Since then its policy has been to take a Christmas break, going back on the road from the 26th.
However, in 2003 the company began a new Christmas tradition when John “Bradshaw” Layfield successfully lobbied Vince McMahon to run a special live event at a US army base in Baghdad, dubbed Tribute to the Troops. This became an annual event with trips to either Iraq or Afghanistan, filling the timeslot of either Raw or Smackdown in the episode closest to Christmas Day.
The events initially took place in an outdoor setting at a military facility, with appearances from both Raw and Smackdown performers, usually working a more laid-back, house show entertainment style than the traditional TV produce: a highlight of the first event was Steve Austin hitting the Stone Cold Stunner on Vince McMahon while disguised as Santa Claus. Despite tight security, the events were genuinely taking place in a war zone, as highlighted in 2006 when the Camp Victory location was hit by a mortar the day before the WWE show, leading Michael Cole to make a one-night return to his former career as a news reporter. The following year, Layfield told the Baltimore Sun that the landing had not gone to plan. “We thought we were landing in a secured base and we weren’t. We were landing in an unsecured area and actually had to get through town to get to where the small secured area was. When we landed, there were Iraqis everywhere – on rooftops all around us. And there were dead dogs everywhere.”
Because of this danger, as well as the disruption of the lengthy flights and time away from home, participation in the events has officially been entirely voluntary. However, Rob Van Dam’s decision to decline an invitation to the 2006 show reportedly did not sit well with management.
From 2008 the show was switched to NBC, apparently in order to fill a contractual obligation for slots originally earmarked for the revived Saturday Night’s Main Event. The move proved a smart decision for WWE as it was able to fill the slots without having to worry about achieving the type of ratings expected on a network station: TV bosses could hardly be seen to complain about the performance of such a patriotic and genuinely philanthropic show – albeit it one WWE was never slow to brag about.
With US troops having handed over control of Iraq and begun a pullout, and Afghanistan simply too dangerous to visit, the 2010 edition was moved to a military base in Fort Hood, Texas. This year’s show is scheduled for the Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the first at a regular arena. Ironically the nearby military base of Fort Bragg played host to WCW’s Clash of the Champions VII, an event noted for a blistering reaction from a crowd made up of military personnel taking full advantage of some downtime.
Today wrestling on Thanksgiving and Christmas seems a ridiculous proposition: where once promoters believed it was the best opportunity to draw a live crowd, the declining numbers of wrestling fans and the sheer wealth of entertainment options available means it would likely be tricky to draw normal crowd levels in a venue, let alone have the biggest gates of the year. But for a significant part of wrestling’s history, the holidays were a chance for wrestlers and promoters alike to mark the occasion with a financial celebration.
