In the age of YouTube and Twitter, it only takes a moment to share or search for even the most obscure wrestling clip. But before the Internet age, there was a time when some truly amazing or notable events took place yet few fans ever saw them. Those who did would often be left with no easy way to review the footage or confirm that vague childhood memories really were accurate.
These are not the greatest moments in wrestling history – some are among the worst – but they are moments and incidents that should not be lost to obscurity.
The Hulk Helmet
The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon by which people vividly remember something that never happened (such as Nelson Mandela dying in prison.) Hulk Hogan’s helmet was quite the opposite: in the days before it was easy to find footage online, many fans remembered it but assumed it was simply a figment of their imagination.
Officially calling it his “War Bonnet”, in late 1988 Hogan began wearing a gladiator-style helmet with a fist on top of it at house shows. At some points he even wore it during the matches and used the fist to add extra power to headbutts. It doesn’t appear to have been addressed on any of the main WWF weekly programming, explaining why so many doubted the recollections.
Exactly why Hogan donned the gear was never confirmed, but the most common assumption is WWF hoped to establish the headwear and then introduce a new line of replica merchandise. Whether deterred by the thought of children buying something billed as a weapon or just how plain weird it was, that never happened and Hulk put his helmet away.
A Missed Chance
In the days before social media and streaming, the ECWA’s annual Super 8 tournament was one of the key places regional independent wrestlers could make a national name. Names like Christopher Daniels, Paul London and Low Ki were among early winners, with Xavier Woods, Matt ‘Son of Havoc’ Cross and Tomasso Ciampa also building on their success.
That wasn’t the case with 2003 contender Chance Beckett, who entered the tournament with little buzz outside his home promotion ECCW in Western Canada. In one night he took on Sedrick Strong (storyline brother of Roderick), Spanky (aka Bryan Kendrick) and Paul London in a true starmaking performance. Not only were his in-ring credentials on show but, in a setting built around “respect and sportsmanship” he pulled off a heel persona simply by the way he carried himself to the ring.
But save for a single Ring of Honor appearance a couple of months later, Beckett effectively vanished from the US scene. Two years later he was out of wrestling altogether, cementing himself as the great “What If?” of the 2000s.
Satellite Wrestling
Despite the name, most viewers of this mid-80s British show on Screensport watched it via cable television, giving it a significantly limited audience. Much of the show was conventional enough with Max Beesley (father of the famous actor) commentating on matches from Stoke’s Victoria Hall. Wrestlers from the All Star promotion worked traditional matches, albeit with the likes of Mark Rocco and Kung Fu taking full advantage of the looser broadcasting restrictions of cable to use weapons, swearing and blood. The real obscurity came from the fact that at seemingly random points between matches, the show cut to American footage including Madison Square Garden bouts, musical montage videos of Buddy Landell and even a Magnum TA-Wahoo McDaniel cage match.
Ron’s Championship Wrestling
Named after co-host and former local legend Ron Wright, this low-budget independent operated in East Tennessee around 2002-3. While its TV show occasionally featured matches from the promotion’s tapings, the real charm came from the relentless padding with seemingly random clips from 1970s Knoxville and even Smoky Mountain content, along with Wright spending minutes on end effectively begging local schools to hire his promotion for a fundraiser or promoting a Christmas charity show “for the keeeeeeeeeds.” Within the year the promotion was rebranded Tennessee Mountain Wrestling and it appears Ron had left the building.
Shammy Sammy
During the heyday of the Rock ‘n’ Wrestling Connection, the WWF was always keen to highlight celebrities attending their shows, whether hired for the occasion or buying tickets in their own right. By May 1986, it wasn’t that much of a surprise at a Madison Square Garden show when Howard Finkel invited Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar into the ring to address the crowd.
After struggling under the bottom rope, Hagar simply said “Hey New York, how’s it going?” then shook hands with wrestler Paul Christy and departed while commentators Gorilla Monsoon and Al Hayes acknowledged his talents.
What made this celebrity appearance truly remarkable is that the man in question was most definitely not Sammy Hagar. Speaking with what appeared to be a British accent, he looked more like Dana Carvey doing an impression of himself. Nobody knows what really happened here but it appears he was a man on a mission who gave WWF officials the runaround, got in and out and was on top of the world until he discovered that, right now, the dream is over.
They’ll Buy Anything
As the American wrestling craze collided with the VHS era in the UK, fans had plenty of tapes to choose from beyond the official WWF, WCW and ECW releases. Some were worthy such as Kings of the Square Ring, a martial arts compilation packed with clips of Antonio Inoki’s battles with the likes of Everett ‘Monster Man’ Eddy, Bob Backlund and Antonio Inoki. Other were not really worth the money, such as Fighting Fit with Roddy Piper, a health and self-defence title missold on the promise of what turned out to be frustratingly brief clips of his battle with Hulk Hogan on MTV’s The War To Settle The Score.
But perhaps the most obscure was the catchily-named Super Star U.S.A. Championship Wrestling, which offered no details on the cover beyond a list of surnames in capital letters. They turned out to simply contain matches (mainly squashes) from Mid Atlantic’s television show in 1983. Rather than complete episodes including promos, they appeared instead to be random matches with at least one volume being master footage before any commentary had been added.
Who’s The Boss?
WWE has had far too many authority figure storylines over the years, but this one offered onion layers of obscurity. By 2003, Sunday Night Heat on MTV had fallen from a high-profile WWE show to a RAW recap with a couple of taped matches. Over the course of a couple of months that summer, Stevie Richards held the reigns as General Manager of a show he quickly rebranded as Stevie Night Heat, engaging in a host of storylines with performers who could charitably be described as midcarders.
On television, the storyline was that Richards was a self-appointed GM with no real authority. This was also the case in reality: with WWE producing so much programming, upper management didn’t have the time to watch the show, let alone write it. Richards had simply taken it upon himself to improvise segments which the show’s writers gratefully used to fill time.
According to Al Snow, the storyline came to an end one day when Stephanie McMahon happened to walk past as a Stevie Night Heat skit was being shot and expressed her genuine surprise that he held the GM role. That brought a swift end to his reign in “management”.
Six Of The Weirdest
From 1990 to 1992 the SWS promotion in Japan, funded by the country’s largest spectacles manufacturer, spent big bringing in domestic stars Genichiro Tenyru and Yoshiaki Yatsu as well as partnering with the WWF for Tokyo Dome shows that included Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage and the Legion of Doom. After an economic downturn saw the funding pulled, Tenyru launched his own group, the wonderfully named Wrestling and Romance (WAR).
Without much of a budget, it was very much a case of getting whoever was available and affordable, a tactic stretched by the promotion’s liking for its six-man tag championship and multiple tournaments. This led to some of the strangest, random-seeming partnerships and matchups in wrestling history. The first title change involved the plausible enough stable of Gedo, Jado and Hiromichi Fuyuki against the unlikely trio of the Warlord, Bob Backlund and Scott Putski.
Meanwhile a later tournament included Warlord teaming with Vampiro and ‘Lionheart’ Chris Jericho, the trio of Ashura Hara, Jinsei Shinaki (WWF’s Hakushi) and John ‘Earthquake’ Tenta, and the ultimate winners of Tenyru, FMW’s Atsushi Onita and Bam Bam Bigelow.
I Beg Your Pardon
Herb Abrams made the news on several occasions before and after his run as promoter of the short-lived UWF (no connection to the Bill Watts promotion of the same name). At a press conference announcing the group, he reportedly revealed that Blackjack Mulligan would be his booker and Bruiser Brody his top star. The former seemed unlikely given Mulligan was in prison at the time; the latter even more so given Brody’s death two years earlier.
Abrams’ death was also memorable: he died of a heart attack in police custody after offers found him in his office with several ladies of the night. At this point Abrams was naked, covered in what was believed to be Vaseline and several clumps of cocaine, and was busy smashing up furniture with a baseball bat.
Yet Abrams most celebrated obscure moment came at the the Blackjack Brawl, a UWF show broadcast live on cable television and the promotion’s final event. The moment does not take place on surviving footage of the television broadcast – only adding to its obscurity – but wrestling folklore says the atrocious card’s oddest point came when Abrams grabbed the house microphone and, without explanation, shouted “Let’s hear it for the Jews!”
Nothing To Hide
Anyone who’s been around the world of wrestling will be aware of a seedly sideline in which performers of both genders wrestle in regular ring gear but for what can only be described as a specialised audience. The matches don’t resemble traditional pro wrestling but instead concentrate on highly sexualised positioning.
The NWWL was completely different. Hosted by Carmen Electra, it held a series of pay-per-view events in which female performers worked perfectly normal matches with traditional holds and moves and entertainingly wacky characters and storylines.
Oh, except that they were buck naked.
No Second Viewing
In 1991, instant replay had become a hugely controversial topic in NFL football after a study showing only one in eight reviews led to an overturned decision. The practice was ditched by the league, not to return for eight years.
Capitalising on the controversy, the WWF announced it would hold a debate during WrestleMania VII on whether to adopt instant replay in wrestling. As far as British fans were concerned, it never happened: the debate was absent from the UK broadcast of the show and was similarly missing from the video release. Later appearances of the show on DVD and WWE Network were also debate-free.
However, the debate did indeed air, during the then-traditional interval in the middle of WrestleMania when home viewers would usually see nothing but a countdown clock for five or 10 minutes during the middle of the broadcast while those in the arena stretched their legs.
It’s understandable this particular interval was also edited out of the UK broadcast and home video footage: the debate skit was an atrociously long failed attempt at comedy in which NFL analyst Paul Maguire and baseball team owner George Steinbrenner exchanged poorly delivered and badly written one-liners, winding up in the debate itself being subjected to an instant replay review by the Bushwhackers in NFL referee gear.
(Japan’s DDT group also capitalised on instant replay controversy during the 2018 World Cup with a match in which pinfalls were subject to a VAR review to catch alleged cheating.)
Say What You See
In 1993 WWF experimented with a new feature to make attending television tapings more appealing: guest ring announcers chosen from the crowd. Most participants proved just how good a professional announcer really is, but none more that a young child named JB Yetter. Introducing jobber Mike Bucci – the future Nova and Simon Dean – Yetter came across an unfamiliar expression and as children normally do, tried to bluff his way through with a phonetic approach. Given his age, the fault lies less with him and more with WWF for actually airing his announcement that Bucci was “weighing in at 220 lebs.”
Slaughter the Enforcer
After a terrible summer of 1992 at the box office, WWF experimented with a new approach: sports-like pro wrestling. After a series of lengthy no-gimmick, no-rulebreaking main events on a European tour with Ric Flair against Randy Savage and Bret Hart, the “Hitman” took the title and was promoted as a “fighting champion” taking on heels and babyfaces alike across the WWF’s television output.
Less well-remembered is an attempt to establish the new policy on television by appointing Sgt Slaughter as a special enforcer and having referees take the unconventional approach of actually making wrestlers follow the rules. It even led to a couple of upsets with jobbers Jason Phillips and Jim Powers beating the Nasty Boys by disqualification after the heels refused to pin their opponents, instead choosing to inflict more punishment. Meanwhile Rick Martel was also disqualified against Max Moon simply for holding the tights during a pin attempt. The approach was quickly dropped when bookers realised it made most Western-style wrestling booking near impossible.
Set In Stone
The previous year, Slaughter had another memorable moment during a storyline in which he renounced his support for the Iraqi government and attempted to regain trust as a patriot, visiting a series of American landmarks. In one skit he was filmed at the Arlington National Cemetery where, in what was either an insider joke or the most amazing coincidence ever, he was filmed in front of a tombstone of a soldier sharing a name with former WWF champion Pedro Morales.
Johnny Cougar
Back in the 1960s and 70s, the weekly Tiger comic included a regular strip featuring the fictional Native American wrestler Johnny Cougar. A new generation got to enjoy his adventures in the mid-1990s with a monthly magazine reprinting the strips along with puzzles and pictures of WCW stars of the day.
Like most such strips, the stories were largely variations on a theme, with Cougar travelling across the North America, getting into scrapes, and coming from behind to win matches, often in unusual settings. Highlights included an actual lumberjack match at a logging camp, the time an injured Cougar outwitted his opponent by taping up the healthy knee to misdirect his attacks, and some truly unforgettable dialogue such as the time he monkey-flipped a mechanic whilst exclaiming “Now you going to get… Flat Battery!”
Sunday Is Funday
WCW broadcasts on ITV had an inconsistent schedule in the late 80s and early 90s to say the least, with both the programming and timeslot varying from region to region. In 1992 LWT, which served viewers in London, aired WCW Worldwide in the early hours of Sunday morning. However, it hadn’t forgotten about young fans who couldn’t stay up late or access a video recorder.
Sunday afternoons featured the magnificent Sharp’s Funday, a short slot in which Pat Sharp – at the height of his mulleted fame – sat in a primitive CGI house and introduced an episode of the animated Batman series followed by one match from that week’s Worldwide.
Bodyguards and Bandits
Taking the phrase “one match card” literally, this is likely the least-purchased pay-per-view and may well have had more people watching in person than on TV. Held in the Dallas Sportatorium in 1996, long after the venue’s glory days, it appeared to mainly be a way to promote sponsor Dom Minoldi, whose bodyguard business gave the show its name. The only televised bout was a six-a-side American football-themed match held over four quarters and with varying points scores for pins, submissions, disqualifications and countouts. To the shock of nobody, the match went into overtime and Minoldi scored the winning “touchdown” pin.
