Blampied Adam - What Culture Wrestling

WHAT CULTURE WRESTLING

WHAT CULTURE WRESTLING

ISSUE ONE

Copyright WhatCulture Ltd. 2016. All Rights Reserved.

Published by WhatCulture.com

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in any part, in any form, without written permission from the publisher or author.

Contents

With the annual Super Bowl of professional wrestling, er, sports entertainment, having just concluded, I thought it was high-time to launch an updated version of Franchises Forum, which was last published in the ECW Magazine nearly two decades ago. For the ignorant and unwashed non-disciples of professional wrestling, my name is The Franchise Shane Douglas, and I am a former three-time ECW World Heavyweight Champion. I trust that if youre reading this fantastic new magazine, What Culture Wrestling, you certainly know who I am, so I wont bore you with a long-winded overview of my career. Trust me, my insights will educate you AND entertain you, so lets get started...

WrestleMania, the annual worldwide phenomena is professional wrestlings equivalent to the mega-events of other sports, like the NFLs Super Bowl and MLBs World Series. Every spring, it commands a worldwide audience that watches, these days I believe, only because it is now a tradition. But that is not how WrestleMania started, and it sure as hell isnt how its achieved its worldwide cult status! No, these annual events showcasing athletes in boots and tightsand yes Vince, in a wrestling ringhad a much more entertaining birth on March 31, 1985. It was held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. On that momentous day, third generation promoter Vincent K. McMahon, owner of the World Wrestling Federation (WWFnow WWE), launched his answer to Jim Crockett Promotions largely successful annual Starrcade event. It was meant to be a reflection of VKMs sports entertainment approach to wrestling, although that phrase had yet to be created. McMahon believed that the natural progression of wrestling needed a kick in the arse.

He would use WrestleMania to begin morphing professional wrestling into the sports entertainment style he envisioned. His first step was to book (wrestling parlance meaning to hire) several mainstream celebrities, including boxing legend Muhammad Ali, piano virtuoso Liberace, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun singer and MTV star Cyndi Lauper, and TVs Mr. T, who played Clubber Lang in Rocky III (which, coincidentally, also starred WWF icon-to-be Hulk Hogan) and star of the hit TV show The A-Team. These celebs, and others, would be interspersed into this eccentric show, with the hope that they would inspire non-wrestling fans to tune in to see how these stars would fare with VKMs cadre of wrestling behemoths. McMahon had mortgaged his entire company, along with all of his personal belongings to make this inaugural event a reality. And if youre the type who believes dressing room rumours, legend holds that McMahon had fallen over three weeks behind in his wrestlers pay checks and that he even had to borrow a seven-figure sum from the Friends of Tony Soprano Bank. Rumours aside, had WrestleMania been a failure, financially or otherwise, the WWF would be nothing more than a footnote in wrestling history.

So, MSG, to Vince McMahon on that night, must have felt like a pressure cooker. Everything was riding on this one event! As lore would later record, WrestleMania drew a live attendance of 19,121 fans and had an additional one million viewers via closed-circuit TV locations around the U.S., making it a financial success and launching the franchise (no pun intended) now known around the world. Id like to add one small footnote to my comments. Ive mentioned some of the rumours that have circulated wrestling dressing rooms for the past thirty-two years. Now, Id like to add what is universally regarded by insiders as the reason for the success of that inaugural event. With so much riding on that first show, there was NO room for any missteps. Failure was not an option! Remember the Bank that rumour holds had graciously lent McMahon mucho dinero? Well, it doesnt take a Dean (I hear the smart marks snickering!) to figure out what would have happened had that loan not been repaid.

Cmon, most of us have seen Scarface, right? Luckily, the promotion had an ace up their sleeveRowdy Roddy Piper- the most beloved heel in wrestling history! It was Pipers actions, promos, and pre-event hype that is widely regarded, certainly within the wrestling community, as the reason for the success of WrestleMania. As someone who made a pretty damned good living in the post-WrestleMania wrestling industry, I want to thank my dear friend for what he did to make that event successful. Indeed, WrestleMania was the beginning of the rising tide that made professional wrestling the cultural phenomena it became, and that success allowed quite a few Shane Douglases to live out their life-long dreams of being professional wrestlers. Thank you and RIP, Roderick Toombs, my friend. The biz is already feeling your loss!

WrestleMania III, which set an indoor record for its gate of 93,173 in attendance, is to me the event that made WrestleMania cool. Raking in nearly $17 million, it was at this record-setting show that we saw truly iconic and legendary matchups in the main and semi-main events. It is difficult to imagine future WMs without the types of bouts we witnessed at WM IIIHulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant and Randy Macho Man Savage vs Ricky the Dragon Steamboat. The former was the culmination of an amazing career by Andre, whod been billed as undefeated in his past fifteen years in the WWF. To us insiders, it was an incredibly gracious gesture by Andre who, on a shoot (wrestling term for real) could NOT be beaten unless he allowed it. Period!

The latter match mentioned, Savage vs Steamboat, is still regarded as possibly the greatest pure wrestling match in WM history. If you have never seen it, or if its been a while since youve watched it, do yourself a favour and go back and watch it today. You will not be disappointed! That classic is as fresh today as it was on March 29, 1987, twenty-nine years ago. Amazing! And as before, Id like to throw in a very sincere thank you to my friend and former tag-team partner, Richard Blood Ricky Steamboat. I had the great fortune of being partnered with Ricky in 1992-93. Although every wrestling fan knows of Steamboats prowess in the squared circle, every wrestler whos ever wrestled with, or against, Steamer knows he is one of the best teachers in the business. I credit him with helping transform a young, white-meat babyface named Shane Douglas, into a main event wrestler, capable of heading a card and a company. Remember all those Franchise ECW moments just a few years later? Credit (or blame) Steamboat! Thank you, my friend!

Obviously, there are now thirty-two Manias that I could comment on, and Ive mentioned two that left an indelible mark on the wrestling industry. But with the very limited space I have for this column, I want to discuss the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of WrestleMania 32. First up, the Good: From a purely financial standpoint, WM 32 certainly qualifies as a good, no great from WWEs aspect. With a live attendance of 97,769 (again, sorry Vinny!) and boasting revenues in excess of $17.4 million, WM 32 has set new records on both of those critically important facets. As of this writing, I am still waiting to hear of total viewer numbers, on both the WWE network and on PPV, but I have little doubt they will be equally impressive. Congrats WWE!

Now the Bad: Unlike the earlier WMs I discussed, with their now-legendary matchups, WM 32 pales in comparison marquee-wise. Simply stated, no bench! Booooo, WWE! And that brings us to the Ugly: In the spirit of fair reporting, WWE had to contend with an astounding number of serious injuries for WM 32. But in his April 3 article, Card Subject to Change, on espn.go.com, David Shoemaker discussed the litany of injuries plaguing the WWE roster. For brevitys sake, his entire article can be summed up in one quote from his article: WWE has tried to paint WM 32 as a megacard, but it seems as if the talent left off the match line-up could sell more tickets than the one currently on it. OUCH WWE! Cmon Vince, this is WrestleMania! In a call last month to investors, VKM said he would deal with the injury problem by being creative. Depending on your perspective, how effective VKMs creativity was must surely be relative. If youre one of WWEs bean counters, youve been smiling since WrestleMania.