The Old School Questions thread

[Zimbra]

When did competitive intergender  matches start to become a thing?  When I dipped out of watching wrestling in the early aughts I never really saw that outside of, like, Chyna.

[BloodyChamp]

I’m going to guess it was Japan.

ECW had them. There was some comedy relief mixed in but it was at the expense of Jason who was feuding with the women of ECW (lol!) and not the women. And they were still what I’d call competitive. Meanwhile before that there were many instances of violence towards women, women picking fights with men, and just really heavy stuff in general that you’d never seen women do in wrestling that made it “competitive” and would ultimately lead to organized intergender competition.

[Doc Townsend]

41 minutes ago, Zimbra said:

When did competitive intergender  matches start to become a thing?  When I dipped out of watching wrestling in the early aughts I never really saw that outside of, like, Chyna.

Outside of Chyna, the first time i started noticing official competitive matches between men and women wrestlers was the California indies in the mid-2000's.  Joey Ryan worked a fair number of matches against local talent including Candice LeRae.  I don't think the larger (lol) CA promotions like PWG were doing intergender matches yet, but I was attending a lot of tiny indies at the time.

I remember a couple Joey Ryan intergender matches which were really uncomfortable to watch.  A little too "realistic" even compared to what promotions do today.  He basically beat the stuffing out of a few people.  I think there was blood.  Honestly don't remember the promotion, but I'm thinking it was whatever shows Gary Yap was running at the time.  I was following a number of promotions that flew under the radar around that time (smaller, no tv, no nationwide dvd distribution, etc.)

PWG started doing intergender stuff with Joey and Candice Le Rae a short while later.  2010-ish?  They were tag team champions in 2012 so it was before that.  Around the time PWG started, I started seeing intergender matches in East Coast promotions.

I don't really remember sanctioned intergender matches in the 90's.  There was the stuff with Chyna and other promotions started pushing the envelope. but it was generally spots with male wrestlers and sorta-feuds with part-time wrestlers and managers (who presumably weren't as tough or well-trained as a full-timer). 

Edited June 6, 2020 by Doc Townsend

[Zimbra]

Thanks, Doc, that's more  what I was trying to get at.

I'm familiar with the ECW stuff but I wasn't counting it as the point didn't seem to be "these women are the equal of our male competitors" but "this guy isn't really a man"

[AxB]

There was a generation of Indie Women wrestlers who really made their names from having intergender matches, moreso than women's matches, in the early-mid 2000s. LuFisto, Mickie Knuckles, Addy Starr. And some promotions started really making intergender matches a feature, like Hoodslam and Beyond.

[DJ Hero Morganti]

Chikara also had intergender matches in the mid 2000's. Generally played as a straight contest between wrestlers.  Awesome kong vs Eddie Kingston was actually pretty good.

[DangerMark]

On 5/12/2020 at 10:21 PM, RolandTHTG said:

This is a pretty good indication of what happened to WWA...

https://amp.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/presenting-mr-mcmanus-20111222-1p728.html

That article is from 2011, so I figured I've have a look what he was up to these days. Welp.

[odessasteps]

1 hour ago, Morganti said:

Chikara also had intergender matches in the mid 2000's. Generally played as a straight contest between wrestlers.  Awesome kong vs Eddie Kingston was actually pretty good.

I think Chikara made kayfabe sense, since most of the roster was smaller where the size discrepancy was not as much of an issue as it would be in a heavyweight based company.  While Daizee Haze was tiny against someone of any gender, Sara often looked the same size in the ring of much of the roster other than say Brodie, Hero or Claudio. 
 

It probably doesn’t get bigger than Quack wrestling Manami Toyota. 

[Technico Support]

On 6/6/2020 at 11:13 AM, BloodyChamp said:

Same goes for Zenk, speaking of the Can Am Connection. He wasn’t a cruiserweight but he could hang in the old lightweight division with all of those guys. 

If 80s WWF had weight divisions, Zenk would have been considered a Light Heavyweight.  Having huge dudes up and down the card really fucked up our perception back then,  I remember thinking Bret Hart was a smaller wrestler until I saw him in person.

On 6/6/2020 at 11:53 AM, Doc Townsend said:

Outside of Chyna, the first time i started noticing official competitive matches between men and women wrestlers was the California indies in the mid-2000's.  Joey Ryan worked a fair number of matches against local talent including Candice LeRae.  I don't think the larger (lol) CA promotions like PWG were doing intergender matches yet, but I was attending a lot of tiny indies at the time.

 

PWG definitely was doing intergender, but just Joey vs Candice.  I remember feeling like they wrestled each other like 3-4 cards in a row (I definitely remember a match with the two of them where he dressed up as Andy Kaufman).

[Doc Townsend]

3 minutes ago, Technico Support said:

PWG definitely was doing intergender, but just Joey vs Candice.  I remember feeling like they wrestled each other like 3-4 cards in a row (I definitely remember a match with the two of them where he dressed up as Andy Kaufman).

I think Joey was working intergender matches in the smaller indies before he and Candice worked together in PWG.  Could be wrong, but that's the way I remember it.

I know I've seen the Chikara intergender stuff since I've got an almost complete set of Chikara shows up to the end of the BDK angle, but I remember almost nothing about those matches.

Lufisto and Mickey Knuckles were probably working competitive intergender matches around the time I was seeing intergender stuff on the West Coast, but I've managed to see very little of either woman and know practically nothing about their careers.

[Unnatural]

Speaking of Lufisto and Mickie Knuckles I remember Cheerleader Melissa also having competitive intergender matches around that time frame

This could be some Mandela Effect shit but I remember an uncomfortable match between Melissa and Super Dragon showing her toughness and intestinal fortitude and it's just brutal, assuming this match did happen and I'm not making fake memories of wrestling matches in my head.

[Doc Townsend]

13 minutes ago, Hayabusa said:

This could be some Mandela Effect shit but I remember an uncomfortable match between Melissa and Super Dragon showing her toughness and intestinal fortitude and it's just brutal, assuming this match did happen and I'm not making fake memories of wrestling matches in my head.

I forgot about that match.  It definitely happened in APW.  I went to a number of APW shows around that time, but not this one.   I do have the show on a VHS tape.

Cagematch says the date was 5-17-2003.

Here's the match.  It's on Youtube.

 

Edited June 8, 2020 by Doc Townsend

[BloodyChamp]

Can somebody explain to me how 1998 was WCW’s most profitable year? I ask this after having gotten sucked into a discussion about Starrcade 97, after having put the Sting doc in during about the 32nd hour of rain here in Fl. 

I want to say there was a write up on the old board about how WCW’s books worked and that 1998 was realistically when they started losing money but I might have imagined that. This isn’t the first time I’ve read that 1998 was the year they made the most money though.
 

What I remember about 1998 is empty seats, piped in Goldberg chants, the Warrior and Master P getting $1,000,000 without contracts, and a main event match on ppv that included technical difficulties to the point that they showed it on Nitro the next night.

And that’s not even getting into personal opinions of many people like that year having the worst ppv ever, the worst match ever, and just general boring jobber TV plus a main event with clusterfuck finishes. And Lee Marshall and that skit with the mayor they did that 1 night in that town and such in between.

Edited June 9, 2020 by BloodyChamp

[(BP)]

Creative aside, they were still doing great gates and buy rates well into 99. All of the figures from that time are suspect anyway. Bischoff has essentially admitted to using his discretion when it came to what fiscal year some stuff was reported on, so some of 97’s profits were probably reported in 98, and 98’s in 99. Once Ted Turner was a non factor after the merger, Time Warner just used the same creative accounting to make WCW (which was legitimately struggling) look as bad as possible because they didn’t want to be in the wrestling business. 

Edited June 9, 2020 by (BP)

[zendragon]

On 5/19/2020 at 8:57 PM, The Idiot King said:

What would people say are the BEST Konnan matches? Because I understand his popularity in the abstract, but I'd love to be pointed to either a really great match of his or at least a match that shows how over he was at his peak. I more or less only know him from nWo-era WCW onward and I don't remember being exactly blown away by anything of his that didn't involve Disco Inferno dancing in front of it.

I think he had a fun match with Eddy on a random Nitro

[Infinit]

10 hours ago, BloodyChamp said:

Can somebody explain to me how 1998 was WCW’s most profitable year? I ask this after having gotten sucked into a discussion about Starrcade 97, after having put the Sting doc in during about the 32nd hour of rain here in Fl. 

I want to say there was a write up on the old board about how WCW’s books worked and that 1998 was realistically when they started losing money but I might have imagined that. This isn’t the first time I’ve read that 1998 was the year they made the most money though.
 

What I remember about 1998 is empty seats, piped in Goldberg chants, the Warrior and Master P getting $1,000,000 without contracts, and a main event match on ppv that included technical difficulties to the point that they showed it on Nitro the next night.

And that’s not even getting into personal opinions of many people like that year having the worst ppv ever, the worst match ever, and just general boring jobber TV plus a main event with clusterfuck finishes. And Lee Marshall and that skit with the mayor they did that 1 night in that town and such in between.

Master P was June 1999

And pretty sure like @(BP) said 98 was a great year for ticket sales and those empty seats you remember were from 99/00. 1998 was the year the had multiple Nitros in domes.

[thee Reverend Axl Future]

I don't believe a definitive answer about how much money WCW made/lost can ever be found, due to the institutional creative bookkeeping (ex. Hogan's hidden salaries, merch payouts} and the contradictory (depending on who or what is paying them to say it) lies told by those involved over the years ( hello, Mr. Bischoff).. Related, for years people argues about how successful ECW was in money terms, and it seems apparent decades later that it mever truly generated a profit. 

money changes everything,

RAF

[Death From Above]

I still can't really process how a wrestling promotion lost $60 million in a year. That's $5 million a month.  That means in a 30-day month they lost an average of $166 666.67 a day.

How

[Wyld Samurai]

2 hours ago, Death From Above said:

I still can't really process how a wrestling promotion lost $60 million in a year. That's $5 million a month.  That means in a 30-day month they lost an average of $166 666.67 a day.

How

I blame the goddamn Red Rooster.

[BloodyChamp]

There were definitely empty seats in 1998. There were shows like the Georgia Dome show yes but those came at such a bigger cost than usual and the ones that actually made a night out of it weren’t built upon towards anything else. It does take a long time to start losing money in a business that has been making so much though. That’s what makes it an even bigger shame. They could have took all the warning signs and never lost a penny.

[Infinit]

WCW also started Thunder in 98. I'm sure a second tv show helped the bottom line.

[Wyld Samurai]

4 hours ago, Infinit said:

WCW also started Thunder in 98. I'm sure a second tv show helped the bottom line.

Everyone associated with WCW has gone on record saying Thunder was the catalyst that led to their downfall.

Edited June 10, 2020 by Wyld Samurai

[PetrolCB]

12 minutes ago, Wyld Samurai said:

Everyone associated with WCW has gone on record saying Thunder was the catalyst that led to their downfall.

So, it was the thunder before the storm?

[Technico Support]

18 hours ago, thee Reverend Axl Future said:

 Related, for years people argues about how successful ECW was in money terms, and it seems apparent decades later that it mever truly generated a profit. 

 

It reminds me of the advice given to actors and creative people in Hollywood: if you're offered points on a film, take a piece of the gross, not the "net after we've made a profit."  Because there are studio accountants who will swear Titanic never made a dollar.

 

Edited June 10, 2020 by Technico Support

[Infinit]

13 hours ago, Wyld Samurai said:

Everyone associated with WCW has gone on record saying Thunder was the catalyst that led to their downfall.

I'm not talking about the company's downfall. I'm talking about how 50 more TV's probably helped make 1998 WCW's best year financially.