10 Biggest Promotion Killers In Wrestling History
Burning vast piles of cash. On a pole.
No one man put the sword to Paul Heyman's renegade ECW league when the walls finally collapsed in 2001.
ECW died because, as owner Paul Heyman recounted, "it was too small to be big, and too big to be small". Its biggest stars departed for more lucrative shores, just as the liabilities it accrued were growing. Its unique style (albeit one inspired by Japan's Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling) had been co-opted by the WWF, and later WCW, in their attempts to capture the wider zeitgeist. It was no longer the cool kid on the playground. Heyman was a booking genius, in his pomp, but he didn't have a mind for finance.
It was a slow death, with no conclusive cause.
Conversely, the deaths (clinical or forecasted) of other promotions can often be traced to one individual or incomprehensibly wrongheaded business decision. Wrestling is a business sustained, almost entirely, by ego. But the great tragedy of it - as opposed to the many sub-tragedies which have befallen it over the years - is that those who hold the financial cards often have no idea what a royal flush looks like...
10. Motoko Baba
The death of Shohei 'Giant' Baba had earth-shaking ramifications on the puroresu landscape. The company he co-founded, All Japan Pro Wrestling, the most acclaimed in the history of the sport, was bequeathed to his widow Motoko. Motoko's nickname was Dragon Lady - an oddly polite burial, if there ever was one.
The promotion's top star, Mitsuharu Misawa, had been handpicked by Baba, in the year prior to his death, as his booking successor. Motoko, however, despite herself grooming Misawa, elected to hand the presidential reins over to Mitsuo Momota. It was a decision which didn't so much polarise the locker room, of which Misawa was its leader, as alienate it altogether.
Motoko eventually relented, at the behest of the man Misawa had supplanted as company Ace - Jumbo Tsuruta. Misawa was installed as president, but the masking tape plastered over the relationship frayed. Misawa's ambitions were greater than Motoko's, who, wary that the company's television presence had been scaled back, wished to preserve the status quo.
Her lack of ambition would become drenched in irony. That status quo was destroyed forever when Misawa struck a clandestine agreement with NTV, the televised home of Japanese wrestling. All Japan's TV show was no more. Of the 28 full-time AJPW stars, 26 followed Misawa to his new Pro Wrestling NOAH promotion (surely the best-named wrestling league ever).
All Japan remains in existence today, but in a depressing state. If not dead, it has been moribund for years.