10 Incredible Wrestling FIRSTS You Didn't Know About
Triple H took over the WWE main roster in 2022 - but he wasn't the first to replace Vince McMahon...
The next new "First" feels a long, long way away.
Wrestling in 2023 peaks very high but is almost defined by excess and a lack of new, revolutionary ideas.
Ladder matches are a near-monthly occurrence, and that's just in WWE. The last great gimmick match, Money In The Bank, was pioneered all the way back in 2005. Anarchy In The Arena might enter that classic pantheon, but its antecedent, Stadium Stampede, was only charming as a one-off.
WWE still uses the Vince Russo TV format of authority figures reacting to show-opening promo trains or backstage arguments filmed by an invisible camera to book impromptu matches. AEW has abandoned its innovations of fixtures and rankings and at its worst has evolved into an almost clichéd throwback US TV show overloaded with interference finishes and an inconsistent approach to how they are punished.
The statistics-first concept has long since been abandoned - the idea of AEW tracking the effectiveness of finishers to ultimately build drama in subsequent matches - possibly because it was considered a dry, experimental approach. It might be time for AEW, in creative decline, to revisit an old/new idea. Wrestling in the mainstream feels like a composite of everything that has come before, even the high-end quality of which feels oversaturated.
Everything feels like it has been done, but who did it first?
10. The First WWE Match That Wasn't Booked By Vince McMahon
Obviously, Vince McMahon, Sr. booked matches before his son did, so this entry only accounts for WWF history after Jr. took the reins.
Triple H booking NXT matches shouldn't count, either; even though those bouts were "sanctioned"/promoted under the WWE banner, it feels like cheating and isn't particularly interesting.
(The same goes for various house show matches that Vince just grunted his approval towards on the phone if he wasn't physically present).
This entry should only cover the main roster, but the first WWE match not booked by Vince McMahon predated the coining of that term. No, Triple H did not book the first post-Vince televised WWE match in 2022; in a wild and forgotten tale, Vince handed over the pencil to Bill Watts, for all of two to three weeks in 1995, so that he could better concentrate on the corporate side of the business.
Yes, Vince was pulling his "can't be in the weeds any longer" crap almost three decades ago.
Vince, of course, couldn't stay away - despite holding a meeting alongside Watts on September 24, in which he emphatically declared to wrestlers that he would not overrule his new hire. He did, after a matter of weeks, reversing a Watts decision to book a heavy heat angle in which Diesel, Shawn Michaels and the Undertaker were annihilated by a super gang of heels. Vince, aghast at his babyfaces looking vulnerable, hurriedly taped a Dok Hendrix promo in which Dok said that the Undertaker wasn't hurt, or put on a stretcher: the wind had been taken out of his sails!
Working under the assumption that Watts had nothing to do with In Your House: Triple Header, just before which the meeting took place, this would place Skip Vs. Marty Jannetty from the September 25, 1995 Monday Night Raw as the first WWE match Vince had nothing to do with.