10 Classic Wrestling Matches You Didn't Know Bombed
Tournaments are awesome. The hell is wrong with you people?
What's great shouldn't be conflated with what is commercially successful, which is why you get Shelbyville citizens telling you, without fail, underneath Bryan Alvarez's Wednesday Night War ratings tweets, that hurhurhur if AEW was so good why can't it beat RAW?!
Wednesday nights are fantastic, or they were, before nothing was fantastic.
AEW Dynamite pre-Revolution was an incredible TV show that just got the episodic component. They knew how to make wrestling feel massive, ultimately, and the TV wrestling before the massive-feeling PPV wrestling was scintillating and diverse and booked, always, with a sense of purpose in a relentlessly forward-thinking ecosystem that benefited itself across the full breadth of the card.
NXT meanwhile pushed it to be as good as it was getting, and even in the less-heralded case of a Cameron Grimes gifted us some of the most sumptuous chef's-kiss technicality ever witnessed on network television.
The nostalgia for the white hot crowds that were the domain of those magical Wednesdays burns, but not a great number of people feel that because, quite frankly, a lot of you have awful taste...
10. The Ricky Steamboat Vs. Ric Flair Trilogy
This hurts.
Obviously, you want great wrestling to draw. Obviously, you want the thing you like to form a pattern of success, negating the need for a Lana Bobby Lashley wedding to appease the network that facilitates all of this. In a perfect world, you'd want Ricky Steamboat to arm drag Vince Russo from one end of the ring to the other and say "No, motherf*cker, I am ratings."
This isn't the case. The absolutely incredible Ric Flair Vs. Ricky Steamboat trilogy of 1989 - held in parallel with the peak of the WWF's golden age - wasn't a commercial hit. It didn't matter that they were unprecedented feats of conditioning, technical skill, in-ring intelligence and perseverance. It didn't matter that braggart playboy versus gritty, firecracker babyface was a scintillating character dynamic. It didn't matter that those battles were ardently pro wrestling matches that electrified the purists.
That, sadly, may have been the problem; the second match, phenomenally worked, is rendered a very slightly hollow watch, dwarfed as the men were by the cavernous, largely empty NOLA Superdome setting. The TV rating fared poorly, too, running against the blockbuster WrestleMania V.
The next major NWA WCW show that followed the electrifying WrestleWar blow-off, the Great American Bash, almost tripled its live gate (14,500 > 5,200) supported by WarGames and the more blood feud-oriented Flair Vs. Terry Funk programme.