10 Crazy Things You’ll Find On WWE Network (If You Search Deep Enough)

This one will take a concerted, term-specific search, because following last year's Network host provider switch, the glorious Hidden Gems section has been cruelly thrust deep into the unsearchable bowels of the system. It's still there, but for some unfathomable reason they want you to really look out for it.

"This" belongs in the bowels, at least, because it is unadulterated sh*t. Gloriously sh*t. "This" is the 1989 pilot for the AWA Team Challenge Series, launched just before the zombie promotion finally shuffled into oblivion. A desperate attempt to appeal to a WWF-adjacent audience, in a depressing subversion - the WWF years earlier was astute enough to recruit the AWA's key personnel to launch its expansion - the show was, mercifully, so legendarily sh*tty that you can't help but laugh at it.

Ageing promoter Verne Gagne introduces us to this hip new blend of rock, chicks, and wrestling by sitting in a park, with a dog on his lap, wearing a sweater and khakis. A guy who makes Todd Pettengill look like Atsushi Onita talks us through the upcoming events from a control centre before our first in-ring contest, to which Tommy Jammer enters flanked by green-screened fans. The match happens, it isn't much of anything, and the crowd thunderously responds to it nonetheless because their reactions are incongruously spliced in.

The Destruction Crew (Beverly Brothers) cut a promo in front of a green screen, before which they "attack" it with sledgehammers, as if they have in fact demolished the building that is so clearly an image. And then, because the principles that held up the old AWA are so boring and passé, and wrestling as people knew it is dead, some girls engage in boxing wearing lingerie.

Verne Gagne introduced this wearing a pair of khakis.

Magnificent.