10 Historic Wrestling Moments You've Probably Never Seen

Long before Logan Paul stepped through the ropes, this was the original collision of pop culture and pro wrestling. Andy Kaufman, beloved and bizarre comic genius, took his surreal obsession with kayfabe all the way to Memphis, where he and Jerry “The King” Lawler blurred the lines between performance and reality like no one before or since.

Kaufman had been wrestling women as part of his comedy act, taunting Southerners on TV about their supposed backwardness. Lawler, a local hero and the face of Memphis wrestling, wasn’t having it. Their match at the Mid-South Coliseum in 1982 was clumsy, short—and utterly historic. After one piledriver, Kaufman flailed around the ring in a neck brace for months. The stunt reached its surreal peak during a joint appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, where Lawler slapped Kaufman live on air, sparking genuine chaos.

But the match itself didn’t happen under a national spotlight. Memphis wrestling was a regional promotion, and while clips exist, the match wasn't made readily available to fans worldwide. It lives in grainy footage and scattered documentaries—an underground classic that helped launch the concept of the celebrity wrestling angle decades before it became standard fare.