10 Huge Wrestling Matches That Were Given Away On Free TV
Televised wrestling isn't always boring.
As wrestling continues to evolve through the ages, promotions have become more and more reliant on weekly TV shows such as Raw, Smackdown or Nitro in order to help sell, promote and develop Pay-Per-Views from which they'll earn most of their revenue. While the Pay-Per-View will always come first as it should, TV shows do occasionally have some excellent or huge matches in order to hold interest and keep viewers tuning in. The Monday Night Wars tended to have a lot of big, exciting and high-profile matches because of the highly competitive nature of WWF's Monday Night Raw and WCW's Monday Nitro. Due to the sudden relevance of TV ratings in the Monday Night Wars, each company tried to do anything to pull ahead in the ratings, which mean't they couldn't solely rely on PPVs to maintain a viewership. In particular, there were a lot of title bouts and World Championship matches on TV in that period as more frequent title changes were meant to create a more exciting product week-to-week. TV Title matches weren't without their drawbacks, the sheer frequency of them in WCW cheapened the WCW World Heavyweight Championship and damaged their reputation as a company while the years went by. In celebration of an era with much more excitement, innovation and risk in televised wrestling, here are ten huge matches that WWE and WCW gave away on free TV.