10 Incredible Wrestling FIRSTS You Didn't Know About
9. The First Ladder Match
The ladder match isn't quite dead as an art form because live crowds still pop for it.
They don't feel big, they aren't particularly anticipated, and they aren't even a shortcut to match quality anymore, since the general standard is so stratospheric in 2023 that even very good matches are effectively meaningless. They are often forgotten as quickly as the bell rings.
Beyond the total over-saturation, key people within wrestling are speaking to power about the inherent danger, which barely registers these days. Edge has flatly refused to revisit a genre he redefined upon returning to WWE in 2020, and perhaps more damningly, Jon Moxley - who adores violence and has built his style around it - loathes the ladder match and its effect on his bump card.
It isn't going away, even though it should for a while and for more than one good reason, and has been an industry mainstay after it was first introduced in Stampede Wrestling. This was at the urging of Dan Kroffat, whose vision for it was premised on the heel's greed eyeing a bag of money - the first object, predating a title belt or a briefcase, to be hung from a karabiner.
That vision was first realised in a 1972 match between Kroffat and Tor Kamata, which of course Bret Hart used as inspiration when pitching the match type to Vince McMahon in 1992 - before which the AWA and World of Sport experimented with the form in the 1980s.