10 Incredible Wrestling FIRSTS You Didn't Know About
7. The First Time The Forbidden Door Was Opened
Almost everything you see in the mainstream today is derived in some way from the minds of Jerry Jarrett and Bill Watts.
Weirdly, considering WWE is "above" tawdry wrasslin' and doesn't even designate itself as professional wrestling, its video package-heavy presentation, in which authority figures preside over the episodic narrative, is basically a composite of both men's vision.
In addition to pioneering the first authority figure, Jarrett was the first man to open the Forbidden Door.
As with most entries on this list, the exact origin of anything is difficult to pin down. History is slippery at the best of times, and is particularly true in the carny racket that is wrestling. The roots of inter-promotional warfare were planted when the remnants of the defunct proto-hardcore league International Wrestling Enterprise bled into New and All Japan Pro Wrestling.
NJPW founder Antonio Inoki was savvy, presenting the incoming new roster members as "invaders" introduced as the 'New International Army', which was a precursor to Riki Choshu's more successful Revolution Army stable in 1982. Each angle was a worked development originally (though reality did reflect art when Choshu et al. shoot jumped to All Japan Pro Wrestling in 1984). The IWE had formally shuttered in 1981; Revolution Army was - at first - a worked stable that only operated in "defiance" of New Japan within storyline parameters.
The animosity between Jerry Jarrett and Angelo Poffo's competing Memphis territories however was very real; Poffo's ICW was the outlaw group that blew up in opposition to Jarrett's NWA-affiliated CWA as a result of Randy Savage's genius brand of self-promotion.
In 1998, D-Generation X invaded a WCW show on what wasn't a tank. Eric Bischoff attempted to drum up buys for Slamboree by challenging Vince McMahon to a fight in WCW territory, which was obviously never going to happen.
Savage pioneered both wartime tactics in the early 1980s, embracing ICW's renegade perception by calling out Jerry Lawler and arriving unannounced in CWA territory (and incurring legal woes in the process). By 1983, however, realising that he could never outdraw the CWA and that his ICW was on the brink of collapse, Angelo struck a deal with Jarrett.
With a very real Forbidden Door opened, Lawler and Savage did massive business in 1984.