10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Women's Wrestling

5. The Original Screwjob

When you saw 'screwjob' in a wrestling context, thoughts will always rush back to Montreal, Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, and the 1997 Survivor Series. It'll take something truly monumental to replace this as wrestling's most famous screwjob, but it wasn't the first time the company has stooped to such lows in order to deal with paranoia centring around a championship belt.

In the 1980s Wendi Richter was by far the most popular female wrestler in the US, and as such she won the Women's Championship from The Fabulous Moolah (more on her shortly). Richter would go on to defend the title against mysterious challenger The Spider at Madison Square Garden, during a time when the champ was in contract negotiations with the company.

To Richter's shock and surprise The Spider abandoned the booking of the match and pinned Richter to the mat, picking up the win and the title in the process. She was then unmasked to reveal herself as Moolah, and the penny dropped for Richter. She soon left the company.

There are all sorts of claims surrounding the screwjob, but the general feeling is that it was a decision made by Vince McMahon himself. Richter left the arena still in her gear and went straight to the airport, and never spoke to Moolah again. Richter was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2010, but this moment was conspicuously ignored.

John Bills

Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.

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