10 Weirdest Ways To Create A Wrestling Championship

8. The WWF And Rio De Janeiro - Part 2

What people don't often realise is that the creation Intercontinental Championship wasn't the first time that Rio de Janeiro had been used by Vince McMahon Sr. to kayfabricate a new championship. Vince McMahon Sr. and Toots Mondt withdrew their membership from the NWA in 1963 to form the World Wide Wrestling Federation, as NWA champion Lou Thesz didn't draw that well in the northeastern United States. In point of fact, that had been a bone of contention for a while: the NWA's champions just didn't fare well in New York, Boston etc, period. The first ever 'WWWF President', Willie 'the Beard' Gilzenberg, appeared on television in Washington DC in 1963 to announce to the world that the first ever 'Nature Boy' Buddy Rogers had won a tournament to be crowned the first ever WWWF World Heavyweight Champion. That tournament, of course, took place in Rio De Janeiro. Naturally, as with the Intercontinental Championship unification nearly two decades later, no such tournament had ever taken place. In an industry where the fix had been in for decades, this was one of the first occasions that fans had been treated to the 'girlfriend in Canada' routine. Nevertheless, this made Rogers, the seventh ever NWA World Heavyweight Champion, the top dog in the brand new WWWF. Unfortunately for the Nature Boy, ill health and a lack of stellar drawing power meant that Rogers was only ever a placeholder for the man that Mondt had always wanted to front their new enterprise: one Bruno Sammartino, who dethroned Rogers in only forty-eight seconds three weeks or so later. Yes, that match did actually happen.