10 Wrestling Matches That Shaped Vince McMahon’s Vision Of Sports Entertainment
"Well sir, we promised you a great main event."
The problem with apportioning credit within the wrestling world is that it is an industry predicated on secrecy, ego and oneupmanship.
It has been written, somewhere in the reaches of cyberspace, that the first ever steel cage match took place in the 1930s. There are few official records, but instead a vague and often contradictory shared history, as fuelled by competition and as obfuscated as the business it documents. To underscore that point, nobody knows for sure which was the first worked pro wrestling match - though Lancashire is credited as the birthplace of the ancestral catch as catch can style, which was later adapted to predetermine match outcomes in the name of money.
It's a near impossible task, determining which was the very first match to deviate from the marathon, submission-exclusive slog mode, the very first to feature within it the Irish whip. Who was the very first combatant to fling themselves from the rope? Who was the very first to kick-out of a finishing move? We know who was the first to kick out after taking fourteen - John Cena - but who was the first not to kick out at two, but to kick out of one, altogether?
This is not a definitive list - there are long-dead innovators whose work has been obscured by a conflicting set of records - but what follows is an attempt to determine the origin points of Vince McMahon's sports entertainment (even if indirectly) as we know it today...
10. Tommy Rich Vs. Buzz Sawyer - Georgia Championship Wrestling, October 23, 1983
Known as the Last Battle Of Atlanta, this brutal domed cage bout acted as the precursor to WWE’s Hell In A Cell stipulation - but the footage had been lost for so long that it became more myth than match, posthumously.
By 2016, it was thought to have been accidentally erased - until the WWE Network’s enterprising archive team stumbled across a library unassumingly titled “Omni Live Events”. Within it, they found one of the most innovative matches ever. Tommy Rich and Buzz Sawyer were the perfect opponents. Rich was the bleached blonde pretty boy, a man who could charm the fans with his preternatural selling pluck. Sawyer was an ugly wildman, as nasty as he was intense. The match literally bleeds through time to retain its status as a classic, one which WWE adopted and subverted to scintillating effect fifteen years later. Whereas the Last Battle Of Atlanta was enclosed by mesh to guarantee a conclusive finish, WWE literally broke away from the formula to create scope for debuting monsters and lunatic stunt shows.
The claret poured early in 1983 - the stipulation bayed for blood as much as Sawyer did - with Rich fighting from underneath in a masterclass of suspense and (eventual) release. When he unleashed that famed wild fire, against the odds, the Atlanta crowd were deafening in their catharsis.
The match distilled the essence of pro wrestling as much as it advanced it.