10 Wrestling Pay Per View Concepts That Didn't Catch On
8. The Wrestling Classic
While WrestleMania 1 took place several months prior, The Wrestling Classic was WWE’s first ever pay-per-view. 'Mania only ever aired on closed circuit television, so really, The Classic was the true starting point for wrestling’s PPV revolution.
The show presented a single-night, 16-man single elimination tournament, with no fewer than 15 individual matches taking place across the two-and-a-half-hour runtime. A wrestling-centric show, you’d think, but no: The Wrestling Classic featured just 65 minutes of wrestling in total, and none of the matches broke ten minutes.
Most of the contests ran for about three minutes, which is obviously nowhere near enough time to tell a compelling story. As a result, The Wrestling Classic was a rushed mess of an event, and with three matches lasting less than a minute, it was impossible to get into.
The Classic was a flop, but the WWF attempted to revise the single show tournament format at WrestleMania IV. Predictably, that show was a complete disaster, too, and while WWE have ran multiple tournament-themed shows since then, the idea of blazing through a 16-man tournament in one sitting died a long time ago.