I walk for miiiles inside this pit of dangerrrrrr! Ian Hunter here, strolling on out to my giant fire works show that looks like I’m shooting the audience and dropping a bomb on their collective backsides. And low and behold I’ve got nothing better to do with my career than threaten to beat people up if I don’t get a title shot. But of course the company couldn’t just give us a simple title match, could they? Noooo, we had to drama it up and create a fatal four way. You know, I don’t mind the occasional match with more than one opponent, but WWE is too much into the habit of doing multiple-man matches and barely focuses on one-on-one matches. Of course, what else are you going to do with a roster as obese as theirs? So in tribute to this past Monday’s cluster of a main event, this week’s trivia is on multiple-man matches. But first, we need to answer last week’s questions.
1: D. 280 days. The WWF/E doesn’t even count his short reign as even a day in itself, making his entire reign totaled out of his second win.
2: B. His entire title reign timed in at 3:30 minutes. It should be noted that this is also one of the shortest title reigns in all of professional wrestling that didn’t end on a belt being unified or discontinued. It wasn’t until the WWF Hardcore Title came into existence that the record was instantly meaningless.
3: E. Taylor held the championship 4 times in the title’s existence, the only wrestler there to hold it more than once. He also held it the longest, holding it for 5 months at one point, and a total of 13 months overall. He never lost the title to anyone twice, and even had to vacate it once from winning the North American Championship
4: C. Fritz was up north participating as a normal wrestler, a couple of years before he went south to form WCCW. He actually lost a match the week before with Gange becoming the champion, only to beat him the following night for both belts. He held the AWA belt for 12 days before it went back to Gange.
5: The Steiner Brothers beat the Freebirds for the championships. To this day, the screw up has never been corrected, not even in what’s left of the NWA records or WWE’s history files. It just remains another example of WCW and TBS’s mismanagement during the early 90’s.
Again, another week of a lot of people getting at least four correct, but not nailing all five. But again, what was I going to give you? A belt for you to hold onto for a few moments until I beat up Earl Hebner and threaten him with his job until he reverses the decision? That would just be insanely stupid. So let’s move on. It’s a brand new week with a whole new set of questions. Answer the questions and email your answers to TorchTrivia@gmail.com. We'll post the names of those who got ALL FIVE correct. Good luck to you all!
1. First will be a True/False question. Let’s kick it off with one of the greatest matches hardly ever talked about out of the Attitude era… Armageddon’s “Hell In A Cell” match. After an entire year of battling and bickering and building feuds, what do you do? Set them all loose inside a giant cage you can climb on. Nevermind the horrible Austin/Rikishi/HHH angle, you take those three and include The Rock, Undertaker and Kurt Angle all in the mix for a six-man match and you get pure insanity. Which is exactly what the fans got. At least twenty “holy s#!%” moments happened in this match which set the stage for WrestleMania X-7 in more ways than one. But the match frequently gets ignored because of the sudden finish of Kurt Angle suddenly having his hand on The Rock and getting the pin for the win. One of the highlights was Undertaker choke-slamming Rikishi off the top of the cage onto a truck which was brought out by McMahon in an attempt to take the cage apart. So true or false… Rikishi was the original person picked to be slammed onto the truck?
2. Next will be a write-in question. Probably one of the most convoluted matches in all of WCW/NWA history (and there were a lot) was the Tower Of Doom presented at the 1988 Great American Bash. The idea behind this match is you climb to the top on ladders and fight in a small room on the top, and fight your way down into the second level that’s split into two rooms, and then down to the ring where you can finally try to pin your opponent. The original was a mess of a match, to say the least. (I like to think the crowd was cheering that it was over more than the fact that the faces won.) But WCW brought the match back years later. What was the event the second match of this kind was held at?
3. Unforgiven 1999, McMahon relinquished control of the WWF title he won off of Triple H (covered in a previous trivia) and was putting the title up for grabs in a Six-Pack Challenge. HHH, Big Show, British Bulldog, Kane, Mankind and The Rock were all involved with Austin as a special enforcer at ringside. Part of the reason Austin was there was due to a “referee dispute” storyline where the major talent had been mistreating them in the middle of matches. It got to the point where they were going on strike in the middle of matches, which at the time was a very creative direction for the WWF. But one scab decided to cross the picket line and referee the match, only to get beat up by the rest, who were in turn beat up by Austin. Who refereed the match?
A. Earl Hebner
B. Tim White
C. Mike Chioda
D. Theodore Long
E. Jim Korderas
4. ECW was one of the first to make multiple-man matches a mainstay in professional wrestling. But the majority of the time they were called Three-Way Dances and featured tag teams for the championships. One of the first of it’s kind took place in April of 1995 for the tag team championships. Tazz and Rick Steiner went up against Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko, against the champions at the time Public Enemy. The match went on for nearly twenty minutes showing combinations of attacks with team members normal fans hadn’t seen before. In fact the match helped win Malenko over with the fans as he put both the Public Enemy in a twisted 6 legged Boston-crab at one point. But Malenko was pinned at the end of the match after a series of chair shots from Tazz. Who pinned Malenko?
A. Rocko Rock
B. Tazz
C. Rick Steiner
D. Chris Benoit
E. Johnny Grunge
5. Since we’re on the subject of these matches, Halloween Havoc 1991 had one of the worst matches ever comprised during that era. That match… Chamber Of Horrors. You got eight wrestlers and no real plans for them (including Sting I might add), so what do you do? Stick them in a cage with an electric chair and electrify one of the for the win. Created by Dusty Rhodes, the match was supposed to help make Abdullah The Butcher reach a level of legendary status by showing that he could withstand being electrocuted and still come back to fight. Instead it made all the participants in it look like fools, and it didn’t help any that during the match the switch for the electricity fell to the “On” position for everyone to see. (Mick Foley managed to correct it, even though it was filmed by the camera crew.) But a few individuals were replaced ahead of time due to injuries (we think). Who wasn’t a replacement wrestler, or one being replaced?
A. Kevin “Oz” Nash
B. The One Man Gang
C. Barry Windham
D. Scott Steiner
E. El Gigante
LATEST PRO WRESTLING TORCH NEWSLETTER #1039 (17 PAGES)
This issue begins with a cover story by Wade Keller who attended Brock Lesnar's first UFC victory on Saturday night in the semi-main event in front of a record-setting crowd in his hometown. Keller's BBL looks at Lesnar's place in MMA and in what ways he seems more comfortable than ever... Bruce Mitchell's Memo examines the dilemma of Chris Benoit and the Hall of Fame... Sean Radican reviews the two latest TNA DVD releases... In-depth coverage of the TNA Hard Justice PPV including Keller's match report with star ratings and the newsletter-exclusive Roundtable Reviews... Jason Powell's "Page 2 Buzz" with scoops and insider analysis... WWE Newswire, TNA Newswire, and ROH Newswire with insider news, big story analysis, and notebook tidbits... Plus Keller's reports on Raw, Smackdown, and Impact, the Top 5 Stories of the Week, and more....
