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Throwback Thursday: WWE's First National Pay-Per-View, The Wrestling Classic

How one crappy wrestling show changed its most lucrative company, and maybe offers a blueprint into the future of how we consume sports.
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As 2016 winds down, it can safely be said that the WWE is not in a great place. Its ratings are shriveling. The WWE Network can't seem to get on track. Brock Lesnar, its major tentpole attraction, bombed a drug test. John Cena, its greatest bankable star this century, is easing off the throttle on his in-ring career.

Most damningly, the in-ring product is often terrible. This is not a talent issue: the roster is teeming with ability, so much so the company recently created a fifth in-ring show just to house all of it. The problem, as ever, is the people writing it. This year's Wrestlemania was an unmitigated disaster and the recent brand split is threatening to go that way so long as RAW underwhelms on a weekly basis. The latest awkward attempt to elevate Roman Reigns into the main event picture will probably inflame matters more.

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And yet, the product itself could be much worse–and has been. Thirty-one years ago this week, on November 7, 1985, the WWE debuted its first national pay-per-view, The Wrestling Classic. It was mostly garbage.

Read More: What The Hell Happened To TNA?

Like so many other milestones in WWE's history, the truth behind the event is complicated. There is the company's version of events, and then there's what actually happened. Today, the WWE refers to The Wrestling Classic as its very first PPV event, which isn't exactly true: Wrestlemania I, which took place in March of that year, was broadcast in several markets through PPV as well as closed circuit television.

But TWC was the first one to cut out closed circuit in lieu of a nationwide, PPV-only model. It represented the biggest sea change in how the wrestling industry broadcasts premier events, a model that remained virtually unaltered until the advent of the WWE Network almost three decades later.

When you're a part of television history. Photo by David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

The show itself was comprised of two events. The first, and the show's namesake, was The Wrestling Classic itself–a 16-man, single elimination tournament in which the winner received a strictly-for-storyline-purposes $50,000 check, and more pragmatically, a monster push. The second was the continuation of a feud between Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper, which had burned all year and was set to culminate in a match for Hogan's world title belt.

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And, that's it. That's all the backstory you need to know. It was unapologetically straightforward, in the way that 1980's wrestling so often was. The villains were tropes like the Russian patriot Nikolai Volkoff, or serial cheaters like Piper and Cowboy Bob Orton, the Archie Manning to his son Randy's Peyton. The good guys were folks like muscle-bound smile machine Paul Orndorff, the acrobatic Ricky Steamboat, the shuck-and-jiving Junkyard Dog—if you're wondering whether old school wrestling shoehorned a black man into a terribly racist caricature, the answer, regrettably, is "of course"—and, naturally, Hogan himself.

Crowd reactions tilted accordingly. They lustily booed Volkoff when he sang the Russian national anthem, and raucously applauded the Dog and Hogan—clad in all-white instead of his trademark yellow and red—exactly as Vince McMahon intended them to.

Where things got complicated, and far worse, was inside the ring. Today's WWE certainly leans on its fair share of overbooking; this is, after all, the promotion that allowed Jon Stewart to disrupt two separate title matches inside of a year. But that's downright tame compared to TWC. The show crammed a whopping 15 matches into two-and-a-half hours, and exactly four of them were decided by a clean pinfall. There was manager interference, foreign object use, a fake TKO-stoppage and the time-tested false finish of one wrestler getting pinned with his foot on the ropes. Two matches ended by single count out, including the tournament final, when the Junkyard Dog chucked Macho Man Randy Savage over the top rope onto his back. A third was decided by double count-out. Cowboy Bob got disqualified in his opening round match against Paul Orndorff by clobbering his opponent with a cast on his arm. Some 45 minutes later, he broke up the Hogan-Piper title match by doing the same thing. The Junkyard Dog won his semifinal match by counting his own pinfall over Moondog Spot, which is a permutation I've legitimately never seen before in twenty some-odd years watching pro wrestling.

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Then there's the matter of length. That ambitious lineup wedged a lot of ring time into a small space, and it showed. No match lasted even 10 minutes, and only a third of the card went past five. Three of them took less than a minute. The whole thing came off like a stage production marred by too many wardrobe changes, the scenery revolving too often and too bizarrely to genuinely invest in. It was hurried, cramped, and often nonsensical.

Which isn't to say it was unwatchable. There are a number of ways to enjoy TWC, and not all of them are rooted in irony. You could appreciate the fashion: McMahon in a tuxedo, Gorilla Monsoon rocking a ruffled pink shirt underneath a burgundy blazer, Jessie "The Body" Ventura pairing a bright red boa with a t-shirt that's best described as an LSD-laced interpretation of the Spider Man villain Carnage. You could parse the presentation, which was surprisingly buttoned-up—in as much as Lord Alfred Hayes performing bracketology whilst lasciviously groping a model could be that—and punctuated by a raffle giveaway of a Rolls Royce. You could munch on the bite-sized chunks of quality wrestling, of which there several; namely, a Savage-Steamboat match that, in four brief minutes, foretold the chemistry that spawned a legendary feud a year-and-a-half later.

Most of all, you could drink in the better days before too many sad endings. Dynamite Kid was nimble and able-bodied, Terry Funk was coherent, and way too many others—Savage, Piper, Davey Boy Smith, Adrian Adonis, Moondog Spot—were simply alive. Wrestling is a business that kills and eats its own, and this card is an especially potent reminder of that fact. TWC is also a reminder of why those wounds stung so much to begin with: That those dead men once did something difficult and artful, and were spectacular at it.

The legacy of TWC is seen any time the WWE runs a pay-per-view tournament, a device that almost always takes place at least once per year and is billed as A Really Big Deal along the way. The undercard is usually handled on weekly television well before pay-per-view time, so matches are more robust and the fussing over the bracket has been pared down. But the bones themselves are obvious. The Wrestling Classic is every plot device to fill a title vacancy. It's King of the Ring. It's even the damn Brawl for All.

And, far more significantly, it's quite possibly the future of how we consume sports. Cord-cutting is surging in popularity, and among the reasons why is the rise of more specialized packages for fans to watch their favorite sporting events digitally. Some of this isn't new: NFL Sunday Ticket, NBA League Pass, MLB TV and NHL Center Ice have been around since the 1990's. Now they're being joined by smaller variety bundles like PS Vue, prompting the question of where things go next. The answer may very well be what the WWE had in its hands all along: the single-event purchase. Non-football fans can simply pick up the Super Bowl, and college sports fans can map their discretionary income to their team's schedule. The NBA implemented both models last year. How long until everyone else makes it writ large, ad infinum?

Quite the epitaph for a shitty wrestling show in one of pro wrestling's more buffoonish periods. But, if this week has taught us anything, it's that history can be made in surprising ways, from unusual sources, however inadvertently. In that regard, TWC may only continue to rise in importance as the years drag on. They don't call it a classic for nothing.