July 9th – On This Day In Wrestling History
1963 – An AWA World Heavyweight Championship change took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota when The Crusher defeated Verne Gagne.
1985 – The Rock n’ Roll Express (Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson won their first NWA World Tag Team Championship with a win over Ivan Koloff and Krusher Khrushchev in Shelby, North Carolina.
1986 – The WWF Women’s World Championship changed hands in Sydney, Australia when The Fabulous Moolah defeated Velvet McIntyre. McIntyre had defeated Moolah for the title just six days earlier.
2000 – WCW’s Bash At The Beach PPV took place at The Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida. The show is most famous for the chain of events that led to Hulk Hogan leaving WCW, never to return. The main event of the show was due to see Jeff Jarrett defend the WCW World Heavyweight Championship against Hogan. Whilst the truth of what happened in the run up to the event is hard to uncover, to say the least, Vince Russo claimed that Hogan refused to lose to Jarrett, citing the creative control clause in his contract. As a result of the back and forth, the Jarrett vs. Hogan match took place in the midcard and saw Jarrett simply lay down in the middle of the ring to allow Hogan to pin him and he then walked out without fanfare. Later in the show, Russo took the mic for an apparent ‘shoot’ in the ring to viciously run down Hogan and seemingly air the dirty laundry of the backstage negotiations in public and on PPV. The result was that Russo promised that Hogan would never appear for WCW again and a match would be held between Jarrett and Booker T in the main event to determine the new WCW Champion. This match was won by Booker T. The other title change on the card saw KroniK (Brian Adams and Bryan Clark) defeat The Perfect Event (Shawn Stasiak and Chuck Palumbo) for the WCW World Tag Team Championship.
2001 – One of the wildest Monday Night Raws in history took place in Atlanta, Georgia. An action packed show saw the debut of the ECW faction and the formation of The Alliance. The show started with The APA (Faarooq and Bradshaw) winning the WWF Tag Team Championship from The Dudley Boyz (Bubba Ray and D-Von). Soon after, a match between Chris Jericho and Kane taking on the WCW team of Mike Awesome and Lance Storm was interrupted by Tommy Dreamer and Rob Van Dam, making their debuts. They joined Awesome and Storm in beating down Jericho and Kane. A group of WWE wrestlers barrelled to the ring to make the save including The Dudley Boyz, Tazz, Justin Credible, Raven and Rhyno. As they confronted the invaders in the ring, they slowly turned to instead face the WWE pair as the realisation that all of the WWE ‘saviours’ actually had an ECW background. A 10-on-2 beatdown ensued as Paul Heyman stood up from the announce booth to crow that ECW had been resurrected. As a result of the invasion, Shane McMahon approached his father Vince to suggest the WWE and WCW factions put their differences behind them to confront the ECW threat and a 20-person tag team match was signed for the main event which would pit the ECW team against a combined WWE/WCW force of The APA, Kanyon, Hardcore Holly, Billy Gunn, The Big Show, Mark Jindrak, Sean O’Haire, Chuck Palumbo and Sean Stasiak. However, as the match started, The WCW portion of the team revealed they were aligned with WCW and the newly christened Alliance began an attack on the WWE stars in which they outnumbered Vince McMahon’s squad 15 to 5. In the aftermath of the beatdown, Heyman revealed Stephanie McMahon as the new owner of ECW and The Alliance between Heyman and the two McMahon siblings was born.
2017 – WWE’s ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ PPV took place at the American Airlines Arena in Dallas, Texas. In the main event, Brock Lesnar defeated Samoa Joe to defend the WWE Universal Championship.
Notable Wrestling Birthdays:
- Shelton Benjamin (1975)
- P.N News (1969)
- Tom Brandi (1966)
- Damian 666 (1961)
- Marc Mero (1960)
- Kevin Nash (1959)