June 1st – On This Day In Wrestling History
1996 – The World Wrestling Peace Festival took place at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in Los Angeles, California. The event was promoted by Antonio Inoki and brought together matches and wrestlers from NJPW, WCW, NWA,AAA and CMLL. The main event saw Inoki team with NWA World Champion Dan Severn to defeat Yoshiaki Fujiwara and Oleg Taktarov. The semi-main event saw The Giant, then the WCW World Champion, defeat Sting in a non-title match. The event was considered a failure at the box office with less than 6,000 fans in attendance at the 17,000 capacity arena.
1996 – At ECW ‘Fight The Power’ from the ECW Arena in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ECW World Television Champion Shane Douglas was forced to defend his title FIVE times. He defeated El Puerto Ricano, Don E. Allen, Devon Storm, and Mikey Whipwreck in consecutive matches before dropping the title in the fifth match to Pitbull #2.
2008 – WWE ‘One Night Stand’ took place at the San Diego Sports Arena in San Diego, California. All the matches on the show had ‘extreme’ stipulations with Edge defeating The Undertaker in the main event in a Tables, Ladders and Chairs match. The win gave Edge the vacant WWE World Heavyweight Championship and forced The Undertaker to leave WWE. In reality, ‘Taker was taking time off to heal injuries and returned at SummerSlam a couple of months later. Also on the show, Triple H retained the WWE Championship with a Last Man Standing match victory over Randy Orton.
2009 – On an episode of Raw in Birmingham, Alabama, Kofi Kingston defeated MVP to win the WWE United States Championship.
2010 – Wade Barrett is crowned the first winner of the NXT show when the brand was a quasi-reality show. David Otunga was runner up with Justin Gabriel finishing third.
2014 – The Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois played host to WWE ‘Payback’. The main event of the show was The Shield (Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose) defeat Evolution (Triple H, Randy Orton and Batista) in an elimination rules match. The Shield won without suffering a single elimination. This would be their last match of their initial run as a unit as Seth Rollins turned on the rest of the group the following night on Raw.
2019 – Two titles changed hands at what many consider to be the greatest NXT event to date, NXT TakeOverr XXV, held at the Webster Bank Arena in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The main event saw Adam Cole defeat reigning champion Johnny Gargano in a classic 31 minute match to win the NXT Championship. The other new titleholders on the evening were The Street Profits (Angelo Dawkins and Montez Ford) won won a four way ladder match for the vacant NXT Tag Team Championship against Bobby Fish & Kyle O’Reilly, Danny Burch & Oney Lorcan and Wesley Blake & Steve Cutler.
Notable Wrestling Birthdays:
- L.A Park Jr. (2000)
- Sam Gradwell (1991)
- Velvet Sky (1981)
- James Storm (1977)
- Scoot Andrews (1971)
- Ian Rotten (1970)
- Nick ‘Big Bully’ Busick (1954)
- Black Bart (1948)