Today In Wrestling History 8/1: Vince McMahon And Shawn Michaels Return On Memorable Raw, More

* 43 years in 1972, Georgia promoter and star Ray Gunkel passed away at the age of 48 in the locker room of the Civic Center in Savannah, Georgia. His death was one of the most (in)famous of the era in wrestling, sparking a promotion war among other things.

He was wrestling Ox Baker that night, and they loved to hit each other with heavy forearm shots to the chest. One of Baker;s shots caused a hematoma that turned into a blood clot, broke off, and went go Gunkel's heart, killing him. Just over a year earlier, Alberto Torres died after he happened to suffer a ruptured appendix while wrestling Baker, so promoters billed Baker as the wrestler whose' Heart Punch finisher killed two men.

In real life, the wrestling-side fallout was on the business end. Quickly, Florida promoters Eddie Graham and Lester Welch were plotting to force Ann Gunkel, Ray's widow, out of the company. One friend of Ann's even heard them scheming at the funeral. Graham, Welch, and Paul Jones (the Atlanta promoter who served as the front man for decades, not to be confused with the '60s-'80s wrestler) shut down the existing company, ABC Booking, and launched Georgia Championship Wrestling without Ann's involvement. In turn, she started the All-South Wrestling Alliance a few months later...and the wrestlers were so loyal that not only did all but two join her opposition group, but they did it right before the big annual Thanksgiving night show. Ann also got an hour of TV on WTCG (later TBS) right after the GCW show. When ASWA closed due to lots of NWA pressure and dirty tricks, that's when the GCW show became two hours.

If you want to know more, the most detailed look at the war for Georgia is in the book Chokehold. It sources a lot of testimony from lawsuits and other first-hand accounts.

* 21 years ago in 1994, the WWF held a Monday Night Raw taping at the Beeghly Center.in Youngstown, Ohio in front of a heavily papered crowd of 2,300 fans. This was, first TV taping since both the death of Joey Marella and the acquittal of Vince McMahon in his conspiracy/steroid distribution trial. With some syndicated shows still in the can, Marella's death (he died in a car accident driving back from the previous set of syndication tapings) wasn't acknowledged yet. McMahon, however, made his return, and Randy Savage constantly referenced the trial and acquittal with lines like:

"Razor Ramon is going to annihilate Shawn Michaels just like you Mr. McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation annihilated the United States Justice Department by pinning them in the middle of the ring one-two-three. Not guilty! Not guilty!"

"Shawn Michaels, not to be confused with [prosecutor] Sean O'Shea!"

"The best tag team in legal history is Jerry McDevitt and Laura Brevetti. I think I'm gonna date Laura in my dreams."

The main event opener was Shawn Michaels vs. Razor Ramon in Michaels' return from an in-ring hiatus that started after their ladder match at WrestleMania X that year. In the meantime, he had been working as Diesel's manager and actually did a very good job, with solid promos and fantastic work at ringside. Here, like every other Michaels return from a long layoff, he looked like he never left and had an excellent 20 minute match with Razor. This was during the period where, for whatever reason, members of "The Clique" had noticeably better matches with each other than they did with other wrestlers, with this match and the "all-Clique" tag match a couple months later really standing out.

Also on the show, Bull Nakano made her return after eight years away from the WWF to take on Alundra Blayze in a match designed to showcase her as Blayze's new challenger. They went to a double count-out that they outdid exactly four weeks later at SummerSlam. So far, Blayze/Madusa hadn't really been clicking with fans, but having such a high quality opponent made a big difference and they had very good matches together that crowds got into. That said, a "division" with two wrestlers plus some others occasionally brought in as enhancement talent was always going to have a hard time coming across as legitimate.

Jerry Lawler also hosted a very odd edition of The King's Court. It was supposed to be Bob Backlund's big interview explaining his heel turn. Instead, Lawler started by going into the crowd, finding a lovely couple (Mike and Andrea), and letting Mike propose marriage on live TV. Except he ruined it by referring to Andrea his Mike's "fiancee" or "soon-to-be fiancee" right away. Mike asks...and Lawler won't let her answer until after the commercial break. Then he told awkward "jokes" about Andrea's nose...and kissed her.

So Backlund came out with limited time, McMahon talked over the promo, and the whole segment was a mess wth Backlund getting cut off. They rectified at the next Raw taping two weeks later in Lowell, Massachusetts: After a long interview where McMahon went over Backlund's history in the WWF, they shot the memorable angle where Backlund put the Crossface Chickenwing on WWF Magazine writer Lou Gianfriddo. However, it took a while to "replace" the bad King's Court segment, as that episode of Raw didn't air until September 19th; five weeks after it was taped and seven weeks after the original messed up segment aired live.

The Smoking Gunns closed the show by winning a squash match at the last second before the show went off the air due the timing issues. It was a strange, but very good and memorable edition of Raw. As usual, they also taped the next week's show that night, though it had no major matches angles and only forwarded the Ted DiBiase/Tatanka/Lex Luger "Has Lex sold out?" angle.

Also taped that night was the Sunday Night Slam SummerSlam hype special, which replaced the old March to WrestleMania/Countdown to the Crowning/SummerSlam Spectacular/Survivor Series Showdown shows with PPV-specific names. As usual, the matches served as the core of the next night's Raw on 8/22. The featured match was Diesel defeating Typhoon, who was back from WCW for a three month run before disappearing a few weeks later.

The taping schedule at this point was a bit odd. As alluded to above, the next Raw taping was on August 15th, opening with a live show, but the following week was the Sunday Night Slam replay show that had actually been taped before the most recent live show. The week after that was SummerSlam, as it used to be on Mondays so U.S. Open tennis preempting Raw for two weeks would be less bothersome, there was another preemption the week after that, and they finally went back to the August 15th tapings on September 12th, an unusually long gap.

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