Today In Pro Wrestling History: July 25th

Mostly consisting of the usual suspects, in regards to promotions, but one that’s only popped up a few times makes an appearance with a fun event name! An interesting spread of dates on top of the fact, nothing too old, a few things pretty recent. So let’s see how memorable these events are!

• WWF Fully Loaded (1999)

Fully Loaded is a weird show, because it’s either front loaded or back loaded depending on your perspective. The first four matches all had title changes, but the matches were about as memorable as words written in water. Jeff Jarrett beat Edge for the Intercontinental Title, The Acolytes got their titles back after the Raw is War upset, when the Hardy Boyz won their first titles. D’Lo Brown beat Mideon for the European title and lastly, Big Bossman beat Al Snow for the Hardcore title. See…a whole lot of…meh. But the last two matches were actually memorable! Triple H and The Rock had a Falls Count Anywhere Strap Match. This was a solid match which saw excessive interference from Degeneration X, Chyna and Billy Gunn most notably, to cause enough issues so that Trips could hit the Pedigree and earn the number 1 contender slot. The main event was a First Blood match for the World Heavyweight Championship between Steve Austin and The Undertaker…but wait, there’s more. If Austin lost, he would be barred from ever challenging for the World title again, while if Undertaker lost, Vince was banned from WWF television. Given Vince’s huge heel persona that helped to win the Monday Night War and Austin being everyone’s favorite anti-hero…this was huge for fans. Austin won, so Vince was gone for 50 days.

• WWE Raw (2011)

Well we get some convoluted wrestling story, but it worked well given who was involved. CM Punk won the WWE Championship at Money in the Bank and then “left the company” with the belt. So for this show, we saw the finals of a tournament to crown a new champion since it was technically vacant. Rey Mysterio defeated The Miz to kick off the show and become the new champion. Since Triple H was still establishing himself as COO, he decided to book a main event where Rey Mysterio had to defend his newly won title on the same night against John Cena, because Triple H wanted to “fix Vince’s mistakes”. Cena won the belt back, but to give the crowd a cliffhanger for next week, Cult of Personality played and CM Punk walked down to the ring for a standoff.

• PROGRESS Chapter 74: Mid Week Matters: Progress World Championship: Travis Banks (c) vs WALTER (2018)

Now this show had a ton of current white hot names in pro wrestling. Aussie Open, Toni Storm, Grizzled Young Veterans, Doug Williams, Pete Dunne and Michael Oku to name a few. But the main event was the bread and butter. This match was brought up from WALTER’s dominate 239 day reign as the Atlas champion. He was gaining steam and in an attempt to detract “Der Ringgeneral”, Banks told him that he wouldn’t let him challenge for the World title while holding the Atlas title. So, WALTER vacated the Atlas title in June so he could get his hands on Banks. In a hard hitting affair, the match delivered in a Speed versus Power styling. The only slight blemish is the cluster with a ref bump, attempted Eddie Guerrero stuff and WALTER getting assistance from his ally TK Cooper to help overcome the cheating, but WALTER put Banks to sleep with the Gojira Clutch, and WALTER was crowned Progress World champion, and this was the height of his independent scene aura.

• NJPW Wrestle Grand Slam In Tokyo Dome (2021)

The event is notable because this is the first non-January Tokyo Dome show for New Japan since 2005. Another nugget is that the main event was supposed to be Shingo Takagi versus Kota Ibushi for the World Heavyweight title, but Ibushi came down with aspiration pneumonia. So in a last second step up, Hiroshi Tanahashi was slotted as Shingo Takagi’s challenger. Before the main event though, we saw the LIJ tag team of SANADA & Naito defend their tag titles against Dangerous Tekkers (Zack Sabre & Taichi). The Tekkers regained the tag titles in a great match, Taichi was really coming into his own, and the old “Taichi Go Home” chants drifted away once he started actually applying the craft Kawada taught him years ago, instead of being a lazy cheater. Now the main event was very possibly Tanahashi’s last objectively amazing match. The World title itself needed this match because since it’s creation it was marred with hatred for combining the Intercontinental and everyone who touched the belt got sick or injured. This match was amazing, Shingo retained in a 35+ minute match. A match the solidified Shingo in NJPW (since he was still seen as a Dragon Gate born outsider). This was strong style, it was psychology and Shingo finally felt accepted, especially with overcoming the Ace of the Universe. Then Dick Togo and EVIL attacked Shingo and we go into the dark period number 2 that New Japan is still trying to navigate out of.

• AAA Alianzas (2025)

Now this show, was WWE cleaning house for certain people they didn’t want in their version of AAA, and we all know who I specifically mean. Alberto el Patron (aka Alberto Del Rio). He was the Mega Champion until May 31st, when he dropped it to Vikingo and now, he was in a “Loser Leaves AAA” match with El Mesias (Mil Muertes for those who don’t know). The match was overbooked and telenovela levels of layers. Aberto was betrayed by Dorian Roldan, got powder thrown in his face before Mesias cut him in half with a Spear and won the match. Alberto was emotional, which ended with a raw scene to close out the show, but Alberto was gone from the WWE orbit once again. To end the article on a slightly more up note, Vikingo came out to issue an open challenge. Which was answered by Dragon Lee, El Grande Americano (this was Ludwig, but Chad JUST got hurt like a month before this, so it’s still a continuation of the old gimmick before it took on a life of its own) and Dominik Mysterio. Which set up to a big Triplemania Four Way.

Where’s Pitbull when I need some kind of Mr. Worldwide reference? America, England, Japan and Mexico…most of the major demographic areas were covered in this article. I’d be willing to say there’s something for everyone, except women’s wrestling fans. And we all know I’m a big fan…the last two days have had Joshi. But not every article can be diverse and inclusive, sometimes we must choose a struggle.