Today In Wrestling History 6/11: Rob Van Dam Wins WWE Championship, Benoit-Angle Cage Match, & More

* 39 years ago in 1976, All Japan Pro Wrestling ran a house show/TV taping at the old Sumo Hall in Tokyo. Historically, the show is best known for the main event, where Terry Funk defeated Jumbo Tsuruta to retain the NWA World Heavyweight Championship in a best two out of three falls match, This was the third bout in a ten match challenge series designed to evaluate where Jumbo was at three years into his career.

Among hardcore viewers of old matches on tape/DVD/YouTube/downloads, this match is considered one of the best surviving matches of the '70s if not the very best. It's the only complete/lengthy Funk title defense that exists on video and it makes you want to see a lot more. He's more technical than you've ever seen him, but he's still very much Terry Funk and brings all of the Terry Funkness you'd want from a Terry Funk match. Tsuruta was, as always, tremendous, an all-time great and one of the brightest prodigies in the history of the business.

* 19 years ago in 1996, NJPW had a house show/TV taping in Hiroshima that's best known for featuring the semifinal matches of that year's Best of the Super Juniors tournament, as Black Tiger (Eddie Guerrero) defeated Wild Pegasus (Chris Benoit) and Jushin Thunder Liger defeated El Samurai. All of the semifinalists had recently united as the "Junior Four Horsemen," flashing the four fingers and teaming together in various combinations against the younger junior heavyweights led by Koji Kanemoto and Shinjiro Ohtani.

Both matches were excellent, albeit with the Guerrero-Benoit match being much different from their usual efforts. Instead of their usual, more fast paced match, it was built around Benoit grounding Guerrero with chinlocks...and as weird as this is gonna sound, it's way better than it looks on paper and is an absolutely fantastic match. If you have no issues watching Benoit matches, it's worth checking out.

* 14 years ago in 2001, the WWF aired a live Monday Night Raw from the Richmond Coliseum in Richmond, VA. The main event was one of the more memorable in Raw history, though not necessarily for the right reasons. Kurt Angle defeated Chris Benoit in a steel cage match and it was complete insanity, including Benoit hitting a German Suplex off the top rope and a diving head butt off the top of the cage as well Angle doing the missed moonsault off the top of the cage for the first time (which he did on a whim). Benoit was unknowingly working on a badly damaged neck and seemingly made the damage worse, leading to two level spinal fusion surgery a few weeks later and a year out of the ring.

* 9 years ago in 2006, WWE held the second ECW: One Night Stand pay-per-view event at the Hammerstein Ballroom of the Manhattan Center in New York, New York. The card was sort of but not exactly built around various "WWE vs. ECW" matches.

Kurt Angle defeated Randy Orton in the opener in a match designed to get Angle's new "wrestling machine" gimmick over, as he changed his in-ring style to rely on a lot of amateur-style takedowns, matwork, and top control/riding. Unfortunately, Angle's painkiller addiction was out of control and he was released a few months later. For the next several years, he would downplay his problems and portray them as something in the past, but after a 2013 rehab stint, he's been much more open about being a recovering addict and the type of emotional issues that led him down the road to substance abuse.

The "dream match" of the show saw Rey Mysterio (wearing his ECW/WCW style mask and tights) and Sabu go to a no contest in a bout for Mysterio's World Heavyweight Championship. While they had a very good match, it was disappointing in that it was a bit too short (just over nine minutes) and the ending came just as the match really got rolling. Sabu hit his triple jump DDT through a table bridging the ring apron and barricade, neither wrestler could continue, and that was it. While the move looked suitably dangerous, the finish rang hollow on in the context of ECW nostalgia since the move never led to anything like that in the original ECW.

The wildest match on the show was the co-main event, with Edge, Mick Foley, and Lita defeating Tommy Dreamer, Terry Funk, and Beulah in an Extreme Rules intergender match. This was the match that got to use barbed wire boards and other assorted sundries and was a crazy spectacle, ending with Edge spearing Beulah, cradling her, and thrusting his groin in sync with the referee's three count. For sheer sleaziness, it's the finest moment of the Edge/Lita pairing.

Rob Van Dam defeating John Cena to win the WWE Championship and reactivate the ECW Championship has become legendary thanks to the crowd reactions. It started with a variety of signs and banners, including the original "IF CENA WINS, WE RIOT," heated up with the fans throwing Cena's hat and shirt back at him when he threw them at the crowd (including an especially animated display from well-known ECW fan Tony Lewis), and continued with all varieties of chants through the end of the match.