Today In Wrestling History 6/5: Vince Russo Pins Ric Flair, Chris Benoit's First WWF Match, And More

* 26 years ago in 1989, All Japan Pro Wrestling ran one of the greatest cards in wrestling history at Budokan Hall in Tokyo. Few cards have the match quality in the top matches that this one did.

The event really got going when the Can-Am Express (Doug Furnas and Danny Kroffat) defeated The Footloose (Toshiaki Kawada and Samson Fuyuki) to win the All Asian Tag Team Titles. The All-Asian belts had been around for decades, but this feud was a big part of them evolving into belts contested in potential show stealers that were closer to American style tag team matches with the Japanese style sequence of false finish after false finish at the end. The Can-Am Express was in the title picture for basically their entire AJPW career, and Kroffat shaped the style with his knack for incredible finishes. The whole feud with The Footloose, which is sort of like a Japanese version of the Midnight Express vs. the Rock 'n' Roll Express or The Fantastics, is well worth watching, but this is the consensus best match they had.

Third from the top was Sting vs. Dan Spivey. Promoter Shohei "Giant" Baba loved Sting and wanted to keep using him on big shows even after washing his hands of his relationship with WCW a few months earlier, but it just wasn't to be. Still, Sting and Spivey had a match that while not GREAT, is all action and a total blast to watch. Japanese fans loved Sting and he always stepped up his game on his tours (here or in NJPW), and Spivey had turned into a sneakily good performer. With Sting not coming back, Spivey got the win.

The main event saw the latest chapter in the feud between Genichiro Tenryu and Jumbo Tsuruta. Formerly tag team partners, they broke up to feud with each other when their main rivals, Riki Choshu and most of his Ishingundan stable, returned to NJPW after about two years in AJPW. Aside from one match that had an early injury finish, the entire feud is fantastic, and their matches are credited with shaping the version of the AJPW main event style that took hold in the '90s with guys like Kawada, Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Akira Taue, and Jun Akiyama. Like with the tag mentioned earlier, this bout, where Tenryu won AJPW's Triple Crown Title, is the consensus best match of the feud.

* 20 years ago in 1995, the WWF held a Monday Night Raw taping at Struthers High Shcool in Struthers, Ohio. Historically, this taping is interesting for a couple different reasons:

During the live show that opened the taping, there was a cut to a match "live from another arena," which was Owen Hart vs. Davey Boy Smith in a King of the Ring qualifying match that went to a 15 minute time limit draw. Conspicuously, they joined the event just after their ring entrances and the director never cut to a camera showed the entranceway. That was because the match happened to have been shot on May 14th, where it was a dark match to the first In Your House pay-per-view with its very distinctive set by the standards of the time.

So why did they do this? While the Hart vs. Smith match was airing on USA Network, in Struthers, Chris Benoit was getting a tryout match against Bob Holly. Why it was held during the live Raw was never made clear, but it likely had to do with wanting to ensure that the fans reacted to him on the level of a debuting star and not an unknown. Holly won the match, which was the first of three for Benoit at that month's three days of tapings. While Benoit very much impressed the WWF brass, he wanted to keep his NJPW tours and they wouldn't let him, so for the time being, he was still a free agent.

Finally, in the second hour of the taping (which aired on June 12th), they shot an angle during a Lex Luger vs. Yokozuna match that was seemingly designed to introduce Luger's flag bearer as a new babyface character, but it never went anywhere. The WWF had been picking fans to be guest ring announcers and flag bearers for a while, but here, Luger's second was Scott Antol, who wrestled as Scott Studd in the USWA at the time as well as being the future Scotty Riggs in WCW.

The USWA/WWF connection got him the booking, where the announcers identified him by his real name and explained he was a young professional wrestler who had befriended Luger. At the finish, he took a bump for Mr. Fuji and it SEEMED like it it was going somewhere, but he never appeared again in the WWF. The plan was for him to Luger's protege, but it just wasn't to be. Antol had befriended Marcus Bagwell, they put together the above music video to pitch the American Males tag team, WCW was interested, and they offered him a guaranteed money contract. Given the state of wrestling in 1995, he did the smart thing and took the WCW deal.

* 15 years ago in 2000, WCW ran a live Monday Nitro from Philips Arena in the company's home base of Atlanta, Georgia. It was definitely a more memorable show than most of the Nitros that year, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

The most famous thing on the show historically is the Ric Flair vs. Vince Russo match in WCW's version of the Hell in a Cell cage. Flair worked an absolute miracle and turned it into a good, dramatic, compelling match. There were a bunch of shenanigans with Flair being able to get his friend and biggest fan, Charles Robinson, as the referee, use of a ladder and a trap door to climb on top of the roof, and eventually a bunch of run-ins.

What led to the run-ins in a cage match? Everyone aligned with the New Blood stable, which included Russo, got to drop a vat of red liquid (that may or may not have been blood) from the ceiling onto their enemies, which somehow knocked them unconscious. David Flair was under the ring, and he helped Russo beat his father. Yes, Russo beat Ric Flair. With help from Flair's own son. In Atlanta. In a match broadcast on national television.

Meanwhile, also on the show, The Mamalukes (Big Vito and Johnny the Bull) helped Eric Bischoff beat Terry Funk, giving him the WCW Hardcore Championship in the process. Bill Goldberg returned from nearly losing his arm (when he punched out the windows of a limousine in January), quickly beating Tank Abbott in another overbooked match.