Today In Wrestling History 7/28: Bret Hart Upset By The Patriot On Raw, In-Ring Death, More
* 64 years ago in 1951, Janet Boyer, also known as Janet Wolfe and Janet Boyer Wolfe, passed away at 4:00 a.m. local time stemming from injuries suffered the previous night in a tag team match with Eva Lee against Ella Waldek and Mae Young. She had barely been wrestling for six weeks.
Earlier in the night, she had also worked a singles match against Waldek and came out of it with a severe headache that Waldek suspected might have been a concussion symptom. Janet was afraid to tell Billy Wolfe, the women's wrestling promoter who was in the process of adopting her. During the tag team match, she grabbed her head and collapsed on the ring apron.
She was immediately given oxygen and rushed to the hospital, but she never regained consciousness. The autopsy showed she had two separate, potentially fatal injuries: A subdural hematoma in her brain and a "traumatic rupture" of the stomach. In the aftermath of her death, other wrestlers echoed Waldek, saying that Janet had been complaining of headaches for weeks but didn't want to miss her bookings. Her parents didn't blame Billy Wolfe, but the other wrestlers did for letting her get beat up too often in training. Janet's death led to an increased backlash against women's wrestling, especially in New York, where it was banned for decades
* 18 years ago in 1997, the WWF ran a live Raw is War from the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Perhaps most memorably, this is the show where Bret Hart cut the famous promo about how if you were to give the United States an enema, you'd stick the hose in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, Bret also challenged The Patriot, who had debuted two weeks earlier and gotten involved with the USA vs. Canada/Hart Foundation feud. The Patriot got a clean pin (albeit off a distraction), and it seemed like he was being groomed to be a main event level babyface.
Del Wilkes, the man behind the mask, had spent much of the last several years working for All Japan Pro Wrestling, where he became an excellent in-ring wrestler and was fairly popular as a babyface who teamed with top Japanese names like Kenta Kobashi. He had always been a charismatic guy pretty strong interviews and a great look going back to early in his career as The Trooper in the AWA and The Dreamweaver in the CWA/ Memphis, but now he was a complete performer. Unfortunately, he wasn't booked well after the win here, and even if he had been, injuries started to pile up, with that came painkiller addiction, and he was done within a few months.
The show also featured a match that was indicative of the WWF mindset at the time. With WCW having pulled ahead in the Monday Night War, thanks in some part to the Cruiserweight division, the WWF decided to instituted a light heavyweight division. While they had a title tournament later in the year, at first, it was just a random assortment of matches with a "LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT DIVISION" graphic flying in. On this night, the division was represented by Devon Storm vs. Ace Darling in a battle of New Jersey independent standouts. They got 45 seconds and the match was immediately cut away from.
Whether it was Vince McMahon or someone else, the WWF braintrust clearly had no concept of why the Cruiserweight division was working in WCW. Most of the time, instead of the best smaller wrestlers they could find from the independent scene, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, it was just whoever was on their radar that was considered too small to get a look otherwise. Scott Putski, a short but muscle bound second generation wrestler who had been around for years and wrestled nothing like WCW's cruiserweights, was an early focus of the division.
At one point, Bobby Fulton and Tommy Rogers, legendary tag team The Fantastics, who were too short for the WWF in the '80s, randomly wrestled each other on Raw and were never seen again. While the lineup they put together for the eventual title tournament was not bad, one first round match stuck out like a sore thumb.
Long time TV job guy Scott Taylor was suddenly a light heavyweight title contender (his push as a tag team with Brian Christopher was not for many months), and he won his first round match over Eric Shelley. Who was Eric Shelley? Just a random local indie worker they threw into the tournament because he was smaller enough.
* 8 years ago in 2007, Karl Gotch, known in Japan as "The God of Professional Wrestling," passed away at 82 years old in Tampa, Florida. Gotch is a fascinating historical figure that we probably can't do full justice to here, but among his various accomplishments, he competed as both a freestyle and Greco Roman wrestler for Belgium in the 1948 Olympics, was an excellent British-trained submission wrestler, is a former WWWF Tag Team Champion, gave the German Suplex its name, and was a prolific trainer for both NJPW and various shoot and shoot-style groups.
His greatest legacy was in Japan, where he was an enduring main event star and a legend at the level of few in the history of the business. He parlayed this into a job training for NJPW, where he taught that man that he dubbed his finest student: The NJPW dojo's first graduate, Yoshiaki Fujiwara. Meanwhile, he was also Antonio Inoki's foil when NJPW started, the "real world champion" who Inoki could make his legend in defeating. He retired in 1982 after a short final match with Fujiwara.
After retiring, his big influence was on the legitimate fighting world. He left NJPW for the second UWF Japan promotion, which did "shoot style" pro wrestling. After the company split into multiple pieces, he was part of Pancrase, the first actual "real pro wrestling" promotion in Japan. Everyone who learned grappling from the Pancrase originals (Ken Shamrock, Minoru Suzuki, and Masakatsu Funaki, who were trained by Gotch's son-in-law, Masami Soronaka) learned Gotch's style through his lineage. Later, he was involved pushing books of old school bodyweight exercises favored by catch wrestlers before a falling out with business partner Matt Furey.