Today In Wrestling History 8/4: The Undertaker Meets Kane Two Years Early, Strike Force Forms, More

* 28 years ago in 1987, the WWF held a Superstars of Wrestling taping at Dane County Coliseum in Madison, Wisconsin. There were a few major angles shot at the taping:

The first was the debut of Sir Oliver Humperdink as a babyface manager, fresh off leaving Jim Crockett Promotions. As a heel, he had been hosting Southern Pro Wrestling, the secondary of the two shows based out of the old Florida office they had taken over, which was they were also syndicating outside of the territory on networks like SportsVision/Sportschannel Chicago and Home Team Sports. At this taping, he made his debut as a rival of Bobby Heenan in a segment taped for Prime Time Wrestling, where Heenan took a bump off the interview platform.

That led to a segment on the following weekend's Superstars show. The previous week, Heenan had promised that Paul Orndorff would concede that newly hired Heenan Family stablemate Rick Rude had the best physique in both the stable and the sport. Here, Orndorff obviously did not do that, instead firing Heenan and announcing that Humperdink was his new manager. Orndorff would pick some steam back up in the early '90s, but here, he was still reeling from the effects of his neck injury and the related muscle atrophy in his arm, so he was not quite the compelling performer he had been before.

Meanwhile, at the previous taping, in a bit of an odd interview, they wrote Tom Zenk (who left over a contract dispute) out of storylines by having Rick Martel, his tag team partner in the Can-Am Connection, declare that he had "quit" when the going got tough in their feud with The Islanders. Well, he never said it was Tom Zenk, and neither did announcer Craig DeGeorge. It was just a lot of "your partner" and "my partner." Regardless, Martel was committed to taking out The Islanders.

So on this set of tapings, The Islanders attacked Martel, only for Tito Santana, sitting in as a guest Spanish language announcer, to make the save. The next week, they cut an amusingly awkward promo where Martel dubbed their new team Strike Force as Santana proclaimed that "We'll be striking with force, baby."

They went on to have one of the most underrated feuds of the '80s, with the above match at the Boston Garden being one of their best. Both teams were underrated on their own (and Tama had truly found himself as a heel), but

* 20 years ago in 1995, Smoky Mountain Wrestling promoted the last really big show in their history in the form of the Super Bowl of Wrestling, which drew close to 5,000 fans at the Civic Coliseum in Knoxville, Tennessee. The show was built around bringing in wrestlers from other promotions, including the WWF.

The larger role of the main event was turning Buddy Landel babyface. He was the top heel after getting sober and in great shape, on his best run in close to a decade. The first step was having him talk about his past. His manager, Jim Cornette, said he was so confident that he wasn't going to interfere in Landel's shot at WWF Intercontinental Champion Shawn Michaels. "That's right Jimmy, you're not gonna interfere." Not only did he open up about his past and what the opportunity meant to him, but he admitted for the first time that he was born and raised in Knoxville.

Michaels and Landel had an excellent match with a clever finish. Referee Mark Curtis was bumped, and Cornette defied Landel's orders by trying to interfere. He failed, and paid for it, but Landel took advantage of the situation, hitting a DDT and his corkscrew elbow drop finisher. 1-2...Curtis sees Cornette's tennis racket in the ring. Landel arguing with Curtis (since he didn't actually do anything wrong) led to Michaels hitting the superkick for the win.

The biggest monsters in SMW and the WWF did battle on the card, with The Undertaker defeating SMW's Unabomb. Unabomb was, of course, Glenn Jacobs, the future Kane. Meanwhile, Jacobs, who had been doing skits for a few months, was about to make his WWF in-ring debut as Dr. Isaac Yankem against Bret Hart at SummerSlam.

The card also featured various wrestlers from the USWA in Memphis (as the SMW vs. USWA feud was heating up), Dan Severn defending the NWA World Heavyweight Title, Al Snow regaining the Midwest Territorial Wrestling Heavyweight Title from Marty Jannetty in a fantastic match, and the full-time return of the Heavenly Bodies, defeating The THUGs (Tracy Smothers and Tony Anthony) to win the SMW Tag Team Titles. The Steiner Brothers had been scheduled to wrestle The Headbangers at one point, but that fell apart when Rick booked Scott without his permission. Chris Benoit was Snow's originally scheduled opponent, but that fell through due to visa issues.

* That same day in 1995, WCW's Collision in Korea pay-per-view premiered. This was a compilation of matches from the NJPW shows at Mayday Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea on April 28th and 29th. The cards themselves are legendary for the crowds they drew well in excess of 150,000 each night, though it was, for lack of a better term, something of a "civic duty" to attend. If you haven't read the oral history of the shows that Sports Illustrated's published, you need to. https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2015/04/27/muhammad-ali-ric-flair-oral-history-pro-wrestling-north-korea

The idea of spotlighting a WCW star headlining the biggest pro wrestling crowd of all time seemed great on paper, and their Japan Supershow PPVs from 1991-1993 had done well enough, but this show was a mess. For some reason, the tape NJPW sent over still had the Japanese commentary on it, so they had to turn down the audio to the point you barely heard the in-ring sounds or crowd noise. There wasn't much of the latter because the crowd, having never seen pro wrestling before, barely responded, but it was still distracting. Announcers Eric Bischoff, Kazuo Ishikawa (actually Kazuo "Sonny" Onoo), and Mike Tenay didn't click, either, and were obviously calling the show in a studio after the fact.

* 19 years ago in 1996, NJPW ran night 3 of that year's G1 Climax tour, with the most newsworthy events being the semifinals of the single elimination J-Crown tournament on the undercard to unify eight different junior heavyweight titles.

WAR International Junior Heavyweight and British Commonwealth Junior Heavyweight Champion Ultimo Dragon defeated NWA World Welterweight and UWA World Junior Light Heavyweight Champion Shinjiro Ohtani to become a quadruple champion. This was the best match of the tournament and a legitimate match of the year candidate, which was especially impressive in 1996 when there were several strong contenders in the NJPW junior Heavyweight division alone. Both guys were arguably at the peak of their powers and built the match tremendously, plus there's a cool side storyline with Ohtani's father watching from the crowd.

In the other semifinal, IWGP Junior Heavyweight and NWA World Junior Heavyweight champion The Great Sasuke defeated WWA World Junior Light Heavyweight and WWF World Light Heavyweight champion El Samurai to unify the titles.This was another excellent match, though not quite match of the year level like Dragon-Ohtani was. Samurai was always kind of underrated and he's become even more underrated historically since his retirement, but he was a tremendous performer and did an elite job of reigning in Sasuke.