Int'l Wrestling - Montreal #21 Page #2
Not
surprisingly, this piecemeal arrangement lasted less than a few months before
Desmarais' company went under after just a handful of poorly-attended
houses. Desmarais was woefully under-funded and the "Superstars"
headliners were not yet established enough with Montrealers in order to draw
well.
Following this disappointment, Cannon himself decided to pick up the pieces and
ran shows for a while at the old Grand Prix stomping grounds of the
Verdun Auditorium.
Stubbornly,
Montrealers still stayed away in droves. The revolving door of promoters during
1976-77 - many of them unscrupulous characters who cheated
on talent and proved more adept at false advertising than giving the customers
their money's worth - had soured the fans on pro wrestling. Cannon
could produce a damned entertaining and popular TV wrestling show (which
"Superstars" really was), but he couldn't convince fans to return to
the
arenas.
By
mid-1977, Cannon realized things just weren't working out and handed the
Montreal territory over to former wrestler Jack Britton, in order concentrate
his forces in Ontario (excepting Toronto) and Newfoundland. Britton formed the
"Olympia Pro Sports" company and seemed to have both the knowledge and
the credibility required to revive wrestling in Quebec. The father of Gino Brito,
Britton became quite known throughout the wrestling world as the
business manager of the midget wrestlers who became popular attractions on Eddie
Quinn's Montreal Forum shows in the 1950's and remained so across North
America right up the the WWF expansion era of the mid-1980's.
Operating
under the same arrangement as his predecessor Desmarais, Britton really tried to
make a go of it with an eclectic mix of U.S. imports ("Chief"
Jay Strongbow, "Luscious" Johnny Valiant, Spiros Arion), Cannon
stalwarts (Martinez, Otto Von Heller, Waldo Von Erich, Sailor White) and
returning
locals (Brito, Edouard Carpentier, Tarzan Tyler, Domenic DeNucci). In hindsight,
it was almost like a multi-inter-promotional effort which might
very well have paid off if it had been promoted as such. Then again, after the
mushroom cloud created by the Grand Prix vs. All-Star war, it appeared as
if no one had the stomach for a re-visitation to that kind of storyline.
Looking
back, Britton's cards actually were quite interesting and well thought out, yet
Jack's formula still failed to catch fire. Aside from some
of the reasons stated above, the lack of a french language TV show really
snuffed out his chances of breaking the business out of the doldrums in this
province. It was really a no-brainer. French TV had made Eddie Quinn a
millionaire and the loss of it eventually ruined him. Johnny Rougeau was able
to both soar and survive as long as he did because he always had that steady
Saturday afternoon time slot on CFTM channel 10, and Grand Prix only truly
took off when they appeared every Sunday morning on Sherbrooke's CHLT channel 7.
Britton just couldn't interest any french-language Quebec station to pick
up wrestling again after the debacles of previous administrations, and it
essentially cost him his place alongside the great Montreal wrestling
promoters.
Combined
with that, what ultimately sealed Jack's fate was the fact that the Cannon
program's cross-Canada programming format just wasn't conducive to
concentrating on Montreal-centric feuds, and many top names stars would just
suddenly appear on arena cards without the appropriate television build-up.
Still, to his credit, Britton somehow managed to keep things afloat for about
three years until his death in 1980. Despite the fact that they were never
able to return Quebec wrestling to its former glory, both George Cannon and Jack
Britton must be commended for at least restoring stability and
credibility to the promotional end of the business in this province after such
seemingly irreparable damage had been done in the mid-70's.
While
Quebec wrestling was mired in the doldrums throughout the latter half of the
decade, some interesting things were happening in the rest of the
grappling world. Actual inter-promotional world title matches were beginning to
occur on a semi-regular basis. The first one occurred on January 25th,
1978 in Tampa, Florida which saw NWA champion Harley Race battle to a draw with
WWWF kingpin "Superstar" Billy Graham. Fourteen months later on March
25th, 1979, AWA titleholder Nick Bockwinkel faced the WWWF's Bob Backlund. The
following year, on September 22nd, 1980, Backlund faced Race in New
York's Madison Square Garden.
Still
another interesting phenomenon was also taking place.
By late
1979, George Cannon began concentrating most of his "Superstars Of
Wrestling" forces within the Windsor-Detroit area. The TV show, which had
been produced at the CFCF-12 studios since late 1977 pulled up stakes and moved
to smaller confines. As a result, production values suffered and the
Quebec presence all but disappeared. The move hurt both the program's ratings
and the local house show attendance, which wasn't all that healthy to begin
with. As this was happening, WEZF channel 22 (now WVNY-22) - the Burlington,
Vermont ABC border station - picked up "WWF Championship Wrestling"
for their
11:15 p.m. Saturday night time slot. It was the first time channel 22 had aired
pro wrestling since 1974, but the difference was that they had since
secured a spot on the two Montreal-area cable systems and were now readily
accessible throughout the city. As ratings for Cannon's program dropped,
local fans - even the french-speaking ones - began to flock to the WWF
show. The absolutely electric Bruno Sammartino/Larry Zbyszko feud in 1980
sent the
program through the roof and plans began to form in the Montreal office to set
up a new booking agreement with Vince McMahon Sr. in New York.
After Jack
Britton's death, Gino Brito decided to take up the promotional reigns from his
father and made two crucial moves designed to catapult the
re-structured company over the top. First off, he sought to solve the chronic
underfunding problem which had plagued local promoters ever since the heyday
of the Vachon brothers by taking on Frank Valois and Andre The Giant as
partners. On the surface, this seemed a risky proposition. As a veteran of
Grand Prix Wrestling, Brito knew that while banding together a group of star
wrestlers to bankroll a promotion allowed them to outspend rival Johnny
Rougeau in the talent acquisition department, ego clashes and fighting amongst
those men eventually led to the destruction of the company from the
inside. Yet it was a risk Gino probably knew he had to take.
Secondly,
Brito utilized Andre's connections with McMahon to bring in talent from the WWF
in order to capitalize on the growing popularity of their TV
show on channel 22. Thus, "Varoussac Promotions" was ready to hit the
ground running and it didn't take very long for the company to score a hit.
Their
first spectacular at the Paul Sauve Centre on August 25th, 1980 saw the building
sell out for an Andre The Giant vs. Hulk Hogan main event. Just
seven years later, that same match-up would draw 93,000 fans at the WWF's
WrestleMania III extravaganza.
Hot on the
heels of this initial success, Brito lay the crucial third cornerstone in place
when Edouard Carpentier and former European martial arts
competitor Guy Hauray helped secure the old Sunday morning french-language time
slot on Sherbrooke's CHLT channel 7. Brito also revitalized ties with
his old mentor George Cannon, who now needed talent exchange help rather badly,
and got some of his wrestlers back on the "Superstars Of Wrestling"
CFCF-12 show.
Now, the
only thing left for Brito was to find a babyface who could lead the company as
its champion, just like Robert, Carpentier and Rougeau had done
before. It turned out that the this man was right under his nose - his old tag
team partner Dino Bravo.
In the
five years following the demise of Einhorn's IWA, Bravo had remained in the
southern U.S. where he parlayed his tag team experience into a good
run there with several partners, including a young Ricky Steamboat. Brief stints
as Americas champion in Los Angeles and Mid-Atlantic champion in the
Carolinas paved the way for Dino's coming out party as a singles headliner when
he made his way back up to Toronto and scored his first really big solo
success by capturing the area's inaugural Canadian heavyweight championship in a
tournament at Maple Leaf Gardens on December 17th, 1978, defeating the
legendary Gene Kiniski in the final. By the end of 1980, Brito felt that Bravo
was now ready to headline Montreal for the long haul.
With the
four cornerstones firmly in place, Varoussac's "Les Etoiles De La Lutte"
("The Stars Of Wrestling" in english) television show took off like a
rocket and house show attendance at the Paul Sauve Centre soared. With Bravo and
Andre headlining most shows, along with returning local stars and WWF
imports, the company had finally restored Montreal to its rightful place as one
of the premier wrestling centers of the world.
1982 saw
Varoussac build on its initial successes by setting up the triumphant return of
professional wrestling to the venerable Montreal Forum,
after a six year absence, on July 26th. The following year saw the promotion
really hit its stride when the Dino Bravo/Masked Superstar epic feud lit up
the territory for most of 1983.
The
beginning of 1984 could have spelled disaster for Brito & co. when the WWF's
Vince McMahon Jr. embarked on his ambitious national expansion project
and severed the co-promotional agreement Brito had made with Vince's
father. But Varoussac was now so well-established that they didn't really
need the
WWF anymore. As an insurance policy, however, Brito quickly struck a talent
exchange deal with Verne Gagne's AWA in Minneapolis.
By this
time, Andre had sold his share of the company to Bravo and Rick Martel was in
the process of buying out Frank Valois' piece of the pie. The
company was officially re-christened "International Wrestling", but
nary a beat was missed and match-ups actually improved when Martel won the AWA
world
title that Spring and defended it regularly throughout Quebec.
But
serious storm clouds were looming on the horizon.
The WWF
had already made their intentions clearly known when they swallowed up George
Cannon's "Superstars Of Wrestling" promotion in early '84 and took
over the TV show which was airing on CFCF-12. On May 29th, McMahon's Quebec
liaison Pat Patterson booked a surprise TV taping for the Verdun Auditorium
and the plan was to battle International head-on. But the WWF miscalculated the
popularity of the hot local promotion and the taping drew poorly, even
with world champion Hulk Hogan headlining the show. As a result, the WWF decided
that another strategy to conquer the Quebec market was needed.
In January
1985, one year after McMahon had taken over the Cannon program on CFCF-12,
Quebec wrestling fans got the shock of their lives when Carpentier
and Hauray had reached a deal to switch the CHLT-7 show to an all-WWF format.
Luckily, Brito had months earlier struck an agreement with the Cogeco network
of stations for a second french-language TV show, and that literally saved
International Wrestling from ushering in 1985 without television. That would
have killed the company right then and there, but the homegrown boys managed to
dodge the bullet.
Meanwhile,
things were no better for McMahon's stateside competitors. Once unthinkable,
Verne Gagne's AWA arranged an unprecedented co-promotional deal
with the NWA in a desperate attempt to stop the WWF juggernaut in its
tracks. Dubbed "Pro Wrestling USA," the combined effort secured
a TV slot on the ESPN
cable network and promoted shows as far into WWF territory as New Jersey.
International benefited from this arrangement by booking the Road Warriors,
Butch Reed, "Gorgeous" Jimmy Garvin, Tom Zenk and The Tonga Kid for
Quebec appearances.
Even
though International was still drawing well (especially with the Rougeaus/Garvins
feud burning up the circuit) Brito must have really felt the
WWF breathing down his neck. It was only a matter of time before McMahon would
once again try to run house shows in Quebec, but this time he had a
much larger financial war chest at his disposal and could afford to lose money
at first before ultimately gaining the upper hand. Realizing this,
International decided to roll the dice and enter into an agreement with the WWF
which would commence in August 1985. The general terms of the deal handed
McMahon exclusive rights to Le Colisee in Quebec City in exchange for a
co-promotional partnership for the Montreal Forum. Meanwhile, Brito would run
the smaller Paul Sauve Centre unopposed.
Although
most fans tend to ignore this because it happened up here in Montreal (a place
most American fans didn't seem to know existed at all until
1997), the concessions in the house show match-ups that McMahon made to Brito
were unprecedented for that time period. The bouts took place in
International's ring. International wrestlers main-evented four out of the six
shows and were even allowed clean victories over WWF stars. This only
demonstrates how important the Montreal market was to Vince McMahon.
Turning
back southward, McMahon's competitors, like their predecessors before them,
somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. While the
Pro Wrestling USA experiment had failed to slow down WWF expansion, it was
actually holding its own and even enjoyed a modicum of successes. On
September 28th, 1985 - one month after the WWF/International deal took effect -
the AWA/NWA partnership reached its zenith by drawing 21,000 fans to an
outdoor Chicago show at Comiskey Park called "SuperClash".
As it
turned out, this success was the worst thing that could've happened to the Pro
Wrestling USA concept because it immediately went to everyone's
head, particularly Verne Gagne's. Whether it was because he had planned all
along to back-stab his partners, or was legitimately fearful that the NWA
stars were outshining his AWA crew, Gagne pulled out of the deal and took the
ESPN time slot with him, thus consigning Pro Wrestling USA to the scrap heap
of failed inter-promotional ventures that had come before it.
If nothing
else, the WWF/International Forum shows were a huge hit at the box office,
consistently drawing between 15,000 to 21,000 fans for the six cards.
A largely obscured tidbit to this deal was that there was, at least initially, a
plan to culminate the six-show deal with a mega-blowout Dino Bravo vs. Hulk
Hogan main event at the huge Olympic Stadium in Montreal which would surely have
shattered the city's all-time attendance record. Somewhere along the line, that
idea was abandoned in favor of holding the bout on January 13th, 1986 at the
Forum. As we all know, the bout never materialized and much speculation abounds
as to why. It has been erroneously reported that the match was cancelled on the
night of the show at the last minute, but that was not the case. I was in
attendance that night and it had already been announced for several weeks on TV
that Hogan would be defending the WWF title against "Cowboy" Bob Orton
while Bravo faced off against old nemesis "Big" John Studd. In any
case, the lynch-pin to the success of McMahon's new WWF was Hogan's popular
image, and risking that in a match with Montreal hero
Bravo in Dino's home town just wasn't something Vince was prepared to do.
He soon
made it clear why he wasn't prepared to do this when he dissolved the WWF
alliance with International Wrestling and announced that the February
26th Forum show would be an all-WWF affair, as would all Forum events from there
on in. Gino Brito's company had gotten some excellent houses out of the
partnership but McMahon cleverly used International's popularity to gain
valuable exposure for his superstars with Montreal ticket-buyers. It was
"every promoter for himself," and International was now in big
trouble.
Losing the
revenue-rich Montreal Forum was damaging enough, but now the talent-raiding
began. The Rougeau brothers and King Tonga were the first to
jump in the Spring. By the end of 1986, Dino Bravo saw the writing on the wall,
sold his share of the company to Brito and Rick Martel, and headed over
to the WWF. Rick Martel and Tom Zenk joined him there in time for WrestleMania
III in the Spring of 1987, leaving Brito alone as the sole owner
of International Wrestling which, by this point, wasn't a good position to find
himself in. A few months later, International Wrestling went bankrupt
and closed its doors for good.
Ironically,
one could argue that the six-month WWF/International deal was the most
successful inter-promotional venture in Quebec wrestling history -
certainly in terms of ticket sales. Yet, as history has proven time and time
again, even triumph is no match for ego and greed when it comes to
professional wrestling's behind-the-scenes politicking. Like many of the
wrestlers themselves who aspire so obsessively to stand alone at the top of
the mountain wearing the world heavyweight championship belt, so it is with the
men who have controlled and orchestrated the industry from behind closed
doors.
After the
WWF took control of the Quebec market for good, there were a few
half-hearted attempts to stop the inevitable. Verne Gagne tried again to
partner up with a few of the remaining southern-based promoters in 1989, but his
second foray turned out to be even more disastrous than the Pro Wrestling
USA fiasco and wound up destroying both his own AWA and most of the other
companies he hooked up with.
At the
height of the WWF/WCW promotional war, Jacques Rougeau pulled off a coup and
actually managed to sneak into the Molson Centre on April 11th, 1997
for a one-off co-promotional deal combining wrestlers from his small independent
group with a few WCW superstars. This show is also historically
significant for World champion Hulk Hogan going behind WCW head Eric Bischoff's
back and dropping a rare (for the time) clean pinfall loss to
Rougeau in the non-title main event. But the ensuing "battle for
Quebec" sadly never materialized, the show was never followed up on and WCW
oddly
decided to leave the province squarely under Vince McMahon's control.
The whole
notion of a big inter-promotional battle done right came to a whimpering (yet
perhaps a fitting) end with the WWF's loused-up "WCW/ECW
Invasion" angle of 2001. After nearly a century of rivals consistently
sabotaging each other's schemes to bring off some form of an ultimate
inter-promotional storyline, Vince McMahon proved that even the most successful
wrestling promoter in history was capable of screwing it up all on his own.
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