Heroes of Wrestling
| Heroes of Wrestling | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Information | ||||
| Promotion | Heroes of Wrestling | |||
| Date | October 10, 1999 | |||
| Attendance | 2,300 | |||
| Venue | Casino Magic | |||
| City | Bay St. Louis, Mississippi | |||
| Pay-per-view chronology | ||||
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Heroes of Wrestling was a professional wrestling pay-per-view event that took place on October 10, 1999 from the Casino Magic hotel and casino in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The event was meant to be the first in a series of pay-per-views that would feature popular wrestling stars from the 1980s and early 1990s. Plans for the franchise were abandoned following the event, which suffered from a poor buy rate and several controversies, most notably a disastrous main event featuring an inebriated Jake Roberts.
Playing off the resurgence in popularity of pro wrestling at the time, Fosstone Productions president Bill Stone conceived a series of events consisting of wrestling stars from the 1980s and early 1990s fighting one another in a series of "dream matches". Stone booked the initial pay-per-view with the intent of having three more, run on a quarterly basis, if the initial target of 40,000 buys was reached.
Although the event was heavily promoted, it was only purchased by 29,000 households. Additionally, the event itself was generally regarded to be of poor quality: Wrestling Observer rated it the worst major wrestling event of 1999, with its editor Dave Meltzer giving a rating of "absolute zero" to a tag team match featuring Luke Williams and Butch Miller facing Nikolai Volkoff and The Iron Sheik. Meltzer's colleague, Bryan Alvarez of Figure Four Weekly, has repeatedly referred to this match as the worst he has ever seen and rated it "minus more stars than there are in the universe"
Another match on the card that proved problematic was the singles contest between former Horseman Tully Blanchard and Stan Lane of Midnight Express fame. While most professional wrestling matches are scripted, the men appeared visibly unaware of the intended outcome of the match, resulting in several false climaxes to the fight as each man attempted to "win": Blanchard kicked out of what was supposed to be a finishing maneuver by Lane, who began celebrating his "victory" before realizing the fight was still going on. Later, Lane failed to kick out of what was not intended to be a finishing pinfall until after the referee had stopped the match.
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