WWE SUMMER SLAM EVER HISTORY:
SummerSlam is a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event, produced annually in August by professional wrestling promotion WWE. The inaugural SummerSlam took place on August 29, 1988 at Madison Square Garden in New York, New York and was broadcast via pay-per-view, unlike the Royal Rumble of that year which was broadcast as a television special on USA Network. Dubbed as "The Biggest Event of the Summer", the event is considered as one of the "Big Four" original pay-per-view events of WWE (along with WrestleMania, Royal Rumble and Survivor Series) and is regarded by WWE as their second biggest event of the year, after WrestleMania.
1 - SummerSlam 92: This was the first WWE PPV held outdoors and the first to take place outside of North America. The main event was a match for the Intercontinental Championship which saw the British Bulldog win the title from his brother in law, Bret Hart. That match won the Pro Wrestling Illustrated match of the year award.
2 – SummerSlam 02: The Nassau Coliseum crowd was into this card which featured incredible action from start to finish. The card saw the WWE PPV debut of Rey Mysterio, the return of Shawn Michaels after a five year hiatus, and the crowning of Brock Lesnar as the then-youngest WWE champion.
3 – SummerSlam 91: Amazingly, the main event of this card was not a wrestling match. The show ended with the wedding of the “Macho Man” and the late Miss Elizabeth. The card featured several memorable moments including Bret Hart’s first WWE singles title victory, the WWE PPV debut of Sid, and the Mountie spending a night in a NYC jail.
In the 1980s, Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (WWF)'s main competition in the professional wrestling industry was from Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP). McMahon countered Jim Crockett's successful Starrcade pay-per-view, which began airing in 1983, by making the WrestleMania franchise. After WrestleMania III, the most successful professional wrestling pay-per-view event in history, McMahon made the Survivor Series franchise, which aired the same day as Starrcade '87 in November 1987. After defeating Crockett in the ratings, McMahon made the Royal Rumble, an event airing for free on the USA Network in January 1988, which set a ratings record for the network with eight million households tuning in to watch the event. In retaliation, Crockett made the Clash of the Champions event, which aired simultaneously with WrestleMania IV. WrestleMania IV garnered higher ratings, and not long after, Crockett filed for bankruptcy and sold his company to Ted Turner, who renamed it World Championship Wrestling (WCW).
As the WWF continued to replace its closed circuit programming with pay-per-view programming, McMahon added more pay-per-views to the lineup to capitalize on the success of his previous events. In addition to WrestleMania in March, the Royal Rumble in January, and Survivor Series in November, McMahon made an event for August, which he named SummerSlam. To keep the WWF from having a market monopoly, Turner began airing monthly WCW, and both companies began bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. SummerSlam became one of World Wrestling Federation (later World Wrestling Entertainment, and eventually just WWE)'s most successful events and one of the "Big Four" pay-per-views, along with WrestleMania, Survivor Series, and the Royal Rumble. Those four events, along with King of the Ring, are known as the "Classic Five".
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