She also had some matches with Jason, whose gimmick I found disappointing because he doesn’t even wear a hockey mask. She had a lengthy feud with Simon Diamond, who had a “Simon says” gimmick and a generally low regard for women. In a promotion with no real women’s division, she had little choice but to fight men. ![]() Meanwhile in ECW, Jazz was a powerful female fighter in a world where that was hardly a thing. And even when he was forced to vacate for exceeding the weight limit, Madusa never got to wrestle for it again. Madusa, Spice, and Asya (a female bodybuilder WCW hired in a blatant attempt to have their own Chyna) beat him up after the match and poured his own barbecue sauce on him, but the belt was already lost. (You have no idea how much I wish I was making this up.) He proclaimed that he was going to win the belt to prove that men were better than women, and thanks to heel shenanigans, win it he did. He was a large man with no particular wrestling skills who wore a cowboy hat and hit people with bottles of barbecue sauce. She lost the belt to Oklahoma, a character created to be a parody of Jim Ross. It’s all very ‘90s.īut if the beginning of Madusa’s Cruiserweight Title run was kind of magical, its ending was just as cringe-worthy. There’s also definitely some bisexual subtext in the way Spice looks at Madusa. In what might be my favorite ending to a romance angle in wrestling history, the two women unite against the man they’d both been involved with, and Spice becomes Madusa’s valet. During the Cruiserweight title match, Spice turned on Karagias, punching him in the balls to help Madusa win the title. The two had previously had a match on Nitro as part of a WCW Championship Tournament which led to a romance angle between them, but by Starrcade Karagias was involved with a Nitro Girl named Spice. She fought a few other men in her years at WCW, but one feud stood out.Īt Starrcade 1999, Madusa challenged Evan Karagias for the Cruiserweight Championship. Woman Match.” She looked pretty strong in the bout, but he won by cheating, and the less that’s said about the storyline around it, the better. Madusa had her first televised intergender match all the way back in 1996 at WCW Uncensored, when she fought Colonel Robert Parker in a “Man vs. I’m going to take a minute to focus on each of them. The other factor was a trio of women, one at each company, who were seen as formidable enough to take on men, and who were comfortable doing so. With three companies on national television, they were all getting whatever attention they could by pushing whatever envelopes they could find to push. Part of the reason for the boom was the general atmosphere of the era. ![]() The frequency of these matches increased in all three major companies at the time, until by the end of the year it was happening nearly every week. It was in 1999 that intergender wrestling really blew up. But things were about to ramp up in a big way. There had been earlier matches in WCW involving Jacquelyn and Madusa (more on them shortly), but the arrival of intergender wrestling to WWE wasn’t all that impressive. Goldust (Luna’s onscreen partner at the time) beat up Knowles before the match started, but Luna did get the pin. The earliest intergender match in WWE that I could find was between Luna Vachon and Matt Knowles, on a 1998 Raw. Maybe by exploring the history, we can better understand why so many people think of intergender as such a bad, distasteful idea. ![]() So this seems like a good time to look back at intergender wrestling at WWE, as well as at the two companies that WWE absorbed earlier this century, WCW and ECW. It wasn’t much of a match, but it did happen. Frequent NXT guest and Mae Young Classic competitor Candice LeRae is famous for her intergender matches, at PWG and elsewhere.Īnd while many people have said that intergender wrestling will never return to WWE, they’ve now been proven wrong with an intergender match on Smackdown, between Becky Lynch and James Ellsworth. Ruby Riot also engaged many intergender matches there and at other companies. Current NXT up-and-comer Abbey Laith, for example, was the Grand Champion of Chikara, the top title of that male-dominated company. It’s also a part of many independent promotions, of course. But it’s a part of wrestling that hasn’t gone away, and has even reached more prominence on shows like Lucha Underground. Matches between men and women are a topic often avoided among wrestling fans, because it can be so explosive. Let’s do it: let’s talk about intergender wrestling.
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