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One understated advantage professional wrestling has over its more "legitimate" counterparts in pro-sports is its dynamic ability to remove the things people find boring about "real" competitions and place a simulated fight within an entertainment context.
While WrestleManias 8, 9, 19, 26, 28, 29, 31 and 33 were all held outdoors, we are yet to see a UFC pay-per-view with as much dazzling presentation. The NFL gives us real competition but also stringent rules including prohibiting players from dancing in the end zone after touchdowns, something WWE would never do.
In wrestling, the personalities, characters, storylines and overall context are as important to the medium as the core in-ring performance, therefore it makes sense for live event settings to be as dynamic and charming as the two performers in the ring.
Over the years, there have certainly been a large number of weird yet interesting locations for pro-wrestling matches and events, and just like settings in TV and film, weird wrestling venues have often done a masterful job selling whatever mood was meant to be conveyed in the booking of the matches.
These are the 25 strangest places pro-wrestling has ever taken place in (part 1 of 3).
#25 A subway station
In early 1997, WWE (then WWF) debuted an edgy, late night show on the USA Network called Shotgun Saturday Night. Aired live amid New York City's busy nightlife, it was a unique twist on their standard programming that created an intimate atmosphere for fans in attendance and those watching back home.
The company's Superstars were removed from the usual large-scale arenas and placed in small Fight Club-style settings in bars and clubs across the city. Unfortunately, the show changed after just a few weeks and was turned into a dark match (initially untelevised match) program filmed in arenas before Raw, but not before giving the fans a memorable night of action in the middle of New York's Penn Station.
That's right, then-Intercontinental Champion Hunter Hearst Helmsley (better known as Triple H) literally emerged from a limousine on 34th Street with the title in hand just after a commercial break and stepped directly into the busy train station to defend his belt in the main event against the Undertaker.
The match, which was preceded by Rocky Maivia, Marc Mero and other wrestlers on the undercard, took place in a small 16x16 ring with NXT-style yellow ropes, yet still delivered a cool television moment. The Undertaker's ominous entrance, casually stepping down a long flight of stairs as his music played and NYPD officers stood in the background, was chilling.
The Dead Man ultimately solidified Shotgun's short-lived coolness by the end of the night when, after losing to Triple H by DQ, he brought Hunter to the upper level of the station and tombstoned him down an escalator as dozens of fans loudly cheered.
#24 A water park
The women of Japanese-style professional wrestling, known as joshi puroresu, are known for hard punching and kicking as a method of trying to create a sense of realism, but it's also true that joshis occasionally like to have a little fun with wrestling.
Case in point, AJW's Yumi Fukawa and Nobue Endo's 1996 ringless mat match in a Japanese water park. Although rumored to have been spurred by a lack of ticket sales and the all-female promotion's desperate financial troubles at the time (they've since gone out of business), it still made for a pretty enjoyable segment:
Then there's current joshi promotion Ice Ribbon. They seem to be doing just fine business-wise, so one can only assume their Splash Ribbon show held last August was for solely entertainment purposes:
#23 The back of a moving semi-truck
In 1995, Dustin Rhodes fought Blacktop Bully in a King of the Road Match at that year's WCW Uncensored pay-per-view. The match took place in the back of a moving 18-wheeler with a separate pickup truck and aerial helicopter following behind with cameras in order to catch the action.
As if this weren't silly enough, the stipulation to win was that one of the two wrestlers had to make his way to an airhorn in the back of the truck's cab and honk it. Unfortunately, Rhodes lost and was fired not long afterwards for blading himself without permission during the match, but given the fact that he was hired by the WWF and developed the iconic Goldust character the following year, I'd say WCW did him a favor.
#22 A house, a backyard, a lake and a dirt hill (all in one match)
Long before his ascension within the Bullet Club stable and his epic six-star trilogy of matches with Kazuchika Okada in NJPW, Kenny Omega solidified himself as the King of the Anywhere Match when he fought and defeated Mike Angels all over a suburban property in Canada.
The match, which featured Omega nailing a flying senton onto Angels in a lake before hitting a Michinoku driver on top of a huge pile of dirt for the pin, became a minor viral hit in 2008 and scored Omega a job with Japanese indy promotion DDT (where he would meet Kota Ibushi and eventually become the star he is now).
#21 A nightclub pool
Following in the footsteps of MTV's Spring Break at Florida venue Club La Vela, 90s wrestling powerhouse WCW created their own event by the same name at the same venue during Monday Nitro from 1997-1999.
The ring was held on a stage above a pool with wrestlers sometimes getting thrown in or jumping into the water. The most insane moment from the WCW Spring Break shows, however, was when Sting (who at that time was regularly making weekly arena entrances by descending from the roof on a zip line in order to pitch his enigmatic, phantom-like character) made an iconic entrance down a zip line from a helicopter, with the heavy propeller winds blowing heel authority figure Eric Bischoff out of the ring.
#20 A bathhouse
For the wrestlers of defunct Japanese death match promotions FMW and IWA, a regular hardcore match in an arena filled with screaming fans just wouldn't do. In order for people to truly appreciate the enormity of their confrontation, Tarzan Goto and Mr Gannosuke had to up the ante.
Back in August of 1995, they comically faced the Headhunters (who appeared the WWF Royal Rumble just a few months later) in a real-life Japanese bathhouse that was filled with members of the public who were just there to enjoy a skinny dip. The original video won't be linked here due to some unfortunate NSFW nudity from the unsuspecting bathhouse patrons, but here's a time-stamped synopsis by WhatCulture and you're welcome to search YouTube for the original video yourself.
#19 A military compound
Beginning in 2003 from Camp Victory in Baghdad, Iraq, WWE has run the annual Tribute To The Troops show as an olive branch to soldiers stationed overseas during the War on Terror.
While it's true that the show's footage of wrestlers interacting with soldiers and their families and friends is meant to evoke empathy and patriotism, the visual of an outdoor televised WWE show happening in the middle of a desert is still pretty bizarre.
The ringside area is surrounded by barricades that look like they were made for ducking enemy gunfire rather than holding back a crowd. The security for this event must have been stringent too as the United States had just captured dictator Saddam Hussein less than two weeks earlier and fighting was still happening all over Iraq.
The first edition of this show also lacked the shiny production values that would be used in later years and had the feel of a small, gritty house show or indy event. Weird.
#18 An uninhabited island
Antonio Inoki vs. Masa Saito in 1987 on Ganryujima Island in Japan, the location of a legendary samurai duel between Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro, certainly belongs on this list.
Imagine having so much heat towards someone, that you challenge them to a two-hour Island Death Match where you fight across a land mass like two anime characters? Rumor has it that the WWF planned something similar to this in the mid-90s involving the Undertaker and Mankind on the San Francisco prison island Alcatraz.
Hiroshe Hase vs. Tiger Jeet Singh later tried to recapture the magic with a bizarre feud leading to this even more bizarre match; both opponents looked like psychopaths rolling around in the grass with open wounds while the extremely quiet crowd was barely noticeable, the announcers were highly monotone and the ring was almost completely ignored.
#17 A beach
WCW's Bash at the Beach pay-per-views in 1994 and 1995 took place on Daytona Beach in Florida and the '95 edition doubled as a set location for an episode of the hit show Baywatch, guest starring Hulk Hogan and other WCW talent.
It's too bad that during subsequent years we'd have to settle for a fake indoor beach set inside an arena instead of the real thing. It's also very unfortunate that WWE has never used an outdoor or beachfront setting for Summerslam.
Just imagine the end-of-summer pay-per-view set in an MLB, MLS or tennis stadium like Wrigley Field or Arthur Ashe? Imagine an outdoor NXT show set at an Atlantic Ocean beach not far from Full Sail? Anyhow, rumor has it that WCW stopped doing these beach shows because sand got on the mats, the bottom of the wrestlers' boots and all over the ring causing mat-based spots to hurt due to the sand cutting into their skin.
That's not even mentioning the lack of profit from ticket sales and increased production costs.
#16 A mall (specifically the largest shopping mall in the U.S.)
Keeping with the theme of WCW, the once mighty Atlanta Georgia-based promotion's expansion into television during the start of the iconic Monday Night Wars began on September 4, 1995 at the largest shopping mall in the United States, the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The mall played host to the very first episode of Monday Nitro on the Turner-owned TNT network, and featured the utterly shocking debut of Lex Luger (who had just secretly defected from WWF the night before) and an opening match between the legendary Jushin "Thunder" Liger and the late great Brian Pillman, as well as appearances from Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, Sting and others.
The ring was set up in the middle of the mall's concourse with fans and onlookers on multiple floors visibly cheering as if the action was going down in a basketball arena.
