Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
Professional wrestling can be a very cyclical business. Many times you could be watching a match, a gimmick or a storyline and think to yourself…”I have seen this before.” Sometimes, you may be right, as many things in wrestling do get recycled over the years. Other times, it just may be something similar to something you saw years ago. In any case, Deja View looks at stuff that may or may not have been re-used in wrestling or something that was simply similar in nature that made you go…”Oh yeah, that’s where I remember that from.”
In 1988, Jim Crockett Promotions and the NWA created a gimmick cage match called the ‘Tower of Doom.’ It was a three tiered cage concept that was to debut at the July 10th Great American Bash of that year. While Crockett originally conceived the idea of a three level cage match…they were not the first to use the gimmick. That distinction went to World Class Championship Wrestling. They used the exact same gimmicked cage on the May 8, 1988 Texas Stadium Parade of Champions.
Was this a case of both JCP and WCCW having the same exact idea at the same time? In this case, no. Michael ‘PS’ Hayes, who was employed by Crockett, had a falling out with the promotion and left to return to World Class. When he returned to WCCW, Hayes revealed to then World Class booker Ken Mantell of the triple cage concept that Crockett was going to use for the Great American Bash.
Mantell quickly went to work on designing and constructing the cage which he called ‘The Triple Dome of Terror.’ World Class would use the cage twice on the Parade of Champions event. Despite WCCW’s theft of the idea, the NWA went ahead with their match ‘The Tower of Doom’ at the Great American Bash two months later. The concept of the triple cage match went dormant for several years, until WCW revived it in 1996.
