Today In Wrestling History 6/15: Forgotten HIAC, CM Punk Breaks Skull, Donald Trump Buys Raw, More

* 36 years ago in 1979, The Blond Bombers (Wayne "Honky Tonk Man" Ferris and Larry "Moondog Spot" Latham) defeated Jerry Lawler and Bill Dundee in Tupelo, Mississippi to win the AWA Southern Tag Team Title. After the match, they kept fighting, and the brawl moved to the building's concession stand, where all hell broke loose.

What ensued was likely the wildest and most viscerally violent brawl in the history of professional wrestling up to that point. All hell had broken loose and this was way past being a wrestling match. It was a hate-filled, violent bar fight where they used everything that wasn't nailed down. Mustard was everywhere from broken jars, and when the dust cleared, the concession stand was destroyed.

Jerry Jarrett had booked the angle to make the Bombers hot heels after Robert Fuller was fired as booker, took his crew of stars back to Knoxville, and tanked business in the process. It worked, and ticket sales in the territory quickly rebounded.

Contrary to popular belief, this was not the first iteration of what would become known as the Tupelo Concession Stand Brawl. A year earlier, there had been a very similar angle after a match where Lawler and Robert Gibson faced Dennis Condrey and Phil Hickerson, but the brawl was off-camera and it wasn't promoted heavily after the fact.

* 17 years ago in 1998, the WWF had a live Raw from the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Texas. The main event was one of the "forgotten" Hell in a Cell matches, as Steve Austin and The Undertaker went to a no contest with Mankind and Kane. The match never really got started, as The Undertaker no-showed his entrance. The heels tried to double team Austin outside the cage, so Paul Bearer locked himself in the cage to protect himself from The Undertaker...who was, of course, under the ring. Kane climbed to the roof to find a way in and save his father, Austin took out Mankind, and the show ended with an Austin-Kane slugfest on the roof.

* 13 years ago in 2002, Jersey Championship Wrestling ran the third annual Jersey J-Cup tournament at RexPlex in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The bracket featured a loaded field, with long-time indie standout Reckless Youth winning the tournament by going through Insane Dragon, CM Punk, A.J. Styles, and American Dragon (Daniel Bryan). Of the other wrestlers in the tournament, Mark Briscoe, Colt Cabana, Scoot Andrews, and Dixie would be the most recognizable names, plus Inferno (Dan "Inferno Kid/Danny Inferno" Gimondo) defeated Jay Briscoe in a non-tournament match that served as the co-main event.

The big news coming out of the tournament was that Punk fractured his skull in the match with Reckless Youth. At the time, one of his trademark moves was a twisting Buff Blockbuster off the second rope, and it was mistimed here, with Reckless landing on Punk's head. As soon as the match ended, it was clear something was wrong, as Punk needed to use a chair as a walker to get to the back. He was rushed to the hospital, where he made a half-hearted attempt at punching the orderlies who tried to give him painkillers.

For the next few weeks, he was in rough shape, sleeping 20 hours a day on his best friend's couch and lost all track of time because the TV/VCR combo in the room repeatedly rewound and replayed the same movie. He came back in September, way ahead of doctor's orders, but as long as he was careful, he didn't seem to have a lot of lasting effects.

* Later that day in 2002, Court Bauer's MLW held its first card at Viking Hall (ECW Arena) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The show was built around a tournament for the MLW Championship, which Shane Douglas won by defeating Steve Corino in the quarterfinals, Jerry Lynn in the semifinals, and both Vampiro and All Japan Pro Wrestling's Taiyo Kea in the three-way finals. Douglas tried to throw the belt down after the match a la the NWA Title in 1994, but was told he'd have to defend it.

The angle fell a bit flat and left a bad taste in some fans' mouths. Fans were looking for something different, and while it was refreshing to see Kea (as well as La Parka, who lost to Lynn in the quarterfinals), this was the wrong time for any kind of ECW retread. MLW didn't reappear until September, when Bauer ran a show on at the Manhattan Center's Grand Ballroom in New York New York. The show, which he's cited as the one that best fit his vision of what MLW was supposed to be about, included a diverse mix of international talent and better integration of the former ECW stars and newer northeast independent standouts.

* A few hours later on that night in 2002, Debra Marshall called the police to file a domestic abuse complaint against then-husband Steve Austin. He had left their house before police arrived, but eventually surrendered himself into police custody. To show how much has changed in the intervening years, the first word online that something had happened was via message board posts from wrestling fans in the San Antonio area who had seen a report about the incident on on local TV station KMOL. The station's website had no details, so a lot of people wrote it off as a hoax for the first several hours after it broke, whereas nowadays it would break online before it would show up on TV.

Austin would plead no contest to the charges in November and got probation. The terms of his sentence included abstaining from alcohol consumption for one year, a period that ended with a somewhat uncomfortable celebratory beer bash with the whole roster to close an episode of Raw.

Austin is unable to speak about the incident due to the terms of his and Marshall's divorce settlement. However, on his podcast, he regularly makes reference to not being in the best frame of mind during the period where he was "trying to get the business out of his system."

* 11 years ago in 2004, Chavo Guerrero Sr. (working as "Chavo Classic") dropped the WWE Cruiserweight Championship to Rey Mysterio. Chavo Sr. had been working as his son's manager, and that led to him winning the title in a comedy angle. He was actually doing tremendous work as both a personality and in-ring performer, but he missed two house shows without calling the office first, only to claim after the fact that he had been "drugged and kidnapped." Eddie and Chavito didn't fight for his job, so he was gone.

* 6 years ago in 2009, WWE shot an angle where Vince McMahon announced that he had sold the Raw brand to Donald Trump, who then announced via satellite that the following week's Raw would air commercial free. What started as a clever celebrity hook (with a celebrity whose previous storyline had drawn a ton of money) quickly turned disastrous, as WWE sent out a press release that didn't make it clear that this was a storyline.

The stock went down from $13.13 to $12.60 the next day, and WWE reversed course on the following week's commercial-free edition of Raw. The idea was that he was so desperate to get Raw back that he paid Trump twice as much as Trump paid him.