WWE Royal Rumble 1989

Back in the late 1980s, WWE was engaging in an aggressive war on Jim Crockett Promotions, having already put a number of the regional territories out of business in the preceding years. JCP was the one promotion still standing and had done quite a lot of expansion itself in an attempt to keep up with WWE. In November 1987, as part of that expansion, JCP ran Starrcade, their main show of the year, as a pay-per-view, hoping that the revenue generated by the event would help them survive the continued onslaught from McMahon’s company. In a bid to undercut JCP, McMahon dreamed up Survivor Series, scheduled it on the same day as Starrcade and told pay-per-view providers that they could only run one of the two events. As a proven pay-per-view buy getter, the majority of the providers dropped Starrcade and aired Survivor Series instead. Crockett attempted to once again take advantage of the growing pay-per-view market just a couple of months later, presenting The Bunkhouse Stampede event, again WWE decided to eat into the show’s potential buy rate by airing a free television special on the USA Network entitled The Royal Rumble on the same night. With wrestling fans being forced to chose between a free wrestling event on a widely available cable channel and a pay event, Bunkhouse Stampede was another commercial failure for Jim Crockett Promotions.