It’s Thanksgiving this Thursday, and as a pro wrestling portal on an entertainment website, our job is to say, “Hey, remember when wrestling did a thing that holiday?” Here’s the good news: Very few holidays create more things you can’t remember in pro wrestling than Thanksgiving. The turkey popping out of an egg and dancing with Mean Gene was just the beginning.
To celebrate the holiday, let’s take a look at some of pro wrestling’s most ridiculous Thanksgiving traditions, from sexy Indians to sexier, naked Indians. Also, food fights.
Divas As Sexy Pilgrims And Indians
For most of the late ’90s and the entirety of the 2000s, WWE was obsessed with celebrating every possible holiday with a Divas costume contest match. It’s a tradition that sadly continues today. Whenever it’s Christmas, you can count on a Santa’s Little Helper match, and when Thanksgiving approaches, you can expect Pilgrims and Indians.
As an example, check out this “Mayflower Melee” match from 2009. It pits Michelle McCool, Layla and Jillian (as Pilgrims, who are uptight and therefore heels) against Mickie James, Melina and Kelly Kelly (as Indians, who are the faces, because that’s how the Thanksgiving story works). It even features an appearance from The Gobbledy Gooker, WWE’s failed turkey mascot from Survivor Series 1990. The highlight are the entrance themes and TitanTron videos, which are so stupid they can’t even be offensive. A team of Indians? Send them out to Tatanka’s music and put Iron Eyes Cody in their video.
Divas As EVEN SEXIER Pilgrims And Indians
Mayflower Melee not sexy enough for you? How about this 2002 “Pilgrim fashion show” hosted by Ernest “The Cat” Miller, revolving around the Dawn Marie and Torrie Wilson sexual blackmail angle. If you missed it, Dawn Marie wanted to have sex with Torrie, but Torrie didn’t want to… so Dawn seduced Torrie’s dad, Al, and used him as leverage to lure Torrie to a hotel room to have what at the time was affectionately known as “Hot Lesbian Action.”
Before that, though, they were content to dress up as a Sexy Pilgrim and Sexy Indian and have a “fashion show,” which was an excuse for Al to dress up like a turkey and everyone else to have a food fight. Yes, “dressing up like a turkey” and “having food fights” are the next two traditions on this list.
Turkey Costumes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYQzFZG6Lr0
Don’t get me wrong, bad Thanksgiving segments aren’t exclusively a WWE thing. TNA has their semi-annual “Turkey Bowl” match, in which the winner gets a cash prize, but the loser must wear a turkey suit. The tradition began in 2007 with A.J. Styles ending up dressed like a turkey, and continued in 2008 with Alex Shelley. It made its return in 2011 and continued through 2013, with such luminaries as Robbie T, Jessie Godderz, Dewey Barnes and Norv Fernum all being turkeys.
Too bad TNA didn’t have its own turkey mascot to keep wink-winking and nudge-nudging back to, right?
Food Fights
Oh, just all the time.
How many times in your life have you gotten into an actual, spontaneously-occurring food fight? Once, maybe? Best case scenario, it’s one of those Full House/The Facts of Life scenarios where a game of food-based one-upmanship escalates into a full-on messy war, and eventually everyone chills out and laughs. In wrestling, the presence of food has at least a 95 percent chance of causing a food fight, whether it’s Thanksgiving or not. Thanksgiving bumps it up to 100 percent. If there’s a way to mathematically go above 100 percent certainty, WWE Thanksgiving would do it.
Eating Contests, And Vomit
Sometimes the food fights stay relaxed, but end up with someone eating too much and throwing up everywhere. Puking is one of the only things WWE thinks is funnier than bad breath. The most recent and famous example of this happened in 2013, when Titus O’Neil entered a pie eating contest with The Great Khali, wrestled a match later in the night against Cesaro, got spun around too much and puked on everything. Wrestling!
Gravy Bowls
https://dailymotion.com/video/x2l1jtf
Not satisfied with watching wrestlers eat food and throw it up all over themselves? Check out the “Gravy Bowl” match, wherein two WWE Divas must… well, wrestle in a gravy bowl. There’s not a lot more to it. You know foxy boxing? You know oil wrestling? It’s that, but with a 60-year-old man yelling about how he wants “niblets” in his gravy.
There’ve been a handful of gravy bowl matches in WWE history, including this classic between Jacqueline and Ivory, so if you’re into that kind of thing, check it out.
Honestly, Anything Stupid With “Thanksgiving” Added
You can never accuse pro wrestling of trying too hard.
Sometimes there isn’t even a Thanksgiving joke to be made, you just add “Thanksgiving” to whatever you were already planning to do. The most notable of these, for me anyway, is this TNA Knockouts match with maybe the most embarrassing name for a speciality match in wrestling history: the THANKSGIVING THONG THUNDER MATCH. Read that again. “Thanksgiving thong thunder match.” They aren’t even wearing thongs. I don’t know. Sometimes wrestling promoters come up with a terrible idea and it gets to TV before they get to step two in the thought process, which is, “That’s a funny idea, but yeah, no, we shouldn’t actually do that.”
Let us know your favorite pro wrestling Thanksgiving moments and traditions in our comments section below. We hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving, full of thongs and thunder.
