“Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!”
“You got peanut butter on my chocolate!”
If you’re of a certain age, those two lines transport you back to a simpler time. (A time when you couldn’t fast-forward through commercials.)
The advertisement suggested that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were invented by accident after a man holding a chocolate bar bumped into a woman holding a tub of peanut butter. Is that really how it happened? Of course not. But it’s a fun fiction to believe.
Which brings us to pro wrestling.
For every person rolling their eyes and dismissing rasslin’ as fake, there’s another person declaring, “It’s still real to me, damn it!”
WrestleMania 42 is this weekend, and no, I don’t know what any of the matches are, and no, I haven’t watched wrestling with any regularity in about a decade, but yes, I will be heading over to a friend’s house to watch some of it. What can I say? WrestleMania is a great excuse to get together. And it’s a fun fiction to believe. And, at least in small doses, it’s still entertaining to me, dammit.
And over the years, wrestling and boxing have dipped their chocolate in each other’s peanut butter quite a few times. Unlike the Reese’s product, the flavors haven’t always combined with delicious results. But it’s nevertheless worthwhile, on the eve of WrestleMania, to look back at some of those times that wrestling and boxing collided and got all mixed together in the same spit bucket.
Here's a brief history, broken down by category:
Real (we think) fights
On June 26, 1976, at Nippon Budokan arena in Tokyo, Japan, Muhammad Ali and Antonio Inoki met in “The War of the Worlds” – the most famous boxer-vs.-wrestler match ever (with one arguable exception coming up later in this article), and also the most dreadfully boring boxer-vs.-wrestler match ever.
After months of back and forth over what the rules would be and varied speculation over whether it would be a “work” (scripted performance) or a “shoot” (real athletic competition), Ali and Inoki got in the ring, and Inoki spent almost the entirety of the 15 rounds on his back, kicking at Ali’s legs.
It was scored a split draw, meaning there were no losers. Except for everyone watching.
Twenty-three years later, at WrestleMania 15, with Vinny Paz as the guest referee, pro boxer Butterbean took on pro wrestler Bart Gunn in an actual fight under boxing rules. And, like Inoki, Gunn ended up on his back. Just not by his choice.
Butterbean delivered a vicious right-hand knockout after 36 seconds of action, a reminder that fights held under boxing rules tend to favor the guy who knows how to box.
Fake (we’re pretty sure) fights
Probably the most high-profile example here is Floyd Mayweather meeting Paul “Big Show” Wight at WrestleMania 24 in 2008, giving away nearly a foot-and-a-half in height and some 250 lbs in weight. Mayweather won their scripted match with the help of some brass knuckles. (Insert your own Antonio Margarito joke here.)
But the real highlight came about six weeks earlier on the No Way Out pay-per-view in Las Vegas, when the WrestleMania match was set up by Floyd breaking Wight’s nose with a combination of punches. Wight later explained that the broken nose was legit, but it was planned – he told Mayweather to pop him hard enough to make it bleed in order to sell the feud to come.
That was a case of boxing’s top star at the peak of his powers crossing over without particularly embarrassing himself. They aren’t always this high-profile, and they don’t always go this smoothly.
Tyson Fury trained as a wrestler and performed competently enough in his 2019 match against Braun Strowman in Saudi Arabia. The man to whom Fury just paid tribute last weekend, Ricky Hatton, was a little more iffy in his 2009 match on an episode of Raw in Sheffield, England, against Chavo Guerrero, winning by knockout with the least convincing right hand “The Hitman” ever threw. The punches with which Evander Holyfield prevailed in his scripted boxing match against Matt Hardy in 2007 were of comparable quality and, of course, when the wrestler known as MVP stuck his nose in, he got a taste of the softest right hand Holyfield could throw.
Far tougher to watch than those phony punches was the boxing match between Mr. T (not a pro boxer, but he played one in a movie and served as a bodyguard for others) and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper at WrestleMania 2. Piper had Lou Duva in his corner and T had Joe Frazier in his – futile attempts to lend boxing legitimacy to the proceedings. The match offered few highlights and ended when Piper was disqualified in round four for bodyslamming Mr. T and shoving the ref.
Some believe there were “shoot” elements to the T vs. Piper affair, and the same is true of a boxer-vs.-wrestler match that took place the same day as Ali-Inoki in the summer of ’76. The mixed-rules bout between Chuck Wepner and Andre the Giant at Shea Stadium is widely believed to have been a “work,” but there has always been a degree of debate over that. It ended in the third round when Andre tossed Wepner out of the ring and “The Bayonne Bleeder” was counted out, which one presumes was the outcome agreed upon in advance.
Fake almost-fights
Again Ali stands out in this category for a bit of promotion 25 days before his farce against Inoki. He was seated ringside in Philadelphia for a TV taping for what was then the WWWF, and from that seat he jawed with Gorilla Monsoon (one Ali adversary who didn’t mind being called “Gorilla”).
That led to Ali jumping into the ring during Monsoon’s match and taking off his shirt, then circling Gorilla and tossing out several jabs that (intentionally) fell short, which prompted Monsoon to lift Ali across his shoulder, give the boxing champ an airplane spin and slam him to the canvas.
On the June 23, 1997 episode of WWF’s Raw in Detroit, the planned trash talk and pretend violence reached a similar level. In that case, Bret “The Hitman” Hart spotted Tommy “Hitman” Hearns in the front row, declared “There’s only room for one Hitman in Detroit,” and accused Hearns of stealing his nickname. (As best I can tell, Hart first started using that monicker in 1985, so, nope, his case wouldn’t quite hold up in court.)
Hearns entered the ring and took down Hart’s longtime tag team partner Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart with a body shot, but he and Hart were (clumsily) separated before they could come to blows.
Fake and fictional fights
This was the one I was hinting earlier when I questioned whether Ali-Inoki was the most famous boxer-vs.-wrestler match ever. It’s entirely possible that more people are familiar with Rocky Balboa vs. Thunderlips.
The scene from Rocky III never made much sense, as surely in real life the heavyweight champs of these respective sports would be on the same page about whether it’s a work or a shoot. But the absurdity was fitting, as this was the movie in which the Rocky franchise transitioned from capturing a degree of boxing’s realism to leaning into wrestling’s over-the-top approach.
In any case, this was the most impactful boxer-vs.-wrestler encounter ever for the wrestling business, as it launched Hulk Hogan to a new level of fame and paved the way for Vince McMahon to push him to the top of the business.
Career transitions
Quite a few boxers have gone into pro wrestling as more than just a one-off appearance, with mixed results.
Joe Louis was surely the saddest case, turning to wrestling shortly after his 40th birthday due to financial troubles. “The Brown Bomber” wrestled on and off through the 1950s, then came back for a few more matches in the ‘60s and continued until 1973, when he was nearly 60 years old.
Fellow heavyweight champ and one-time Louis knockout victim Primo Carnera had a much more fruitful wrestling career, making a living at it from 1946-’62. He was a legit wrestling star and challenged for a major singles title and won a major tag team title en route to posthumous induction in 2019 into the WWE Hall of Fame.
Junior lightweight champ Alfredo Escalera was a particularly odd case, as he retired from boxing in 1979, bulked up to a reported 210 lbs to hit the Puerto Rican pro wrestling circuit, did that for a year or so, then dropped back down to 140 lbs and returned to boxing for another two years.
Most recently, 2012 Olympic bronze medalist Anthony Ogogo of England followed a boxing career cut short by an eye injury with a transition to wrestling. He made his debut in 2019, worked his way up to AEW (the biggest competitor to WWE) and remains on the AEW roster.
Heavyweight champs as guests referees
Jack Dempsey was the trendsetter here, refereeing numerous matches over a span of 27 years following his retirement from boxing – including a Carnera match in 1950.
Since Dempsey paved the way, it has become almost a rite of passage for heavyweight champions to play the role of guest wrestling referee once.
Joe Frazier was the guest ref between Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes at Starrcade in 1984, and he mostly did a lousy job and got in the way, but his boxing background played into the script when they had Frazier controversially stop the bout in Flair’s favor on account of a cut.
Ali didn’t wait long to try to one-up Frazier, serving as guest referee in 1985 for the main event of the first WrestleMania. His role was limited – Pat Patterson did the heavy lifting as referee inside the ring, while Ali was the outside-the-ring ref. But Ali set a guest-refereeing template by taking a few swings at the heels.
James “Buster” Douglas took it a step further in 1990 in an NBC-televised match between Hogan and Randy Savage just days after he upset Mike Tyson for the title. Douglas, like Ali, was assigned as the second ref, outside the ring – but his services were needed when the other referee lost consciousness at a critical moment in the match, as rasslin’ refs often do. Douglas came in and made the count and declared Hogan the winner, and when Savage expressed his displeasure, Buster knocked him out with a right hand that would have made Sonny Corleone proud.
In 1998, it was Tyson’s turn, refereeing the WrestleMania 14 main event between Steve Austin and Shawn Michaels. Tyson was thought to be in the bag for Michaels, but it turned he wasn’t. He made the three-count in Austin’s favor and – well, you should know how this goes by now. Tyson’s right hand served Michaels some sweet chin music.
At least the writers stopped short of having Tyson bite Michaels’ ear, the sort of thing you would never put past a wrestling booker – but perhaps not the card Tyson wanted to play while waiting for the Nevada commission to re-license him.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
