On September 23, 1994, Herb Abrams’ Universal Wrestling Federation ran what turned out to be its first and only televised event, Blackjack Brawl, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.
The building holds over 17,000 people. Roughly 600 showed up, and only 228 of those tickets were actually paid for.
The event consisted of eleven matches. The show closed with Cactus Jack and Jimmy Snuka fighting to a double count-out in a match specifically designed to prevent that exact outcome, and by the time the turmoil died down, the Wrestling Observer Newsletter had named it the worst wrestling show of 1994.
UWF Blackjack Brawl –
The Night a Promotion Died in a Nearly Empty Arena
How a Clothing Salesman Ended Up Running a Wrestling Promotion
The UWF’s story starts with Herb Abrams, a Queens-born entrepreneur who’d made his money in the clothing business and had no real background in professional wrestling before founding the company in August 1990.
Abrams secured a genuinely significant television deal with SportsChannel America, which committed roughly a million dollars to produce a weekly show called UWF Fury Hour, and he used that backing to sign a roster full of recognizable names from the WWF’s golden era.
These names included the likes of Bob Orton Jr., Paul Orndorff, Billy Jack Haynes, and, eventually, Bruno Sammartino, who was brought in as a commentator.
The promotion never found real economic security. Money kept getting spent faster than it came in, checks to talent started bouncing, and Abrams’ own behavior became increasingly erratic as the years went on.
Mick Foley, who worked for the company during this period, later put it plainly in an interview for a documentary on Abrams’ career: the money simply wasn’t legitimate.
“The money wasn’t legit,”
By 1994, the SportsChannel television deal had lapsed, cutting off the exposure the UWF had relied on to sell shows in the first place, and Abrams staged Blackjack Brawl as an attempt at one more big supercard to keep the company’s momentum intact.
Why Few Fans Didn’t Attend
The UWF hadn’t attempted a pay-per-view-style supercard since its earlier Beach Brawl event years before, and by 1994 the promotion’s national television presence had already collapsed.
Without a weekly show driving interest, there was little reason for a Las Vegas audience to turn out for a card built almost entirely around wrestlers whose biggest fame had come in other companies years earlier.
The show also arrived without any real narrative or build, and most of the championships on the card were being contested for the first time that night.
They included newly created belts with no history behind them, handed out to rationalize a stacked-looking card rather than to pay off any actual program.
Some fans likely felt they had no real reason to care who won, since there was no story to it beyond the names involved.
Herb Abrams Blackjack Brawl Booking
By 1994, Abrams was reportedly handling the creative booking of the promotion largely by himself, and the results showed.
The card identified the booking as the show’s single biggest problem. The matches usually ended abruptly by disqualification or count-out rather than clean finishes, with constant run-ins and interference throughout nearly the entire card.
It wasn’t a case of talent underperforming so much as a promotion with no clear creative direction throwing a night of wrestling together and hoping star power alone would carry it.
The Event’s Card
Blackjack Brawl was packed with new championships. Dan Spivey beat Johnny Ace for the inaugural UWF Americas Championship. Jack Armstrong beat Mando Guerrero for the first UWF Junior Heavyweight Championship.
The Killer Bees, Jim Brunzell and B. Brian Blair, beat The Warlord and Power Warrior to win the debut UWF Tag Team Championship.
Candi Devine faced Tina Moretti for the inaugural UWF Women’s Championship, and Sunny Beach beat Dr. Feelgood for the new UWF Television Championship.
In the main event, UWF World Heavyweight Champion Steve “Dr. Death” Williams defended against Sid Vicious. Williams appeared to have the match won with a Doctor Bomb before Dan Spivey ran in and attacked him, causing Williams to retain the title by disqualification rather than in a clean finish
Cactus Jack vs. Jimmy Snuka – A Lumberjack Match with a bizarre result
The match that’s remembered above everything else on the card was billed as a Lumberjack match between Cactus Jack and Jimmy Snuka, a stipulation built specifically to keep both wrestlers from escaping the ring, with a group of undercard talents surrounding the ropes to throw anyone who tried to bail back inside.
Foley later wrote about the match in his autobiography, “Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks,” revealing that Abrams himself didn’t want Cactus Jack to lose, and that Foley had no intention of letting Snuka simply lie down for him either.
When the assembled lumberjacks pointed out that the match couldn’t legitimately end in a double count-out given the stipulation, Foley’s response settled the matter on the spot:
“We can do whatever we want. It’s Herb’s show.”
That’s exactly what happened. Snuka and Cactus brawled out of the ring and into the crowd, roaming through a mostly empty arena before the match was called a double count-out at roughly the nine-minute mark.
The visual of the two battling in a nearly empty arena was rather disappointing. For baseball fans, the analogy of it resembling two people chasing a home run hit into an area unoccupied by fans in attendance
The Worst Show of the Year
The reaction to Blackjack Brawl was almost uniformly negative, and it wasn’t close. The Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the industry’s most influential trade publication at the time, named it the Worst Show of 1994 outright.
From a canvas that reportedly bunched up during matches, to delayed starts, to visibly empty seats throughout the broadcast, to commentary from hosts Carlo Gianelli and John Tolos that struggled to make the show feel like a legitimate wrestling card.
It turned out to be the last event the UWF ever ran. The promotion limped along in name only for another two years, occasionally teasing a return, before Abrams died in November 1996 at 41, and the company closed for good shortly after.
Why It’s Still Talked About
Blackjack Brawl is remembered today less as a wrestling show and more as a study in how quickly a wrestling promotion can collapse once the television deal that justified its existence disappears.
Every element that went wrong that night did. Whether it was the rushed title matches, the matches that weren’t built up, the interference-heavy finishes, or the near-empty arena, it all traced back to the same root cause.
It was a company that had invested years in running on Abrams’ confidence and outside financing rather than on a sustainable business model.
Cactus Jack going on to become one of the biggest stars of the following decade in ECW and WWE only adds to the show’s strange legacy, a Hall of Fame-calibre career passing through, however briefly, one of the most infamous nights in wrestling promotional history.
Sources:
- Dark Side of the Ring: The Herb Abrams story.
- Foley, Mick. Have A Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks
