So how did that WCW ring apron end up in Trinidad anyway?
One of our most popular stories of the past year came on the twentieth anniversary of the purchase of World Championship Wrestling by World Wrestling Entertainment. On that date (March 24, 2021), we shared the tweet below regarding a WCW ring apron that somehow made its way all the way to the island of Trinidad in the country of Trinidad and Tobago and was still in use by a promotion based on the island known as New Evolution Wrestling.
Twenty years ago today, WWE purchased WCW. Questions remain about where WCW’s rings, ring accessories and sets wound up. One of the ring aprons wound up on the island of Trinidad and is still in use today by one of the promotions based on the island, New Evolution Wrestling pic.twitter.com/BK4PHHX5M9
— WrestleMap (@WrestleMap) March 24, 2021
The tweet itself made its way to some of the internet’s most popular wrestling news sites and remained a pretty hot topic for a week or so around the 20th anniversary of WWE’s purchase of WCW. Outside of the fascinating fact that a WCW ring apron ended up in Trinidad somehow, there were plenty of questions about how this ring apron could have made it all the way to the Caribbean island nation.
In an attempt to answer that question, WrestleMap reached out to New Evolution Wrestling to see if we could get an explanation.
Stars from Trinidad’s New Evolution Wrestling do battle on the WCW Monday Nitro canvas
NEW’s explanation of how they came into possession of the ring apron answers some questions but also creates even more. The apron was actually given to NEW by the World Wrestling Council, the famous Puerto Rican wrestling company owned by Carlos Colón and Victor Jovica. This came following a run by WWC in Trinidad that took place as a biweekly event at the Jean Pierre Complex in the city of Port of Spain. These shows ran at least for a time in summer of 2010 but there isn’t much information about them online besides a few YouTube videos that were shot from the crowd. Cagematch doesn’t seem to have results from any of these shows and a Google search returned this news article from the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian that discusses the first two events of this initiative, which were to be held on July 3rd and 4th, 2010.
The WCW Monday Nitro ring apron can be seen pretty clearly in the YouTube footage so it appears as if the WWC not only gifted the apron to New Evolution when they left Trinidad but were also using it for the shows they were running in the country. Wrestlers that competed at these events, according to our contact with NEW, the linked news story and the YouTube videos, included Scott Steiner, Carlito, Shelton Benjamin, Tommy Dreamer, Aaron Stevens, ODB, Mickey James, Christopher Daniels, Ricochet, Carlos Colon and Victor Jovica. One of the most interesting tidbits and pieces of trivia that this revelation creates then is regarding Scott Steiner. Steiner was a longtime WCW wrestler and stuck with the company through its demise in 2001. The assumption could easily be made that Steiner would have wrestled his last match on a WCW branded ring accessory in 2001, but instead it looks like that most likely took place in 2010…in Trinidad and Tobago. Really, the same can be said for Christopher Daniels who also competed with WCW for a time. Speaking of Christopher Daniels, we were able to find some footage of his ring entrance and his loss by pinfall from one of the shows in Trinidad, which you can see below.
As far as we can tell, this is the only footage that’s readily available of these events in Trinidad. The WWE was reported to have purchased the World Wrestling Council’s tape library in 2018. As of now, that full library has yet to be uploaded to the WWE Network. There’s no way to know for sure if footage from these events were part of the library purchase, but there does appear to be a professional camera man at ringside, making that entirely possible. There’s a good chance that these events would have aired on either Puerto Rican TV or Trinidad and Tobago TV during this time period but we couldn’t find anything to confirm nor deny that.
But what about New Evolution Wrestling’s involvement in all of this? What part did they play and how did they come into contact with the WWC? All of that happened through Trinidad and Tobago based pro wrestler Thunderbolt Williams, who actively competed for the World Wrestling Council in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1980’s. Williams made contact with NEW to help put the show on. The WWC used some of the NEW’s wrestlers in the show as they were the only wrestling company based in Trinidad and Tobago at the time and they were pivotal in making the shows happen.
So the question of how the WCW ring apron ended up in Trinidad and Tobago has been answered. But what about how the World Wrestling Council came in possession of the apron? That’s an answer that we may never have.
