The WWE House Show With Hardly Any Wrestlers

The vast majority of WWE house shows are anodyne affairs, but sometimes the company’s non-televised live events present something just a little bit out of the ordinary. One such case took place during WWE’s Ruthless Aggression era when what was expected to be a light-hearted weekend diversion for WWE fans instead ended up being a house show with a scant crowd in Hattiesburg, Mississippi as a few of SmackDown’s top stars made the best of a bad situation.

What WWE’s House Shows Typically Looked Like In 2005

Two weeks before WrestleMania 21, on the weekend of March 19 and 20, the Raw and SmackDown brands each had a spate of house shows to hold before filming their final pre-WrestleMania TV broadcasts. 

On Saturday, March 19, Raw ran a live event before 2500 fans at the Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The event included a guest appearance from Carolina native Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat, who beat down Jonathan Coachman in a segment, but the nine-match card was pretty typical for the Raw brand in its hedonistic mid-Ruthless Aggression period. 

On the undercard, WWE World Tag Team Champions William Regal and Tajiri beat La Resistance, Viscera flattened Simon Dean, young Chris Masters defeated The Hurricane with his Master Lock, and Victoria beat Molly Holly. Intercontinental Champion Shelton Benjamin also defeated Christian, Kane vanquished Tyson Tomko, Muhammad Hassan eked past Chris Jericho, and Chris Benoit won the semi-main event against Gene Snitsky. In the main event, Batista reunited with former Evolution stablemate Randy Orton to defeat World Heavyweight Champion and former boss Triple H and ascending heel Edge.

The same day, nearly 400 miles away in Knoxville, Tennessee, the SmackDown brand presented a nine-match house show at the Civic Coliseum. What made this event particularly notable was that it featured the first WWE main roster match for 28-year-old rookie Bobby Lashley, less than three months after taking part in his first-ever match in Ohio Valley Wrestling, as he defeated Spike Dudley, although it would be another six months before Lashley debuted on WWE TV.

Elsewhere on the show, Kurt Angle beat Booker T, while Scotty 2 Hotty and Funaki defeated MNM, who had also yet to debut on television. In a true oddity, Torrie Wilson, Jackie Gayda, and Michelle McCool went to a rare draw in a bikini contest after Heidenreich interrupted the proceedings. The terrifying poet laureate then defeated Gayda's eventual husband, Charlie Haas, in a subsequent bout.

From there, WWE Tag Team Champions Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio defeated The Basham Brothers, Mark Jindrak beat Rene Dupree, and Paul London defeated Akio via match stoppage after Jimmy Yang was legitimately knocked out. 

In something of a two-match main event, John Cena teamed with The Big Show to defeat WWE Champion JBL and United States Champion Orlando Jordan in 30 seconds after Cena pinned John Bradshaw Layfield. This led to an immediate non-title singles bout between Cena and an irate JBL, which Cena also won.

Aside from Jimmy Yang's unfortunate injury, these live events felt like the typical WWE fare of the day, a near-total representation of 2005 WWE except for Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker, and Trish Stratus not being on the cards.

The following day on Sunday, March 20, the Raw crew travelled over 160 miles to Columbia, South Carolina, with the card having a few changes from the night before like Shelton Benjamin defeating Muhammad Hassan, Kane picking up a win over Christian and Tyson Tomko in a Handicap Match, Chris Jericho defeating Edge, Batista going over Triple H in a non-title match, and Randy Orton beating up Jonathan Coachman. 

A Five-Man Tournament 

While Raw would have a few changes, the SmackDown alterations would be wholesale from the night before. The Sunday SmackDown house show was booked for the 8000-seat Reed Green Coliseum in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. 

The Raw brand talents only had to travel around 160 miles to get from one Carolina city to another. The trip from Knoxville to Hattiesburg, though, was approximately 490 miles, meaning a seven-and-a-half hour trip southwest on Interstate 59.

They wouldn't be performing for a huge crowd, either, as only 1500 fans were in attendance for the show just two weeks out from WrestleMania. This wasn't a big market, juiced-up crowd but more of a college basketball venue in the Deep South that was less than 25 per cent full.

Of the 27 individuals that were advertised or scheduled for this SmackDown brand card, 18 ended up missing the event entirely. A full two-thirds of the talent scheduled to perform at the Reed Green Coliseum never even made it to the venue, leaving a very sparse crew to entertain the crowd in Mississippi.

There are few accounts of the event in question, but one thorough fan report was posted to the wrestling news site Rajah.com. In it, the attendee wrote that it was announced prior to the US national anthem that some of the wrestlers scheduled to appear would be unable to do so due to travel problems. Accounts in both Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer Newsletter and Bryan Alvarez's Figure Four Weekly backed up the transportation issues explanation. Meanwhile, The History of WWE's abundant results archive listed "inclement weather" as the cause.

However, very little is publicly known about what the exact hindrance was, or whereabout on the 500-mile drive it occurred. Meltzer's report of the time only stated that talent dealt with "transportation issues in coming from Knoxville", with no further details.

Somewhat fortunately, the wrestlers who did make the show were a hefty chunk of the SmackDown main event scene in JBL, John Cena, Kurt Angle, Booker T, Eddie Guerrero, and The Big Show, as well as the MNM trio of Joey Mercury, Johnny Nitro, and Melina. 

The hastily-rearranged card ended up booking the roster in Hattiesburg multiple times on the night, with Cena, Big Show, Guerrero, Angle, and Booker T placed into a five-man tournament where the winner would challenge JBL for the WWE Title at the end of the night. 

MNM, meanwhile, were only going to appear in the night's opening match, facing Big Show in a two-on-one handicap challenge. The team had not debuted on WWE television yet and wouldn't do so until after WrestleMania 21, where Nitro and Mercury almost immediately captured SmackDown's tag team titles.

Until then, they were fur-coated shark bait for Paul Wight, in what ended up being a 15-minute comedy match. In actuality, Big Show and MNM were stalling for time in the hopes that some other wrestlers would make it to the venue. They could only stall for so long before the crowd became restless, however, and Big Show eventually finished Nitro and Mercury off with a double chokeslam. 

Next up was the tournament to determine JBL’s WWE Title challenger which began with a semi-final match that saw John Cena pin Kurt Angle after countering an ankle lock into a pin. Then, bizarrely, the tournament switched to a quarter-final match where Eddie Guerrero defeated The Big Show by DQ, before Guerrero was defeated by Booker T in the other semi-final. How they worked out which two wrestlers advanced straight to the semi-finals is unknown. 

In the tournament final, Booker T was defeated by John Cena, giving the new chosen one a title shot for that night against his WrestleMania 21 opponent. 

A confident John Cena took the mic and informed Hattiesburg that WrestleMania 21 was going to happen that night. The fan account had Cena vs. JBL as the best match of the night, between Cena working extremely hard in his third outing and JBL employing every cowardly heel trick and tactic in the book to keep the challenger at bay.

Finally, Cena had JBL right where he wanted him and was setting up for the FU when the champion was suddenly saved, with Kurt Angle stepping in as an honorary cabinet flunky for the night and attacking Cena to facilitate a DQ ending. The Big Show then ran down to even the odds, which led to one final match of the night as John Cena and The Big Show teamed together against JBL and Kurt Angle. Strangely, it was Big Show who got to pin JBL instead of WrestleMania opponent Cena.

The Aftermath

So ended one of the most unusual WWE house shows of all time. Eight wrestlers competed in seven matches, with Cena working four times, Big Show working thrice, and Angle, Guerrero, Booker T, and JBL wrestling twice each. Accounts noted that the 1500 fans in Hattiesburg were, understandably a little burned out by the end after seeing Cena and Show across multiple matches, but the options were limited.

The Monday night SmackDown house show in Jackson, Mississippi - 90 miles to the northwest - saw the entire touring troupe restored. There weren't any no-shows as the nine-match card concluded with Cena pinning JBL in a non-title bout. Unfortunately, that Monday card drew an abysmal 750 fans. 

Though the attendees in Hattiesburg were unlikely to forget the unusual show they witnessed, it quickly became a forgotten curiosity in overall WWE lore and life in WWE moved on. 

That SmackDown crew were all part of high-profile moments in the immediate future. Cena won the WWE title from JBL at WrestleMania 21, Angle defeated Shawn Michaels in a match for the ages, Guerrero soon entered into a feud with ongoing tag partner Rey Mysterio after dropping the belts to MNM, and Big Show lost a sumo match to Akebono.

Though the circumstances were highly extreme and not at all ideal, the wrestlers that did make it to Hattiesburg admirably put on as good a show as they possibly could have. They may not have been out there delivering pay-per-view calibre matches, but those SmackDown talents did work multiple bouts, and by all accounts did their best to not shortchange the fans that did show up.

The fact that Cena, especially, wrestled in four matches only reinforces his long-affirmed status as a workhorse, and he would continue to prove his insane reliability in the years ahead.

Most professional wrestling house shows are by-the-numbers, ho-hum affairs. The Hattiesburg, Mississippi card on Sunday, March 20, 2005 was, of course, anything but by-the-numbers. This was one unusual live event where good intentions and professional pride ended up winning the day.