10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE Royal Rumble
9. The Very First Rumble Had 12 Entrants
1998 didn't mark the WWF's first flirtation with Rumble greatness though.
On 4 October 1987, an otherwise-uneventful house show went down in St. Louis. On the card, One Man Gang won a 12-man Royal Rumble match. That was just one of the 108 matches Ganger worked in '87, so it probably didn't live long in the memory for him and other knackered wrestlers.
Not all of the participants are actually known, which is a bit strange. Gang did eliminate Junkyard Dog to win the thing, but didn't receive any kind of reward for it in storyline. Nope, this was just a one-off house show experiment and an excuse to mix things up on the road.
48 hours later, the company ran a standard 10-man Battle Royal in Milwaukee. Perhaps someone thought the staggered nature of entrants and the general match layout was too confusing for fans to comprehend. Or, maybe everyone just thought it sucked generally.
Pat Patterson had the last laugh!