Whatever Happened To WOW: Women Of Wrestling?

WOW

Women of Wrestling, aka WOW!, is a professional wrestling promotion founded in 2000 by David McLane, previously the founder of Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. It was based in Los Angeles, California. Using a similar format of character driven performers, with names befitting a comic book series, such as Jungle Girrrl, an inmate tag-team complete with orange jump suits named Caged Heat and the Persian Princess, WOW launched a series of syndicated programs in the 2000-01 television seasons in 102 TV markets. The programs quickly became the highest rated wrestling shows in the markets of New York and Los Angeles and demonstrated ability regardless of the region, market size or time-period to grow each television stations audience. With its headquarters in Los Angeles, CA, WOW held its live events which were taped for broadcast from the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California. The organizations first live event attendance was a mere 400+, but its audience grew to over 5,000 customers over the period of only six events and its website peaked in one month with slightly over 10 million unique visitors. Los Angeles Lakers Sr. Vice President Jeannie Buss who is a business partner of Mr. McLane’s appeared regularly on WOW programming, although not as an in-ring participant.

Wrestlers

Teri Gold

WOW programs were able to stand out from other wrestling programs by offering television viewers and live event audience an all female troupe of performers who played campy villains and heroines in all sizes and nationalities. By being the only entertainment source of its kind, WOW captured a strong adult demographic following with its primary audience, the male television audience (18–49 years of age) generating 25% higher ratings than its secondary audience of young women (18-24), teens, and tweens (7-12).


Due to the ever soft and declining advertising market during this time, WOW wasn’t able to take advantage of its momentum and ceased production after completing 24 original episodes and one live pay-per-view event. WOW, although off the air in the United States after 2001 continued to exist through international distribution deals with the markets of Israel, Russia, India, Canada, South Africa, Kenya, Middle East, Turkey, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic and other countries airing the WOW shows.

WOW: Women Of Wrestling

In December 2010 the WOW website underwent construction with a cover page of Jungle Grrrl appearing to fly over the skyline of Las Vegas, thus giving the impression the WOW promotion is set to return with live events from Las Vegas.