Superfly Jimmy Snuka vs. The Magnificent Don Muraco (Jun 1983 – Dec 1983)

Background

Jimmy Snuka arrived in the WWF as a heel managed by Captain Lou Albano, beating Barry Hart in his debut on All Star Wrestling on March 12, 1982.[1] He went straight after WWF Champion Bob Backlund. Their steel cage match at Madison Square Garden on June 28, 1982 went to Backlund, and Pro Wrestling Illustrated readers voted it Match of the Year.[1]

The turn came through Buddy Rogers. On his "Rogers' Corner" segment, Rogers had been investigating whether Albano stole the money Snuka earned, and up to that point Snuka had never said a word in an interview. When Rogers told him the money was gone but that he was free of Albano's contract, Snuka spoke for the first time: "I would like you to be my manager."[2] Albano and Ray Stevens answered by tearing the island beads off Snuka's head, bloodying him, and Stevens piledrove him twice on the concrete floor.[2]

As a babyface, Snuka was Pro Wrestling Illustrated's Most Popular Wrestler of 1983.[1][24] He had already met Intercontinental Champion Don Muraco once that spring, winning by disqualification on April 4, 1983.[1]

Muraco was born in 1949 in Sunset Beach on Oahu, grew up watching Verne Gagne's AWA on television, and played high school football.[4] He was a Hawaii state amateur wrestling champion in 1967, learned the business in Vancouver, Portland, Florida and Los Angeles, and got his first break in the AWA, where he often teamed with Snuka as a babyface.[5] The two men who would bleed all over the Northeast in 1983 had started out as partners.

Managed by the Grand Wizard, Muraco first won the Intercontinental Championship from Pedro Morales on June 20, 1981, and lost it back to Morales in a Texas Death match on November 23.[5] He spent 1982 in Mid-Atlantic, Georgia and New Japan before returning to the WWF that fall, now managed by Albano, and regained the title from Morales on January 22, 1983.[5] He played the arrogant champion who demanded respect, and crowds answered with chants of "beach bum."[5] Albano, the manager Snuka had escaped, was now standing in the champion's corner.

Build-up

The program began on the June 18, 1983 episode of Championship Wrestling.[6] Muraco was a guest on Rogers' Corner, upset that nobody ever talked about his accomplishments. While he was still talking, Snuka came out for his scheduled match with Don Kernodle, and Muraco went to ringside, yelled at him, stood on the apron and spat on him.[23]

Snuka dove over the top rope onto Muraco and the two brawled at ringside, with Snuka tearing Muraco's clothes off. Muraco grabbed the microphone hanging above the ring and hit Snuka in the head with it, busting him open.[23] Several wrestlers eventually kept them apart, and each man was taken backstage through a separate entrance.[23]

A week later, on the June 25 Championship Wrestling, Vince McMahon interviewed Snuka in an empty arena and reminded him of Muraco spitting in his face. Snuka began throwing chairs around the building.[23] The story was simple: the arrogant champion had disrespected the popular challenger, and Snuka wanted the belt or revenge.

The singles matches started in Boston on July 9, where they went to a no contest at 12:12 in front of 14,820.[10] A week later, in front of 10,000 at the Philadelphia Spectrum, Muraco kept the title by disqualification at 8:21 after Snuka shoved the referee.[8] The match aired on the PRISM Network, the Philadelphia regional channel that carried the Spectrum cards.[8]

At the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland on July 23, in front of a sellout crowd of 19,800, Muraco used referee Joey Marella to block Snuka's splash off the top. The match ended in a double disqualification at 15:46, with second referee Dick Woehrle also abused when he came to the ring.[9] That card was televised nationally on the USA Network.[9]

The July 30 match at Madison Square Garden drew 27,000, a figure that included a sold out Felt Forum. The card aired on the MSG Network and the USA Network with Gorilla Monsoon on commentary, and pretaped comments from Muraco, Snuka and Rogers ran just before the match.[7] Rogers escorted Snuka and Albano escorted Muraco to the ring.[7]

The match ended in another double disqualification at 12:29, after Muraco shoved the referee and Snuka refused to release a chokehold. Several wrestlers, including the Invaders and Don Kernodle, tried to pull the two bloody men apart, but they kept brawling down the aisle.[7]

The non-finishes kept coming. At the Spectrum on August 13, in front of 14,008 and with Swede Hanson as guest referee, Snuka won by count-out at 11:24 when Muraco left ringside, and a count-out could not change the title.[8] In Boston on August 20, in front of a 15,235 sellout, it was Muraco who won by count-out, at 8:35.[10]

The October 8 Championship Wrestling set up the next chapter. Muraco and Albano were guests on Rogers' Corner, where Albano accepted Rogers' challenge to face him in the ring. Muraco suggested they make it a tag match, and Rogers said he would have Snuka to back him up.[23]

The cage match came first. Two days before it, at the Capital Centre on October 15, Muraco beat Snuka by disqualification in a Fijian strap match.[9] Muraco later described the problem the office faced: they had different specialty matches leading up to the cage blow off, so keeping the belt on Muraco was a real challenge.[19] Back then, he said, a heel could barely scrape by and still get major heat, unlike later years when the heel had to win big.[19]

Every disqualification, count-out and strap-match finish kept the title on Muraco and pushed the story toward a match with no way out.

The Matches

The cage match took place on October 17, 1983, in front of a sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden.[7] The show aired on the MSG Network and later on the USA Network on November 16, with Gorilla Monsoon and Pat Patterson on commentary.[7] The card also had Bob Backlund defending the WWF Championship against the Masked Superstar Andre the Giant against Afa, and Rocky Johnson against Sika.[11]

Vince McMahon conducted backstage interviews with Snuka, Rogers and Muraco just before the match.[7] Rogers escorted Snuka and Albano escorted Muraco to the ring, but both managers went back to the locker room before the bell.[7] That left the two men alone inside the cage, with no one in either corner to interfere.

According to Muraco, Snuka was having trouble with the office, so the plan was for Muraco to win the cage match while keeping Snuka a hot babyface.[19] He said he envisioned the finish himself. He would take a few bumps and get knocked out of the cage by fluke, and then Snuka would drag him back in and leap from the top of the cage.[19] In Muraco's words, Snuka was just way too hot to bury.[19]

That is how it played out. Muraco won at 6:46 when a flying headbutt from Snuka sent him tumbling out the door.[7] Snuka dragged him back into the ring and climbed the cage.[5] From the top, he splashed the prone champion 15 feet below.[7]

Snuka jumped barefoot, arms outstretched like wings, as flash bulbs popped around the building.[12] Evan Ginzburg was in the crowd with a friend, and as Snuka climbed they were saying out loud, "No! He's not..." Ginzburg wrote that in those days of flashcubes, "a zillion flashes went off simultaneously as Jimmy made his leap, and Madison Square Garden literally shook."[3] He had attended live wrestling since 1974, and he called it "THE wrestling moment."[3]

The landing was not clean. Muraco recalled that Snuka's knee hit his thigh pretty hard, but he refused to be carried out to the locker room.[19] After the match, Patterson interviewed Albano about the result, and also Australian wrestler Larry O'Dea.[7]

The splash did not change the title. Muraco left the Garden still Intercontinental Champion. Five days later at the Spectrum, he beat Snuka by disqualification in another strap match, whipping him with the strap behind the referee's back until Snuka was caught not wearing it.[8]

Aftermath

The feud moved to tag matches. With Arnold Skaaland substituting for Rogers, Snuka's team and Muraco and Albano traded wins on November 24 and 26.[1]

At Madison Square Garden on December 26, 1983, in front of 24,592 including the Felt Forum, Snuka and Skaaland beat Muraco and Albano at 10:07 when Snuka pinned Muraco with a crossbody off the top.[7] Lord Alfred Hayes interviewed Snuka and Skaaland backstage after the win, in his debut.[7] Snuka finally had a pin on Muraco, but the title was not at stake.

The same card changed the company. Backlund defended the WWF Championship against the Iron Sheik that night, and the Sheik won it when Skaaland threw in the towel with Backlund trapped in the Camel Clutch.[7][13] Hulk Hogan was introduced as the new champion at the Garden on January 23, 1984.[7] Snuka moved on to the Roddy Piper feud that began with Piper smashing a coconut over his head on Piper's Pit in 1984.[1]

Muraco held the Intercontinental Championship until February 11, 1984, when he lost it to Tito Santana.[5] He later said he felt bad that the cameraman ran out of tape and missed the last half of the match where he dropped the belt.[19] He took a break in August 1984 and returned in 1985 managed by Mr. Fuji, headlining Madison Square Garden against Hogan and winning the first King of the Ring that July.[5] In his shoot interview, he said the feud with Rocky Johnson that followed the Snuka program was another way of extending the Snuka angle for a few more months.[19]

The two men stayed linked. They teamed in a six-man tag at WCW Slamboree in May 1993, and when Snuka was inducted into the WWF Hall of Fame on November 16, 1996, Muraco inducted him.[1] Muraco went into the Hall himself in 2004.[14]

Behind the Scenes

There is no honest account of Snuka in 1983 that leaves out what happened on May 10, five weeks before the spitting angle aired. Nancy Argentino, 23, was rushed out of Snuka's room at the George Washington Motor Lodge near Allentown, Pennsylvania. Snuka had returned from a WWF taping at the Allentown Fairgrounds to find her gasping for air and oozing yellow fluid from her mouth and nose.[15] She died hours later of traumatic brain injuries consistent with a moving head striking a stationary object.[15]

The pathologist who performed the autopsy wrote that the case should be investigated as a homicide until proven otherwise, and the deputy coroner said he immediately suspected foul play.[24] Snuka originally told at least five people, including the responding police officer, that he shoved Argentino and she fell and hit her head.[15] He later told police he had been misunderstood, and that she slipped and hit her head when they stopped along the highway to go to the bathroom.[15]

The investigation went cold on June 1, 1983, after prosecutors met with Snuka and Vince McMahon in the district attorney's law library. There is no record of what was said, but Robert Steinberg, then an assistant district attorney, remembered that McMahon did all the talking but was cooperative.[15] In his 2012 autobiography, Snuka wrote that McMahon took him to "either a court or law office" and that "all I remember is he had a briefcase with him." He added, "I don't know if he gave Nancy's family money or anything."[16]

McMahon has always denied any involvement.[16] A 2020 report focused on a January 1983 incident in Salina, New York, where an intoxicated Snuka attacked Argentino and the officers who tried to arrest him. A detective's notes from the 1983 death investigation recorded New York officers saying McMahon tried to talk her out of making the complaint.[16]

Muraco was close to the events. In one account of his shoot interview, Eddie Gilbert injured his neck in a car wreck that same night, Muraco saw both Gilbert and Snuka in the emergency room back to back, and he drove Snuka to the police station himself.[17] In another recap, Muraco had spent the night at the hospital with Gilbert, returned to the hotel to find investigators talking to Snuka, and was asked to follow them back because Argentino had ended up in the room next to Gilbert's.[19] Muraco said the feud almost didn't happen, because Argentino's death came right after they shot the spitting angle.[19]

Argentino's family won a $500,000 civil suit against Snuka in 1985, but the criminal case stayed open.[22] Snuka was charged with third-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in September 2015, 32 years later.[25] A judge found him incompetent to stand trial because of dementia, and the charges were dropped in January 2017.[25] Terminally ill with stomach cancer, he died on January 15, 2017.[24]

Dark Side of the Ring covered the case in "Jimmy Snuka and the Death of Nancy Argentino," the fifth episode of its second season, first aired April 14, 2020.[18]

Inside the locker room, Muraco remembered the feud fondly. He called it "a great thrill" in his career, and in word association he called Snuka "The Man," saying he owed a lot of his career to him.[19] He described the atmosphere as not a lot of backstabbing but probably personality conflicts, and recalled Albano getting drunk and obnoxious after TV tapings, fired after every Allentown taping and rehired the following week.[19]

Legacy

For most of the country, the splash arrived on videotape. Coliseum Video put the cage match on WWF's Most Unusual Matches in 1985 and on Inside the Steel Cage in 1986.[20] It was later included on Bloodbath: Wrestling's Most Incredible Steel Cage Matches and History of the Intercontinental Championship, and the December tag match that closed the feud also went on Most Unusual Matches.[7] For fans outside the MSG Network's reach, those tapes were the way to see it.

Some of the fans in the building went on to wrestle. Mick Foley, Tommy Dreamer and Bubba Ray Dudley were all at the Garden that night.[7] Foley was inspired to become a wrestler after watching Snuka leap from the top of the steel cage at Madison Square Garden.[21] He adopted Snuka's fearlessness when he entered the ring himself, and as Cactus Jack he built a following not for winning matches but for surviving them.[21]

Foley was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, at Madison Square Garden. It was the same building where he had watched Snuka take the leap thirty years earlier.[21]

One retrospective described the dive as a groundbreaking move that set the stage for the dangerous dives that came after, from Foley's to Rob Van Dam's.[22] Kids saw that dive and wanted to do it, the piece argued, and when the times demanded it, they did it bigger.[22] Another called it Snuka's magnum opus.[12]

Muraco's view is less romantic and more practical. He gets depressed thinking about the money they could draw with that angle today.[19] Snuka never won the Intercontinental Championship, and he lost the match that made him famous.

The dive came five months after Argentino's death, in a case that would not lead to charges for 32 years.[25] Any honest telling of that night now has to hold both.

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Jimmy Snuka profile and career timeline — Online World of Wrestling. https://www.onlineworldofwrestling.com/profile/jimmy-snuka/
2. "Stevens and Albano brutalized Snuka to kick off his babyface turn" — Boston Garden Balcony. https://bostongardenbalcony.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/stevens-and-albano-brutalized-snuka-to-kick-off-his-babyface-turn/
3. Evan Ginzburg, "Jimmy Snuka and Don Muraco – The Legendary Moment Remembered" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/jimmy-snuka-don-muraco/
4. "10 Things Wrestling Fans Should Know About Don Muraco" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-don-muraco-facts-trivia-things-to-know/
5. Don Muraco — Pro Wrestling Fandom. https://prowrestling.fandom.com/wiki/Don_Muraco
6. "Don Muraco brawls with Jimmy Snuka: Championship Wrestling, June 18, 1983" (video) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/videos/don-muraco-brawls-with-jimmy-snuka-championship-wrestling-june-18-1983
7. Madison Square Garden 1980–1989 results — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/madison-square-garden-results-1980s/
8. Philadelphia Spectrum 1980–1989 results — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/philadelphia-spectrum-results-1980s/
9. Capital Centre 1980–1989 results — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/capital-centre-results-1980s/
10. Boston Garden 1980–1989 results — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/boston-garden-results-1980s/
11. "Rewind-A-Wai #118: WWF at MSG 10/17/83 (Steel Cage: Jimmy Snuka vs. Don Muraco)" — POST Wrestling. https://www.postwrestling.com/2022/10/20/rewind-a-wai-118-wwf-at-msg-10-17-83-steel-cage-jimmy-snuka-vs-don-muraco/
12. Ryan Dilbert, "Jimmy Snuka's Steel Cage Dive and the Top Moments from WWE Star's Career" — Bleacher Report, January 16, 2017. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2687342-jimmy-snukas-steel-cage-dive-and-the-top-moments-from-wwe-stars-career
13. "Bob Backlund vs. The Iron Sheik: WWE Championship Match - December 26, 1983" (video) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/videos/bob-backlund-vs-the-iron-sheik-wwe-championship-match-december-26-1983
14. "'The Magnificent' Don Muraco: 2004 WWE Hall of Fame Inductee" (video) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/videos/the-magnificent-don-muraco-2004-wwe-hall-of-fame-inductee
15. Javier Ojst, "Jimmy Snuka and the Death of Nancy Argentino" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/jimmy-snuka-nancy-argentino/
16. "New report alleges McMahon involved earlier in Argentino/Snuka tragedy" — Cageside Seats, May 2020. https://www.cagesideseats.com/wwe/2020/5/8/21252182/report-vince-mcmahon-convinced-nancy-argentino-not-press-charges-jimmy-snuka-prior-to-death
17. "Kayfabe, Lies and Alibis: Don Muraco WWF 1983 Timeline" (shoot interview recap) — Culture Crossfire. https://culturecrossfire.com/wrestling/don-muraco-shoot-1983/
18. "Jimmy Snuka and the Death of Nancy Argentino", Dark Side of the Ring S2 E5 — IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11848404/
19. Don Muraco shoot interview review, page 2 — Kayfabe Memories. https://www.kayfabememories.com/TapeReviews/shootinterviews/donmuraco-2.htm
20. WWF Coliseum Home Video releases #1–30 — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/wwf-coliseum-video-1-30/
21. Mick Foley bio — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/superstars/mick-foley
22. "Diving Into Darkness: Remembering All of Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka" — Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/diving-into-darkness-remembering-all-of-jimmy-superfly-snuka/
23. 1983 WWF results (television and house shows) — The History of WWE. https://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/83.htm
24. Jimmy Snuka — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Snuka
25. Ellie Kaufman, "Homicide charges dropped against ex-pro wrestler Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka" — CNN, January 4, 2017. https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/health/jimmy-superfly-snuka-charges-dropped

Further Listening

• Rewind-A-Wai #118 (POST Wrestling) — a full review of the October 17, 1983 MSG card, including the cage match and the promos around it
• Dark Side of the Ring S2E5: "Jimmy Snuka and the Death of Nancy Argentino" — the Argentino case in full
• Don Muraco shoot interview — Muraco's own account of the feud, the cage match finish, and the night Argentino died