Battlebowl
1993 World Championship Wrestling pay-per-view event
BattleBowl was a one-time professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by World Championship Wrestling (WCW). The show took place on November 20, 1993, at the Pensacola Civic Center in Pensacola, Florida. The event featured only the "BattleBowl Tournament", where the first round consisted of eight tag team matches where the teams were drawn at random in a "Lethal Lottery". Members of the winning teams would advance to the BattleBowl battle royal main event. Big Van Vader, who was already the WCW World Heavyweight Champion at the time of the show, received a ring for winning the tournament.
WCW had previously used the Battlebowl concept at Starrcade 1991 and Starrcade 1992, opting to make it a stand-alone show in 1993 as they expanded the number of PPV shows they held that year. The BattleBowl concept would not be used again until the 1996 Slamboree show. WCW closed in 2001 and all rights to their television and PPV shows were bought by WWE, including BattleBowl.
Production
Background
The Lethal Lottery/BattleBowl concept was originally introduced for professional wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling's (WCW) 1991 Starrcade pay-per-view (PPV) show held on December 29, 1991. The concept of the "Lethal Lottery" would see names drawn at random to form tag teams, although as with all professional wrestling this was all staged to appear random.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Battlebowl” as 1993 World Championship Wrestling pay-per-view event. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 1993 World Championship Wrestling pay-per-view event. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1136173. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993, 1991, 1992 and 1996.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Battlebowl”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Battlebowl primary sources, Battlebowl archive and Battlebowl research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Battlebowl”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Battlebowl” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.