It’s Day Four of #VarsityClubWeek. In celebration of this month’s Survivor Series, we’re taking a look at famous stables from the wonderful world of wrestling. This is the tenth installment in our patent-pending Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series, and as always we started by making The Club a Stable You (Should) Probably Know Better and on Tuesday, we gave you the finer points of their oeuvre with some Essential Viewing. On Hump Day, we gave you the 10 Best … Athletes Who Translated, and today we make our “Amazon.com on steroids” dreams come true with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…“. Finally, we’ll finish everything off tomorrow with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ erupts in a Letterman-jacket-fueled civil war.) 

Album

Jock Jams, ESPN

Outside of the (very) obvious parallels between the target audiences, both were a combination of foresight — that Rick Steiner was going to be some kind of star and ESPN had serious brand-name cache — and  genuine ingenuity. Jock Jams wasn’t the first popular music album to use samples, but it was definitely one of the first to popularize the Girl Talk-mashup style that has become so prevalent, much in the same way that college athletics — and wrestling in particular —  have become one of the primary recruiting grounds for performers in the modern WWE.      

Movie

The Outsiders

While the lead actors never reached the success of those with smaller bits, everyone involved became a star on some level.  When looking back, the amount of people — and the prominence of the storylines —  involved  is remarkable considering the relative indifference years later.
The idea that the Road Warriors lost belts to anyone is amazing, and the idea that they lost it to a team that had featured “Dr. Death” and “IRS” is mind blowing. Much in the same way that Rob Lowe, Diane Lane, Patrick Swayze and Tom Cruise NOT being the leads in a movie is.
TV Show

Golden Girls

Lost for many years between the time of reruns, digital and streaming media, the Golden Girls were among the more popular shows of their era. Even with a heavyweight comedienne like Bea Arthur, an entire generation nearly missed on one of the better constructed and executed sitcoms of all time. 

Team

2007 Cleveland Cavaliers

Structured primarily as a means of conveyance for Rick Steiner’s rise to the top of the card, the Varsity Club was a filled with better bit players than Boobie Gibson and Larry Hughes, but still were designed for a singular purpose that would ultimately lead to their dissolution. The story told by the Club had a relatively short shelf life, because once Rick left the group, there was no place for storylines to go that still served the origin story.

Instead of being attached to an abstract concept — like passing and defense, in the Cavs case, or wanting to take over the world — once their “reason to be” exited, they were unable to push far past it.