Stable (professional wrestling)
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In professional wrestling, a stable is a group of wrestlers within a promotion who have a common element -- friendships, either real or storyline, a common manager, or a common storyline -- which puts them together as a unit. Stables can be small alliances of three to six wrestlers (like Evolution, The Cabinet, The Dudley Boyz, Team Canada, Planet Jarrett and others), or supergroups that include up to half the promotion's talent roster (like the New World Order (nWo) and Sports Entertainment Xtreme). Often the loudest of them appears in promos, occasionally with another wrestler whose gimmick is to be largely silent, perhaps even mute, but nonetheless nodding or gesturing in wild agreement.
One of the most famous stables in wrestling history was The Four Horsemen, a stable in Jim Crockett Promotions and World Championship Wrestling, originally formed in 1986 by Ric Flair, his "cousins" The Anderson (Arn and Ole), and Tully Blanchard. Among the great wrestlers who would, at some point, be members of The Four Horsemen were Sting, Lex Luger, Sid Vicious, Chris Benoit, and Dean Malenko. They would feud with other stables--from the "Dudes With Attitudes" to the nWo--throughout WCW's history before their final breakup in 1999.
Typically, the use of the term is restricted to groups that exist within the scripted storylines of a promotion. One of the more famous groups of wrestlers in recent times, The Clique of WWF in the mid-1990s, is more accurately called a "backstage group", because the WWF never directly acknowledged the group's existence in its storylines. However, several members of the Clique did form the core of the promotion's D-Generation X stable, as well as WCW's nWo stable.
