Ask 411 Wrestling: Is Orton The True Franchise Player?

Howdy. Welcome to Ask 411 Wrestling. I am not Mathew Sforcina, despite the byline. If you remember me from last time, or from my time writing for 411 about ten years ago, good for you. If not, I’m Jed Shaffer, writer/editor over at Wrestlecrap of the Re-Writing The Book column. What makes me qualified to fill in for Sforcina?

I asked.

So, umm … yeah. That’s good enough for an intro, right? Not like you came here for intros! You came here for questions! And answers to questions! And if you do have a question, you should send it to [email protected], and Sforcina (or the guest host that week) will answer it for you at some point in the future. Isn’t that a lovely deal?

You also came for banner, if I’m not mistaken.

Zeldas!

Check out Sforcina’s Drabble blog, 1/10 of a Picture!

Sforcina On Twitter~!
http://www.twitter.com/411mania
http://www.twitter.com/411wrestling
http://www.twitter.com/411moviestv
http://www.twitter.com/411music
http://www.twitter.com/411games
http://www.twitter.com/411mma

And also, my own

Zeldas!

Me on Twitter, where I live-Tweet Raw most every week!
Re-Writing The Book at Wrestlecrap!

Feedback Loop

Wouldn’t be cricket to do feedback on Sforcina’s column, I think.

The Trivia Crown

Last week’s answer will drop next week. And I suck at these, so I won’t even try to make one.

Getting Down To All The Business

Okay, let’s do this. Who’s first up? Looks like Brandon Ray, who has a few WWE in the year 2000 questions. [Cue Conan O’Brian reference.]

The year 2000 was absolutely my favorite year of the WWE. Fantastic storylines, entertaining matches, and most if not all talent was used well in my opinion (who would think Crash Holly & Steve Blackman could become such fan favorites). However, one thing I was always confused by was how Kurt Angle was booked. I mean he won the King of the Ring, then got destroyed by the Undertaker at Fully Loaded. At SummerSlam he’s in the main event and despite not winning the WWF title, walked out with HHH’s wife in his arms, but at Unforgiven Stephanie gives Angle a low blow and helps Triple H defeat him. But then towards No Mercy Stephanie is Angle’s business partner and wins the WWF title. I was always very confused by the up and down career that was Angle’s during 2000. Can you shed any light on why it was like that?

I think you may have minimized some details that add some very important context.

Angle got to make a Herculean comeback after getting his bell rung in the table Pedigree spot at Summerslam. That made him look like a never-say-die competitor, and the ending of the match furthered the love triangle angle he had going with Trips and Steph. Next month, yes, he lost to a Greco-Roman nut shot. But you can also look at it like this: it took interference by way of a crotch punch (which should, realistically, put anybody down) for Trips to steal a win, because Angle was holding his own.

Now, as for the Undertaker massacre at Fully Loaded … it definitely seems weird, this borderline squash in the middle of a hot run. But let me add some context that’ll make it seem a little more worthwhile:

Survivor Series 2000. Who was his opponent? Undertaker.

Yes, Undertaker won his #1 contendership in a fatal-four-way, but there’s still this nice subtext to the match now; Undertaker not only had a win over Angle, but an outright mugging. Looks like a viable challenger, and makes Angle look vulnerable as a champ, so that when Angle wins, it shows he’s grown as a competitor since their last encounter. And even though Angle won by way of TWIN MAGIC~!, Angle held his own and outsmarted the veteran.

So, all in all, yes, in a vacuum, each incident looks like he had a very up-and-down booking pattern, but it was hardly to his detriment. He was booked strong and near the top consistently throughout the year.

I guess more of an In Your Opinion question, but why do you think the APA weren’t more popular? I always considered them the Stone Cold version of a tag team as far as drinking beer and whooping ass. They were always true badasses and I’ve always wondered why they weren’t more in the Tag Title picture during 2000 and 2001, other than the fact that the Hardyz & Dudleyz were popular as hell.

Timing. Simple as that. Put them in the tag division at any point in the 90’s before 1999, or the mid-2000’s (say, the Billy & Chuck or Deuce & Domino periods), they’d be as well received as anybody. But at the time, you had Ron Simmons more on the downside of his career as far as in-ring skills go, paired with Bradshaw, who was still a Stan Hansen/Barry Windham hybrid with little to no character that someone else wasn’t doing already. Now, measure that against their peers: high-flying daredevils like the Hardys, chaismatic psycho brawlers like the Dudleys, and two all-rounders like Edge & Christian … they just weren’t edgy enough, didn’t take the big bumps, weren’t out there enough compared to those three teams.

Was Tazz’s size the main reason he wasn’t a bigger success as a wrestler in the WWF? Same question towards Dean Malenko & Perry Saturn.

Taz had a lot of strikes against him in WWE, and size is a big one; backstage scuttlebutt had it that many wrestlers were uncomfortable with a guy billed as 5’9”, owning people like he’s 6’9”. Triple H, billed at a not-too-towerish 6’4”, has more than half a foot on Taz. Mick Foley and Steve Austin were billed 6’2”, still five inches difference. We’re not even talking the Undertakers and Kanes here. But if that doesn’t draw the picture for the size issue, this will:

Spike Dudley is 5’8”. One inch shorter.

But size wasn’t the only issue. His wrestling style was also a problem; lots of guys just didn’t want to take his stiff-looking MMA-style strikes or his exotic and dangerous-looking suplexes. Hell, you don’t see a lot of his suplexes now, and it’s not hard to see why:

Can you see anybody in WWE at the time taking any of those bumps? I can’t. ECW, yeah, because those guys had to do crazy stuff to keep food on the table. But on the main stage, I’m not getting dropped on the back of my neck by a guy with the dimensions of a fire hydrant. His last obstacle was injury history. Dude already had a broken neck long before he hit WWE. While there, his injuries just kept mounting. Hard to invest long-term in a guy who can’t stick around longer than six months.

The size and injuries issues can be applied to Malenko as well; dude was too small for the WWE landscape, and also had a broken neck. As for Saturn, he was always going to be the Ringo Starr of the Radicals. He didn’t have the look, he didn’t have the charisma, and he didn’t have the name value. Not everybody can be a main eventer. Both were brought in because The Radicals were a package deal. Benoit and Guerrero were the studs out of that group; Malenko and Saturn were a free-gift-with-purchase.

Dusty, who has a pair of questions I’ll answer, then rescind the answer later on. Get it? Because … aw, never mind.

One, do you think there is a case to be made for Randy Orton being the “franchise” guy for WWE over Cena? He has had a comparable run in the main event, survived the face turn disaster in 2004, and the fans have never turned on him like they did Cena, only really turning on him when he got caught in the Bryan/Bootista zeitgeist. His ring work is extremely good, and his promos sure aren’t any worse than Cena’s for the past 6-7 years. What do you think?

Simple answer: no. Next question.

Oh, you want more than that? Fine.

While you have a lot of good points in Orton’s favor, there are some holes in your argument. For instance, the fans did turn on Orton, right after Evolution turned on him in ’04. His babyface run was such a disaster, it’d be a couple years before he was back in the main event. Cena’s never faced such a situation. Once he won the United States Championship in 2003, his career trajectory hasn’t wavered so much as a millimeter from “upward and onward”.

But beyond that, Orton has had numerous alignment turns, where Cena’s had precisely one, and that was so long ago, it’s almost been whitewashed out of existence. Was Savage ever the franchise? No, not even when he was champ; Hogan was still around, and he was as constant as the northern star, like Cena is now, whereas Savage had a couple of turns, and was more of an appendix or annex to the continent of Hogan, like Orton has been to Cena.

And even beyond that, Orton doesn’t elicit the merch sales or the crowd reaction Cena does. While Cena polarizes the crowd, he gets EVERYBODY in the crowd going, good or ill. Orton does not; those who enjoy him do, and those who don’t sit on their hands. Cena has 25 t-shirt varieties. Orton does not. Cena does Make-a-Wish and talk shows and charity events. Orton does not. Cena is upstanding, clean-cut; Orton has Wellness strikes. Your franchise guy should always be front and center in everything you do. Cena is. Orton is not. Orton may be the better overall talent, but Cena is infinitely more marketable, so he will be the franchise until pigs fly.

Also, I was watching Great American Bash 92, Sting/Vader, and they billed Vader as weighing 448. Was that accurate? He certainly didn’t look 200 pounds more than Sting. Thanks man.

What a wrestler is billed as and what they walk around as at home is rarely ever the same. Without the word right from Leon White’s mouth, we’ll never know, but from what I can find, his weight is pegged in the 370’s.

El Señor Unicornio is up next. I think that’s Dutch for “One who eats Spaghetti-O’s with otters”. He’s asking about the AWA and Otto Wanz. And I fear I’ve lost 99% of the audience.

I’m from the country that Otto Wanz is from, Austria. So naturally, I was kinda growing up with him. Throughout the years I have read/heard how Wanz was just basically buying the AWA title to add legitimacy to his own promotion back home. Bobby Heenan doesn’t have too many kind words for him in his book and bashed him.

Now, I watched the match against Bockwinkel where Otto won the title and the crowd exploded (around 7:10ish) so I wondered how the wrestling world back then looked at his title win. He won the title and lost it back to Bockwinkel like 10 days later, so what is the problem? I have a feeling that he wasn’t really liked in the US but the crowd reaction tells another story, despite the face/heel dynamics.

What is your take on that?

For the sake of accuracy, Wanz held the belt for 41 days. August 29-October 9 of 1982. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s discuss why the Wanz “reign” was a short-sighted mistake that caused more harm than good.

First, the rumors: the buying of the championship for $50,000 is assumed to be gospel, but not once have I heard it confirmed by anybody who would know. I’ve also heard it was a ploy by Verne Gagne to “add international legitimacy” to the championship, which is equally unsubstantiated. Maybe both the stories are true, or maybe neither. Regardless, neither one or the other (or both) make the situation any better, so we’ll proceed pretending both are true, just because it helps cover the bases.

The crowd wasn’t popping so much for Wanz winning as Bockwinkel losing, because he was a world-class douche-nozzle as champ. He was Horsemen-era Ric Flair; nice suits, blonde, cut out of granite, handsome. The prototypical high-society egomaniac who has everything and wants a little more (namely, what you have). He’d been on an epic run as champ – 1714 days, to be exact – when Verne Gagne won the championship from Bockwinkel in 1980. Bockwinkel gets awarded the title when Gagne retires, solidifying Bockwinkel as dickbag #1, since he didn’t do anything to earn it. So, he’s on a roll again, the classic heel champ on a 467 day reign, even fights off Hulk Hogan, and boom, out of nowhere he drops it to Wanz for a month and a half, only to pick it up again for another 501 days. How does this help either guy? The brevity of Wanz’ reign makes it looks like a total fluke, which reflects poorly on Wanz. And losing to a guy on a fluke reflects badly on Bockwinkel. So both guys come out of it looking less than when they went in.

And if it was supposed to be a move to globally legitimize the title, why did the title changes happen in Minnesota? Even if we go by PWI’s standards, merely the act of putting the belt on a non-American does not a World Title make; it must be defended globally. Otherwise, Yoshihiro Tajiri winning the CZW Title in 2001 in Delaware would make it a “world” title. If anything, Bockwinkel dropping it to Jumbo Tsuruta in ’84 in Japan did more to give it international esteem than losing to a guy from another country in the promotion’s home state for six weeks.

So, to sum up, it interrupted a long title run by their #1 heel for the sake of a hotshot reign that did more harm than help to both competitors, did nothing to add to the credibility of the championship or either the home promotion of the belt or the promotion of the new champ.

Daniel Riley has a question about a deceased competitor from CZW. Nice segue from the last question, don’t you think?

What type of career do you think Chris Cash would have had had he not died? I’m curious because I remember graduating school with him, and how he always said he was gonna be a professional wrestler. I distinctly remember seeing him on CZW TV and don’t really remember him being all that bad(Although it was obvious he was very green).

I think the indies were probably the ceiling for him. That’s not a knock on what skills he got to show in his short four-year career, or his passion for the business. His problem was something bigger than that.

The competition.

Dude was in – let’s call a spade a spade – not the most popular of indie feds, and the luminaries that hit the scene during his career … well, just as an example of who he was up against for attention at the time, let’s use the Super-8 tournaments. Just looking at the guys who really went on to be something, here’s the names from 2001-2005:

2001: Bryan Danielson, Reckless Youth, Low Ki, Brian Kendrick.
2002: Amazing Red, AJ Styles, Bobby Roode, Jamie Noble.
2003: Frankie Kazarian, Chris Sabin, Paul London.
2004: Austin Aries, Christopher Daniels (who’d already won it in 2000), Psicosis, Rocky Romero, Ricky Reyes.
2005: Alex Shelley, Puma/TJ Perkins/Manik, Petey Williams.

That’s a lot of heavy-hitters. And we haven’t discussed who isn’t in that tournament, but was in Ring Of Honor at the time: Samoa Joe, The Briscoes, CM Punk, Roderick Strong, Jimmy Rave and Jack Evans. And then there’s wrestlers from other indie feds, like Joey Ryan, Chris Hero, Super Dragon, Mike Quackenbush, Eddie Kingston, Claudio Castagnoli … the list goes on and on and on. The mid-2000’s were just crazy for the talent produced. And back then, CZW had a major stigma, thanks to the booking of John Zandig tending towards blood and guts over workrate, so you didn’t see breakout stars from CZW as often as you do now. He may have been a good wrestler – he may have been the second coming of Daniel Bryan, for all we know – but given who he was up against and the promotion he was in, it would’ve been an uphill climb to make a name for himself beyond where he already was.

Gorilla Cotton Arrowhead Ensemble Fantasyland has a question about scripting promos. I’d like to see that driver’s license. Sounds like a dubious name to me!

I read in an article on 411 recently that Chris Jericho stated his debut promo was not rehearsed at all and did not need approval from Vince or the writing team. Obviously that is not the case today, but my question is when do you think the tipping point was when WWE started requiring approval. Was there a specific incident that occurred that made them decide to approve anything? And when exactly did this start happening?

The inner workings of WWE’s scripting process is not exactly public knowledge, so I don’t know that it’s possible to say with pinpoint accuracy when they moved from improv and bullet points to full scripted promos, or if there was one flashpoint. Personally, though, if there was ever a point where they had to start to question letting talent have an open mic, this would be my #1 with a bullet:

Even in the decidedly non-PG 2004 WWE, phrases like “cock in your mouth” and “cum-guzzling gutter slut” are a step beyond their normal level of vulgarity. They probably didn’t crack down right away, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they slowly started weaving the threads of corporate oversight into the fabric of promos. And I’d lay money that by the dawn of the PG era, it was 100% in place.

Dan Hanna has a question that’s right up my alley: playing what-if.

In 2002, Triple H returned from his quad injury and won the Royal Rumble. If HHH hadn’t gotten injured in July 2001, where would he have been placed during the whole Invasion storyline?

Well, to answer that properly, we need to go back farther than that. To Wrestlemania 17. No, I will not call it by that stupid name.

First, the Battlin’ McMahons angle was supposed to have rolled into the summer thanks to the WCW purchase. Linda would seek a divorce from cheating bastard Vince. When all was said and done, this would have led to the roster split, with Raw becoming WCW Nitro under Linda and Smackdown becoming the WWE flagship show under Vince. At the same time, the Two-Man Power Trip team would continue to dominate and terrorize, but Steve Austin’s paranoia would continue to grow and eventually drive the two apart. Trips would turn face because of this, and jump to WCW to be one of the main stars for Nitro (along, reportedly, with The Rock). Austin would stay with Vince, being the focal point of WWE. WCW and WWE would continue to fire shots at each other until Wrestlemania 18, which would be headlined by Austin/Triple H in a WWE vs. WCW battle of the brands.

But then Trips got hurt, and the Booker/Bagwell match sucked a bag of hammers, and USA balked at turning Raw into a relaunch for a promotion that another network cancelled, and instead of two WWE guys fighting a promotional war by proxy at Wrestlemania, we got … two teams of five guys each (eight of whom were WWE guys) fighting a promotional proxy war at Survivor Series. Some things just weren’t meant to be, you know?

Raza has a question about talent during the InVasion.

WWE purchased WCW back in 2001 as we all know, why WWE not forced WCW wrestlers the likes of Hogan, Nash, Goldberg, Sting, Steiner, Luger etc immediately into their own product. Instead, we saw a number of mid-carders appeared in WWE back then. Was it either due to fact that WWE was afraid that the said big names from WCW supersede their own big names viz, Taker, HHH, Austin, Rock, Angle or WWE thought they might ran out of resources/story lines for simultaneously managing WCW’s as well as their own big rosters or was there any other legal issue with big names of WCW?

WCW’s contractual structure was, to put it bluntly, a damned nightmare. Many of the big-name contracts were not just under contract to WCW, but to AOL-Time Warner. When WWE bought WCW, they bought trademarks, licenses, the video library, the championships, and 24 contracts: Stacy Kiebler, Shane Helms, Chavo Guerrero, Shannon Moore, Mark Jindrak, Jimmy Yang, Lance Storm, Hugh Morrus, Johnny the Bull, Jamie Noble, Chuck Palumbo, Shawn O’Haire, Shawn Stasiak, Mike Awesome, Kaz Hayashi, Reno, Mike Sanders, Evan Karagias, Elix Skipper, Kid Romeo, Lash Leroux, Jason Jett, Kwee Wee and The Wall. Everybody else was given the option to take a buyout of their WCW contract at a ridiculous rate, or sit at home and collect paychecks for doing nothing. Most of those chose to get the free money. There was nothing WWE could do about it.

Connor Watson wants to know about Yokozuna and the latter half of his career.

Why was Yokozuna quickly kicked out of the main event scene in 1994? He loses the title at WrestleMania 10, is stuck in a tag team with Crush at King of the Ring that year, is cannon fodder for Undertaker at Survivor Series, wins the Tag team titles with Owen Hart before jobbing to Savio Vega at KOTR 1995 and becoming cannon fodder for Vader in 1996, it doesn’t really make any sense

Two reasons: timing and weight.

Bret’s title win at WM10 was an apology for cutting him off at the knees at WM9. Bret was getting a long ride out of that, and he did, all the way to Survivor Series. At that point, the Clique got in Vince’s ear, and suddenly, we have Smiling Happy Fun Diesel as champ for almost the entirety of 1995. And from there, it was transitional champ Bret, please keep it warm so Shawn can fulfill his boyhood dream. After that came the shift from New Generation to Attitude. Just no room for Yoko to get another run in there.

But even if there was, somehow, a way to work the narrative to fit him in, the other issue was that with every passing year, Yoko’s weight was becoming a serious problem. WWE tried sending him away to encourage weight loss, but he just couldn’t do it. It got so bad, some states wouldn’t even allow him to wrestle. Supposedly, he was told he’d be welcome back if he could get under 400, but he couldn’t get it done. He left WWE no choice but to bump him down and, eventually, push him out.

SJD has a question about The Streak and how it was covered. I get the feeling questions about The Streak will last as long as The Streak did. Anyway …

Should the ending of the Undertaker’s streak have gotten more notice from mainstream sports media? I saw Fox Sports had an online article from Jim Ross, but ESPN had nothing (they only seem to mention deaths). I know it’s entertainment and predetermined, but at the same time, if anyone said at Wrestlemania 7 that the big bad ass the just beat the Superfly would not lose at Wrestlemania until 2014 nobody would believe it with all the factors involved. The Undertaker had to still be wrestling, not had his gimmick changed and not lost, and from a previous ask411 I think you said he was 6-7 in before anyone noticed.

Fans of something – wrestling, Community, math rock, whatever – tend to wear blinders when it comes to viewing their interest in the proper perspective versus how the rest of the world sees it. If I were to ask my in-laws, who are firm non-fans, they’d know 3-5 wrestlers tops: Hulk Hogan, The Rock and Steve Austin are locks. Probably John Cena. Maybe Chris Benoit (for the obvious unfortunate reason). But while we fans think of The Undertaker as this ultimate icon, the bedrock of the WWE for a quarter century, blah, blah, blah, the fact of the matter is, he is not a cross-over star. He’s big to us, but he just hasn’t penetrated the general pop culture. He doesn’t do talk shows, he doesn’t do charity, none of it. Hell, his tribute to Ric Flair the day after Flair’s last WWE match was done after Raw went off the air, lest they break kayfabe on him. If ESPN isn’t going to report on the wins and losses of John Cena or The Rock, they sure won’t do it for somebody who isn’t either of those two guys. Wrestling didn’t even get that kind of mainstream respect in the Attitude era. Now, not a chance.

Connor – don’t know if it’s the Connor as the one as before – has a question about Mike Tenay.

just wondering if Mike Tenay has ever been offered a wwe contract? and if not why? guy is a great announcer, especially in the WCW days calling the Cruiserweight matches, I guess it just comes down to him being a WCW guy

I feel like there’s been a theme to today’s column, in that a lot of answers seem to boil down to the word “timing”.

When WCW got bought out, WWE was the only game in town.

I know somebody’s gonna mention World Wrestling All-Stars or XWF. Stop it.

WWE had Jim Ross on Raw, and they had Michael Cole on Smackdown, and they had Paul Heyman and Taz on color. Tenay was too high profile, and therefore likely too expensive to stick on Jakked or Shotgun. There just wasn’t a place to put Tenay when he was available, and when there was a place, he was with TNA.

Alejandro has three WCW-related questions. Not woman-crush-Wednesday; the dead promotion. (Mine is Alison Brie).

When Goldust went to WCW he debuted as Seven I believe, however he had the shoot interview talking about hating the Goldust gimmick and then started wrestling as Dustin Rhodes. My question is was he supposed to be Seven and the shoot interview changed that, or was he supposed to wrestle as Dustin Rhodes all along and the interview was just a work so people that didn’t know he was Goldust to know who he was.

The intention was for Dustin to wrestle as Seven, a character inspired by the villains known as The Strangers from the movie Dark City. That was, until Turner’s Standards and Practices actually saw the pre-debut vignettes:

The creepy, pale-faced man staring through a child’s bedroom window and talking about going to sleep gave S&P child-predator vibes. They put the kibosh on it right away, so WCW did the best they could and spun it like it was a corporate-assigned gimmick and Dustin wasn’t going to follow the script.

Did the WWE book the last episode of nitro or did WCW execs in charge at the end book it. I have seen interviews where I believe it has been stated that WWE was in charge at the beginning of the last episode of nitro but did they book it like choose which matches to go on and who would go over.

WWE did not book the last Nitro. It was set up by Eric Bischoff the week before, as he was still trying to scramble for investors to carry on with buying WCW, as a celebration of WCW’s history, with any previous WCW star invited to come back and wrestle (none did). The only parts WWE really had a hand in were the Vince parts where he’d talk about people getting hired or fired, and the final segment that aired on both networks.

And last an opinion question. Do you think it would have hurt the WWE to wait a year after WCW closed to do the invasion angle. I mean within a year they had Ric Flair, nWo, and I believe Goldberg. Also Sting has stated that the only reason he did not want to sign was because of the way that WCW wrestlers were booked in the Invasion angle so he might have signed at the time if the story was right. All these stars plus the ones who originally debuted in the invasion would have made the angle more of a dream scenario than what we originally got. Do you think that the WWE hurried the angle because they felt people would not remember WCW a year after it had closed down. And do you think that it would have made a difference had they waited. Thanks for your time and keep up the good work.

I don’t think there’d be any way to delay it until they had all the major stars on the roster. The problem wouldn’t be if fans would remember, because WWE vs. WCW was THE dream scenario, the war to end all wars, the money angle that could never be topped or duplicated.

The problem would be how you stall for a year while you wait to see if those other big-name players jump on board.

See, we’re assuming that if WWE waited, they’d get Flair, the nWo, etc. What if they didn’t? What if they didn’t like how WWE sat around and waited and let the other guys dangle like worms on a hook? What if TNA starts and they manage to land Flair and the nWo? What if Goldberg and Steiner go to New Japan? What if Rey Mysterio goes to AAA? Do you take the bird in your hand, or do you look in the bush and hope there’s two? Yeah, an invasion led by Mike Awesome, Hugh Morrus and Sean O’Haire isn’t exactly the elite vanguard WCW had to offer, but they’re still “the enemy”, and this is the chance to run the interpromotional angle of fans’ dreams and make new stars in the process. Is it worth sitting on them for lord knows how long all based on a hope?

But let’s play devil’s advocate, say that you get Flair at the end of 2001, the nWo and Rey in 2002 (Steiner didn’t join until late 2002, and Goldberg wouldn’t come until 2003, way too long to wait, even in a hypothetical). You still have a big problem: how do you stall while not spoiling any of the potential WCW vs. WWE match-ups? Do you bury O’Haire, Palumbo, Awesome, Storm, Jindrak and the rest in developmental for a year? If so, then all the talk about buying WCW, having Shane McMahon on Nitro and so on becomes worthless because you’ve stuck the entire brand in stasis. If you put these guys on the air, you run the risk of burning through all the potential match-ups before you ever launch the invasion storyline. Unless, that is, you quarantine them by having them beat up on each other … but you can’t run with that for another 9-12 months. And whether they get stuck facing each other or fully integrated, you still have another logical hurde: how to explain why these guys came to WWE, competed, perhaps won championships, and then suddenly decided to mobilize as an invading force.

And that’s not even discussing the two biggest names they had at the time, Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page, who took pennies on the dollar to have their contracts bought out to be part of InVasion. They’re former world champions. You can’t hide them in OVW. They gotta be front and center. So you have to have them on the field … but we’re right back to “integrate or isolate”, and the “why did they wait” question.

It all boils down to that what we got was gross and horrible and poorly executed … but it should’ve been a slam dunk. So, if WWE could botch the single-biggest lay-up angle in the history of wrestling, do you really expect them to find a graceful way to hold their water until they got all the toys they wanted to play with? I don’t.

Scallywag Popsicle DipsyDooDah FlabbaPie? Am I reading that right? I daresay that’s not your birth name, sir! Anyway, he has three questions about what might have been and what might be.

1. Is there a reason why Adam Bomb never got a big push in WWE? I know he wasn’t the best wrestler, and I don’t recall many promos he did since I was just a kid then. But he seemed to have the right look Vince would like. Other big guys that were worse than him got sustained pushes.

Remember what I said above about Yokozuna and timing? Yeah, apply all of that here, but also add everyone’s favorite mid-90’s booking obstacle, “The Clique”. Long-standing rumor has it he did not enjoy most-favored-nation status with them, so that put the brakes on upward momentum. And there just wasn’t much room for him to move up during his time there, from 93-95. 1993 was the year of Yokozuna, 1994 was all about Bret Hart and the Hart family civil war, 1995 was Diesel-as-Hogan. There ya go.

Where do you see Brian Pillman’s career going if he hadn’t prematurely passed away? Do you think he would have stayed in WWE, or would he have jumped ship again? I haven’t seen much of his early WCW work, but his brief run in WWE was subpar and I do not recall many good matches at all.

I think he would’ve gone the way of Taz: a short in-ring career with little of it memorable, and a lengthy career as a colorful, if eccentric, color commentator. The best indicator of this would be the DVD WWE released; the selections of WWE matches is very slim compared to WCW matches. Not like he was going to get better. The injuries were just mounting too fast to build around him for any length of time. I doubt he would’ve jumped to WCW, though, even in light of the Montreal Screwjob. Pillman’s exit from WCW was an epic double-cross on his part, the kind I don’t think Bischoff would’ve gotten over.

What are the chances we see David Hart Smith back in WWE? He has the pedigree, the look, and hopefully has fine tuned his promo skills a bit since leaving. Do you think we will ever see him in a WWE ring again?

I wouldn’t go better than 50/50, and I think 25/75 is more realistic. And up front, that’s a shame, cause I like the guy, but the machine is rolling in a way that isn’t in his favor. Right now, Trips has his eyes on the American indies, and he’s been striking gold with his signings. Is Smith a talent? For sure. Still young enough (29), 6’5”, athletic as all hell, and has the Hart pedigree. But WWE doesn’t do so well with leftovers. Look at what happened when they brought back Gail Kim or Matt Bloom. WWE has a better track record taking somebody with indie buzz and rebuilding them as their own (Tyler Black→Seth Rollins, Bryan Danielson→Daniel Bryan) than reclamation projects. It’s not impossible, but with Trips’ tendencies now, and an indie scene still rich with big-league-ready talent, Smith’s better off in New Japan.

Andron is up next, and he has questions about competition about the mighty E and what’s wrong with TNA. That’s a loaded question.

ok, my first question is where do you think these other wrestling companies fall short in competing against the wwe? Ive seen wcw, ecw and now TNA having their difficult time in competing against this company. Could it be that most people got into wrestling via wwe and it just difficult to adjust to another wrestling program?

Promotions fall short by trying to compete at all. WWE is a publicly traded, billion-dollar multimedia conglomerate. They have a movie imprint, they have their logo and trademarks over everything you can think of, they have their songs on iTunes, and they have the Network. Thanks to 30+ years of smart – if occasionally unethical – business practices, WWE is a global brand, so synonymous with the product, its name has become verbal shorthand for the product it sells (like Band-Aids for adhesive strips, Kleenex for tissues, Xerox for photocopiers, etc). Unless a promotion had the backing of an obscenely wealthy person, a cherry television slot, and the license to do with as they pleased, there’s just no way to compete. WCW only succeeded in the short-term because they had a billionaire funding them and the Turner media empire at their disposal … and even then, that only lasted a couple years before it all fell apart. Any promotion that wants to survive will face a million other obstacles, but one they can absolutely avoid is trying to keep up with the big bad in town. Trying to follow their lead is a sure-fire way to ensure a second-place finish and a fast demise. WWE are the New York Yankees, and everybody else is a AA farm club. That’s not a knock on the product they put out; just a statement of their position in the marketplace. The best bet for TNA – as well as ROH, Chikara, PWG, and everybody else – is to ignore WWE, and focus on making their product as well-produced, as unique, and as can’t-miss as they can, and let the fans come to them.

My next question is do you think for TNA they have a disadvantage of just choosing the wrong channels? I mean USA is publically available everywhere. TNA in some areas you need special permissions, or packages to have it included in your package, could this be TNAs weakness? Or their odd choice of dates?

No. Two reasons.

1) TNA didn’t a choice in what channels they’re on. 2) You seem to be selling their former home short. Spike isn’t by any stretch of the imagination an obscure channel; they may not be as big as USA, but they’re not as obscure as, say, Palladium. You couldn’t say they were at a disadvantage then; if Spike was good enough to have Raw for five years, we can’t go and call it TV’s ghetto when TNA is on there. As for their current home, yeah, Destination America isn’t the best fit. It’s a bit obscure, compared to most channels. But that leads back to point #1. The market for pro wrestling isn’t what it was in the late 90’s. When the rights for Raw came up last year, WWE thought they were going to get treated like Breaking Bad or Monday Night Football. They didn’t even get close to the deal they were hoping for when they re-upped with NBC/Universal, and if rumors are to be believed, the other offers sucked donkey balls. If WWE, the Jupiter to everyone else’s rest of the cosmos, can’t do better for themselves, TNA certainly shouldn’t expect prime time on Fox. TNA took the best – and from all accounts, the only – offer on the table. That’s not a fault; that’s survival.

David wants to get intellectual and political all in one shot by weighing the merits of Muhammad Hassan. You and me, bro, we’re opening up a can of worms.

Was the gimmick of Muhammed Hassan the most intelligent gimmick ever, or one just too smart for its own good? He and Daivari played the role to perfection, and were fantastic in the ring and on the microphone. However, before the awful timing of the ski-masked attack, the entire gimmick was based off the American people and their stereotypes, and how a guy like him was never given a fair chance. Pretty darn smart, when you think about it, because can relate to everyday life. Smartest gimmick ever?

I wouldn’t say the smartest gimmick ever (just my opinion), but I would definitely agree that, up until the “terrorist attack” angle, it was a very intellectual gimmick. Too much for the average fan.

Disclaimer: at the risk of insulting somebody and starting a flame war, please understand that while I’m about to use broad generalizations, I do not intend for said broad generalizations to include everybody. And when I say “you”, I don’t literally mean you, the person reading this, but the royal “you”. Generic Viewer. Okay? Okay. Here we go.

The thing you have to understand about the gimmick is that it made you look at that razor-fine line that separates patriotism from propaganda. When you boil it down, they’re two sides of the same coin; what looks like Orwellian, state-issued nationalism from our point of view is, to the people of the country hearing it, may very well be a true sense of patriotic pride … and you can bet your ass that sword cuts both ways. The enemies of the United States view its citizens as mindless sheep who follow a war-mongering leader and spout cliches about flags and yellow ribbons when leadership says so … which is what we say about them. When somebody dares to call your patriotism the product of propaganda – whether it comes from a place of tolerance and pride, or xenophobia and presumed superiority – you’re likely to get your hackles up. The Hassan gimmick did that, and in doing so, made people face ugly questions. It reflected back to the viewer that, in the wake of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, some people had let their patriotism mutate from simple pride to defensive, closed-minded hostility. An entire race and religion was presumed guilty because of the actions of a very small group who did not truly represent the larger group’s ideals and values. The “all Muslims are terrorists” frame of mind can still be found in the USA, so back then, when the wounds were much fresher, nobody wanted or appreciated a Muslim shining a light on jingoistic racism, in any arena or medium. Now, add in the fact that the primary audience for professional wrestling tends not to be the latte-sipping, PBS-watching, Joan Didion-reading art-house types; they’re basic folk with middle-class jobs, an underwater mortgage and a fear they can’t board a plane safely anymore. Those people aren’t looking to be intellectually provoked by an entertainment medium based on two oily, sweaty dudes in underwear staging a fake fight. The simpler the character, the better. Hassan was too complex. He crossed a line, not one of taste, but of being a product for a market that wasn’t ready for it … and, sadly, may never be.

Chris Skoyles will close us out, and he wants to talk long-lived finishers.

Just been watching HHH’s first PPV match in 1995 and it got me thinking, have any long-tenured performers used the exact same finishing move persistently throughout their career more than The Game?

By long-tenured, let’s say at least 10 years in.

We can rule Undertaker out because at times he used Last Ride and Hell’s Gate (?) as finishers, and HBK didn’t start using Sweet Chin Music properly as a finisher until 94/95. My only pick for a potential rival to HHH and his pedigree would be Kane.

Any thoughts?

I would still count Undertaker, as he still used the Tombstone from time to time during his American Badass phase. It was his super-Saiyan finisher, if you will, where the Last Ride was your basic finisher. Not to mention Trips didn’t use the Pedigree in WCW … but I’ll play by your rules. And I think I can still beat out Trips.

How about this guy?

You have to go back to his pre-AWA days to find Hogan not using the BIG, STINKY, WART-INFESTED, GIANT-KILLING LEG DROP OF DOOOOOOOOM~!. That’s between 25-30 years, depending on where you measure from. There’s also Sting and the Scorpion Deathlock. Could also go Jerry Lawler and the piledriver. Ric Flair and the figure-four. Or Lou Thesz and the belly-to-back suplex (that’s probably the ultimate winner; dude was the Gordie Howe of wrestlers). Now, if you want to go active wrestlers, and we’re still discounting Undertaker, yes, Trips wins. But by no means does the H’s by no means has the market cornered.

And with that, I close up shop. Hope my brief tenure here wasn’t too painful. Sforcina will be back with his normal brand of excellence next week, as well as continuing the big title run wins/losses thing that I wouldn’t even try to continue in his absence. I’m doing a fill-in, not working miracles.