Ask 411 Wrestling: Was Lesnar Set to Be The Face of WWE?

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Ask 411 Wrestling! I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am filling in for Mathew Sforcina this week. Don’t ask me why, on the week of American Thanksgiving, the American is filling in for the big Q&A column while the Australian is the one who gets the week off. I assume it has something to do with everything being backwards in the Southern Hemisphere.

Anyway, not only am I writing the column this week, but I am also writing it next week as well, so, if you’ve got a question that for some reason you would like to ask of me as opposed to Mat, send it to my e-mail address of [email protected], and I will try to work it in next week.

That’s enough jibber jabber. Let’s get the party started with the best banner in the business . . .

Zeldas!

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

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Do you like professional wrestling? Do you follow the professional wrestling scene in Newcastle, Australia? Of course you do. All true wrestling fans do.

Anyway, if you fit those criteria you can cast your vote right now for the top professional wrestler in all of Newcastle. If you look carefully at the list, you might even see a familiar name . . . not that I’m trying to sway the voting in a particular manner or anything . . .

You know what to do.

Newcastle Pro Wrestling: Who gets your vote for 2015 Newcastle Pro Wrestler of the Year? created by Poll

The Trivia Crown

Mat sent me a direct message on Twitter to let me know that last week’s answer was Roman Reigns. Man, that guy is everywhere these days.

Here’s a new question for the new week:

Who am I? I was trained separately by members of two legendary professional wrestling families. Despite never having had a contract with the World Wrestling Federation, I have still managed to wrestle in promotions based on four different continents, including both major promotions in Japan in the 1990s. In the United States pro wrestling run that got me my most national exposure, I was the tag team partner of a future WWF Triple Crown holder. I had another run-in with that guy a few years later, when I took over a movie role that was originally intended for him. Who am I?

Getting Down To All The Business

Brian has two unrelated questions:

How different would the Monday night wars be if DVR was commonplace in that time where we could easily watch both?

I don’t know that it would have been any different. The natural inclination might be to think that the war would have been more competitive for longer because the time-shifting technology would have allowed more fans to watch both shows. However, the competition still probably would have been tooth and nail between the two companies, because the television industry is all about who can get the most people to watch their ads, and, if you’re watching a show a day or two after it airs via the magic of DVR, chances are good that you’re also blowing by the commercials. That’s why, even though they’re measured, you never hear an entertainment news site talking about the DVR ratings for a show as though they’re some huge selling point for the program. Raw and Nitro easily most likely would have still fought hard over the number of fans who watched the show live, because that is what would make the companies’ networks (and, by extension, the companies themselves) the most money.

Will NXT kill the independent scene by grabbing up any talent once they get any hype?

WWE has had a developmental program for something on the order of fifteen years now, and, during most of that time, their developmental program has focused on signing top independent talent. The indies haven’t been killed in those fifteen years, and I don’t see anything that would cause that to change now. NXT may tour more, and they may be more accessible to fans because the show airs on the WWE Network, but that does not require the company to sign up any more independent talent than it has in the past.

Adrian from Ireland asks questions about Eddie Guerrero and TNA, which is a bit like asking questions about filet mignon and hog intestines.

1) When Eddie Guerrero was released by WWE in 2001 he went on to wrestle in WWA and Ring of Honor. Do you know if there were any approaches from TNA to hire him?

I do not know for certain, but I highly doubt that there were strong overtures. TNA did not have its first show until June 2002, and Guerrero was already back in WWE in April 2002. Given that timeline, chances are good that he was having talks with McMahon and company before TNA even had a chance to make a strong play for him.

2) Now that TNA may be on its last legs, what time period do you feel they were closest to WWE in the new wrestle war? I know they never got within a million miles but was there a time when you thought TNA was up and WWE was down.

As you note, the “war” was never close. In fact, it was so far apart that referring to it as a “war” is a little bit embarrassing. In terms of television ratings, TNA at its best only did between a third and a quarter of the rating as WWE’s flagship programming, and TNA never became a particularly successful entity on pay per view or as a touring product. The only advantage that the company ever had on WWE was that, for a period of time, they were legitimately putting on the better in-ring product. This primarily would have been in 2005 and 2006, coinciding with Samoa Joe’s undefeated streak and his matches with AJ Styles and Christopher Daniels.

Nathan wants me to hit some Japan, because that’s kind of my thing:

My first question is where can I watch AJPW on a regular basis if anywhere? I can find it sometimes on Dailymotion but that it is.

My second question, what does AJPW have to do to turn things around (the arenas look so empty compared to their heyday)? Can AJPW ever regain some of their glory and become one of the top Japanese promotions? Does AJPW need to emulate their past with the whole Heavenly Road concept to rebuild (excluding the head drops)?

My third and final question is unrelated to AJPW. According to Wikipedia, Shibata is only a freelancer for NJPW and not a contracted talent. Is that true and if so why not contract him fully?

As far as I know, there is not a good, consistent basis for most people to legally access All Japan’s shows. In Japan, the company airs primarily on Gaora TV special events carried on Japan’s all-combat sports cable station, Samurai TV. Those two stations are not available anywhere in the English speaking world that I’m aware of, unless you’ve got one of those old school, massive satellite dishes. AJPW has also not really embraced using streaming services like U-Stream or niconico as Dragon Gate has done and as New Japan did prior to the launch of NJPW World. Probably the best thing that you can do to watch the promotion is what you have been doing, unless you can find somebody who is still trading tapes of AJPW’s television in 2015 . . . which is probably easier said than done.

As to your second question, I think that, unfortunately, All Japan isn’t going to get anywhere near its glory days anytime soon. The entire Japanese professional wrestling market (and, as of this writing, the Japanese economy as a whole) are very depressed right now, to the point that the “biggest” promotion, New Japan, is still much smaller than where the country’s largest wrestling outfits were in the 1990s and earlier. There just don’t seem to be enough fans out there to support more than one promotion that is at the current size of New Japan.

In fact, AJPW just had another setback in the last couple of weeks, as it was announced that Go Shiozaki, Akebono, Kotaro Suzuki, and KENSO were all leaving the promotion due to issues with their contracts . . . and specifically issues with their contracts that lead them to believe that they weren’t being paid enough. If you’re not able to keep two of your top stars happy (Shiozaki and Akebono) on the monetary front, things are not looking good for your promotion.

Finally, when it comes to Shibata, he returned to professional wrestling in September 2012 and, in that time, has had exactly five matches outside of New Japan. Three of those matches were for Pro Wrestling NOAH, which at this point may as well be an NJPW subsidiary for as closely as they are affiliated. One of the matches was on Genichiro Tenryu’s recent retirement show, which had New Japan talent up and down their card and was broadcast live on their streaming service. My point is that, even though he is technically listed as a freelancer in just about every readily available source, the fact of the matter is that he is effectively a New Japan guy and there no reason not to consider him as such. His continued listing as a freelancer is probably due to the fact that, when he and Kazushi Sakuraba joined up with the company in 2012, they were being portrayed as “outsiders” to a degree. It’s a holdover from that run.

HUSS! HUSS! HUSS! It’s Mark!

My question is about John Nord. The Berzerker gimmick was not great but it kind of fit the time. I recall he had good matches with Bret Hart and a decent match with The Undertaker at a time when no-one even knew ‘Taker could work due to only working squashes and still being in the super-slow, dead character mode. I remember Berzerker going to attack ‘Taker with his sword but then no real feud followed. Why didn’t this feud/Nord go any further with the company? He was a better worker than guys like Crush, Borga and others who seemingly had longer runs.

The feud did happen. It just didn’t happen where you were expecting to see it.
The Undertaker/Berzerker sword angle took place in 1992, and, at that point in time, house shows were still an important financial contributor for WWE. Not every angle that was shot on the promotion’s television was shot to lead to a program that would play out on TV or be blown off on pay per view. Several angles existed just to set up a run of matches that fans could only see by going to the live events. That’s what happened with these wrestlers. Taker and Nord had, by my count, 34 different matches with each other between March and October of 1992 in arenas all across the country.

Oddly enough, the Berzerker’s next house show opponent was another guy that you mentioned in your question . . . Crush.

David mixes it up with one more factual question and one more opinion-based question:

I’ll admit it, outside of WWE, I’m not up to date at all. However, recently, I’ve watched a bit of Impact and I saw some New Japan Wrestling. On both shows, I’ve seen Jeff Jarrett there, the owner of GFW. On Impact, he seems to be helping out Dixie Carter run the show, and on New Japan Wrestling, he helped The Bullet Club attack someone. Are they running an angle where all of these smaller brands are joining together and inter mingling so as to keep new rivalries fresh and have various brands attack each other? Would that be a feud that would take away ratings from WWE and make the smaller brands more relevant again?

This question has been sitting on the list for a while and is, consequently, a little bit dated, but I’ll answer it anyway. No, the seeming omnipresence of Jeff Jarrett on lower level professional wrestling TV shows was not a result of all of those brands banding together in order to take down WWE. It was really just a biproduct of Jarrett trying to do something, anything to get exposure for his fledgling Global Force Wrestling group. If New Japan wanted to help him promote it, he would be all over that. If TNA wanted to help him promote it, he would be all over that, too. Trust me, New Japan and TNA weren’t in on the arrangement together, not after the bad blood that arose the last time they tried to have a working relationship.

As far as whether such an angle could work and impact WWE’s standing in the wrestling world, the answer to that question is no. If you want to do damage to WWE, you’re going to have to have, at a bare minimum, television exposure equal to WWE. None of the promotions that you’ve mentioned have that, either separately or combined with one another. Heck, GFW doesn’t even HAVE television exposure as far as anybody reading this knows. Until that happens, WWE is still sitting pretty, no matter who tries to team up against them.

Finally, what are your favorite botches of all-time?

We could probably do a whole column on this topic alone if I really tried, but I have other questions from other readers to address, so let me give you three quick ones.

The first comes to us from WCW Monday Nitro, as Billy Kidman attempts his shooting star press. For a guy who did this move on a regular basis, Kidman seemed to screw it up with surprising regularity, though this is probably the worst one that I’ve seen. There are two primary motions in the shooting star press. You have to go up into the air, and you have to go out from the corner in order to reach your opponent. Here, Kidman does the up part pretty well but completely forgets about the out part, pretty much coming straight down and landing exactly where he started. I know that I couldn’t even come close to doing anything that looks halfway like a shooting star press, so I don’t want to sound too critical, but this was a sheer failure to an amazing degree.

Our second entry in this hall of shame is also from WCW, featuring Diamond Dallas Page wrestling the mysterious masked Machine. The Machine, for the record, is actually Emory Hale in a one-off gimmick that was basically designed to give DDP an impressive-looking yet easily beatable opponent for the evening. Fast forward the YouTube video below to about the 6:20 mark, and you will see the Machine climb to the top rope, at which point Page lightly brushes against the ropes a the complete opposite side of the ring, somehow causing the Machine to LEAP off of the top rope, travelling halfway across the ring and landing crotch-first on the cable. This would be a great spot in a comedy match, but the bout was supposed to be totally serious, and that somehow makes it even funnier.

Finally, even though I put over Japanese wrestling a lot when I write this column, it has produced its fair share of dogs, and I’m not embarrassed to call them out when they happen. Thus, I give to you the 1988 match between Tom Magee and Hiroshi Wajima, a sub-two minute match in which just about every second contains some sort of botch. After seeing this, it’s no wonder that Magee faded into obscurity.

Andron is focusing in on African American tag teams but has nothing to say about the New Day:

I am just wondering, what did ever happened to Cryme Tyme in the WWE?

As with most tag teams, WWE eventually decided that it was time to split them up and try them as singles stars. It didn’t go anywhere. It was decided that Shad Gaspard needed more seasoning, so he was sent back to developmental and ultimately released from the company alongside four or five other wrestlers in what was likely just a “spring cleaning” sort of purge.

JTG stayed on the roster as an enhancement guy for quite a while longer, and his lack of appearances became a running gag on the internet for a time. Once he was let go, he wrote an e-book entitled Damn! Why Did I Write This Book? which talked about his time in WWE and detailed just how much heat he and Shad got in the company, including a particularly amusing story about John Cena confronting him over some perceived gimmick infringement while he was taking a shit.

My second question is wouldn’t it have made a good gimmick team to go against Prime Time Players or would you consider their gimmicks to be too alike?

I don’t know that their gimmicks were all too similar, unless you consider being black to be a gimmick. It could be an interesting match if it were kept short, particularly the two big men, Shad Gaspard and Titus O’ Neil, wailing on each other.

Long-time column participant APinOZ asks about jobbers and their, um, jobs:

Back in the mid 1980s, when WWF wrestling first came to our screens in Australia, it was the show Championship Wrestling, taped in small arenas in Poughkeepsie, NY and Allentown PA, I believe. 99% of the matches were squash matches. My question is about the jobbers in those matches – names like Mario Mancini, Joe Mirto, Ron Dee, Aldo Marino, Rick Hunter etc. Did these guys wrestle on any independent circuit or the local scene? Or was their only wrestling job the one we saw them perform each week against the superstars? If so, were they just guys with a “normal” full time occupation who just earned some cash on the side as enhancement talent at the local tapings?

Most classic pro wrestling jobbers from the 1980s had full-time professional wrestling careers that involved working other territories.

Just to use a couple of guys who you named as examples, Aldo Marino is perhaps better known as Ricky Santana, and, though he was doing jobs in the WWF almost full-time during the period that you mention, he also jumped back and forth between other territories, doing stints in Jim Crockett Promotions and Pacific Northwest Wrestling in Oregon. He even made it to the Monday Night War era, where he was an undercard guy for WCW. Rick Hunter (who also wrestled under masks as “The Spartan” and “The Gladiator”) was similar, as he also had runs as an underneath guy in the AWA and New Japan of all places.

This sort of practice would continue for the entire period that the WWF continued using jobbers regularly, as you can year plenty of stories of wrestlers like the Hardy Boys going up to do jobs on the McMahons’ television tapings before swinging back down to the Carolinas to wrestle for OMEGA and other independent promotions.

Here’s a trio from Nightwolf who used to write in as “Nightwolf the Wise.” I’m not sure what has caused him to become un-wise over the years:

1. Time to put your Google Fu to work. Can you name me all the Anoa’i Family members who were wrestlers? What their names in wrestling were and where they wrestled? Thanks. Also are they the largest wrestling family?

This is actually not too difficult, despite the fact that there have been a lot of Anoa’is in professional wrestling.

It all started with brothers Afa and Sika, who were the Wild Samoans. As legend has it, they would come to San Francisco wrestling shows to cheer on Samoan High Chief Peter Maivia but caused problems when they started assaulting fans and sometimes even wrestlers who would get in Maivia’s face. As a result, they were smartened up and trained to be wrestlers themselves, lest they kill somebody.

Sika had two sons who went on to become wrestlers, one of whom was Rosey in Three Minute Warning (followed by a run as the Hurricane’s sidekick) and the other who is current WWE top-guy-in-waiting Roman Reigns.

Afa had five children in total, three of whom became wrestlers and one of whom married a wrestler. Of Afa’s sons, probably the biggest star is Samu, who had runs as a tag team star in both the NWA and the WWF. Samu’s brother Lloyd Anoa’i had a variety of ring names but is probably best known as L.A. Smooth in ECW’s Samoan Gangsta Party, where Rosey was his partner. Afa’s youngest son (by about ten years) was named Afa, Jr. and wrestled under that name on the independent circuit before joining WWE, being rechristened as Manu, and having a run with Randy Orton’s Legacy faction. Finally, Afa’s daughter Monica Anoa’i married Japanese wrestling star Gary Albright.

Samu went on to have a son of his own who is currently an independent wrestler, Lance Anoa’i. Unlike most members of his family, he wrestles primarily under his birth name.

Afa and Sika’s siblings also had children who got into the family business. Their brother Tamuna had one son named Reno, who wrestled as the Black Pearl in a variety of independent promotions, including Hulk Hogan’s 2009 tour of Australia. Brother Junior Anoa’i had a son named Rodney, who initially began wrestling under the name Kokina but gained more fame as the WWF’s Yokozuna.

Of all of Afa and Sika’s brothers and sisters, it was their sister Elevera who gave us the most pro wrestlers. Her sons were the Tonga Kid (also Tama of the Islanders), Umaga (also Jamal of Three Minute Warning), and Rikishi (also Fatu). Of course, Rikishi is the father of current WWE stars Jimmy and Jey Uso, and Jimmy (real name Jonathan) is the real-life husband of Trinity McCray, better known as Naomi of Team BAD.

So, if you want to total all that up, we’ve got fifteen blood-related Anoa’is who have been professional wrestlers, and you can add two more via marriage to get the total up to seventeen.

But wait, there’s more! Even though there is no genetic relationship, the Anoa’is claim a connection to the Maivia family due to a “blood brother” relationship between their ancestors. This would add patriarch Peter Maivia and his wife Lia, who, though she was not a wrestler, was a wrestling promoter. Peter and Lia’s daughter, Ata, married Rocky Johnson, and they gave birth to the Rock.

If you want to add the Maivias to the Anoa’i total, you’ve got two more wrestlers born into the family, one more wrestler married into the family, and one wrestling promoter in the family. That would be a grand more total of seventeen family members who are wrestlers, three more who married in, and one promoter for a grand total of twenty-one.

BUT WE’RE STILL NOT DONE. Current NXT developmental wrestler Nia Jax has some looser connections to the Maivia side of the family, as she is a fairly distant cousin of the Rock. Also, though I have not been able to find details as to precisely how, there are numerous statement out there that the Snuka family ties into the Maivia family by marriage, which would add Jimmy Snuka, Deuce Shade (a.k.a. Sim Snuka), and Tamnia to the mix. With those four, the grand totals would be twenty-one, three, and one for twenty-five members in the wrestling industry overall.

Are they the biggest family in professional wrestling? Again, that depends on how you want to count everybody. One prolific wrestling family that almost nobody talks about is the Alvarado family, also sometimes known as the Brazo family. Brothers Brazo de Oro, El Brazo, and Brazo de Plata (a.k.a. Super Porky) were a hot trio in lucha libre in the 1980s, but more causal lucha fans probably don’t realize that their father wrestled as Shadito Cruz and they also had three other siblings who worked under variants of the Brazo name. By the time you add in all of the Brazos’ children, spouses, and children’s spouses, you have nineteen wrestling members, which would outrank the most conservative count of the Anoa’i family laid out above.

Some people also might think that the Hart family is contention, but they actually just miss the cutoff. Counting all children and spouses, the most wrestling Harts that I can get to is fourteen, which is a few members below the Alvarados and the Anoa’is.

2. Is it true that Sabu is the only wrestler to never go to the hospital for his injuries? I remember reading somewhere he super glued his wounds shut. Is there any truth to this?

Yes, Sabu’s penchant for not seeking medical treatment is the stuff of legend, and, yes, he would superglue some of his wounds back together. (However, that’s not exclusive to him – plenty of other wrestlers have done the same thing.) However, it is overstating the point to say that he “never” went to the hospital.

3. I was thinking back to Brock Lesnar’s first WWE run in 2002 . He debuted in March 2002. He won King of the Ring 3 months later. He then won the Undisputed title to the Rock 2 months after that. Not to mention he went over the Undertaker several times. It got me thinking, Was there any plans to have Brock carry the company? They pushed him awful fast. Were they hoping he became Face of the WWE instead of Cena?

That was absolutely the plan. There would be no other reason to give Lesnar all of the accolades that he received so early in his career. In fact, if you look at the timing of Cena and Lesnar’s respective initial pushes, Cena didn’t start on his upward path to being the face of the company until AFTER Lesnar was established as a main eventer, and he didn’t truly get pushed into the stratosphere until after Brock had donned his first Minnesota Vikings jersey.

Rahil, as is his style, has a series of rapid-fire questions, to which I will give rapid-fire answers:

What PPVs have occurred on a weekday or Saturday rather than a normal Sunday? Names and dates, please.

I will put aside the obvious answers like Taboo Tuesday and This Tuesday in Texas, because, if you can’t figure out what days those shows took place on, you’re probably not able to read this column anyway.

What was billed as the very first WWF pay per view event was actually held on a Thursday. It was the Wrestling Classic, which aired on November 7, 1985. (I refer to it as the first real WWF PPV because the first two Wrestlemanias were primarily sold as closed circuit events, even though they were on pay per view in a very limited number of markets.)

One of the WWF’s more unique PPV events, “No Holds Barred: The Match, the Movie” took place on Tuesday, December 27, 1989. The show consisted of an airing of the movie No Holds Barred followed by a ten minute steel cage match featuring Hulk Hogan and Brutus Beefcake against Randy Savage and Zeus.

In another oddity of a pay per view, the WWF was forced to put on a “sequel” to its In Your House: Beware of Dog PPV in 1996 when a power outage rendered most of the original show unwatchable. Beware of Dog 2 took place on Tuesday, May 28, and it gave viewers the matches that they missed on the first go-round.

Moving on to events that have a bit more renown, the 1991 Royal Rumble, held on January 19, was on a Saturday. There was another Saturday Rumble held in 1994, this time on January 22.

One Wrestlemania has been held on a day other than Sunday. Specifically, Wrestlemania II, held on April 7, 1986, was on a Monday.

The second ever King of the Ring pay per view in 1994 was, oddly enough, on a Thursday. June 16 was the date.

Summerslam in 1988 was on August 29, and that was a Monday. Summerslam 1989 was also held on a Monday, this time August 28. August 27, 1990 was also a Monday, and it was also the date of Summerslam. August 26, 1991, the date of that year’s Summerslam? Also a Monday. The event switched to a Saturday in 1992 when it was held on August 29. The event went back to Monday in 1993, when it was held on August 30. August 29, 1994 was also a Monday Summerslam day.

The Survivor Series was originally built around not being on a Sunday, as it was programmed to be part of a family’s American Thanksgiving celebration. So, the first five Survivor Series PPVs were on Thursday nights, specifically on November 26, 1987; November 24, 1988; November 23, 1989; November 22, 1990; and November 28, 1991. After several years, they switched the event from Thanksgiving to “Thanksgiving Eve,” which means that the show was held on a Wednesday on November 25, 1992; November 24, 1993; and November 23, 1994. After that, the Survivor Series was changed over to the traditional Sunday evening timeslot.

Is Ring Ka King available in English commentary?

Not that I am aware of.

Like Jeff Hardy at Victory Road 11, have there been any other wrestlers who were in no condition to wrestle in a match?

Yes. For fear of being accused of libel, I’m just going to leave it at that.

If Kevin Nash was healthy at TNA Bound for Glory 05 would he have won the world championship and if so how long would he have kept it for?

I have never heard of a plan for Kevin Nash to win the championship at that event.

We’ll let Chuck close it out, because I liked his tag team with Billy just that much:

My friend and I were watching the 1988 Survivor Series Tag Team Elimination Match where Demolition and the Powers of Pain did a double turn. My question is why did the double turn take place? What were the kayfabe and non-kayfabe reasons for the turn? On the surface it seems like Fuji’s actions made little to no sense in the storyline. Was there a backstory to this that showed tensions between Demolition and Fuji? Also, it seemed like the Powers of Pain were over as babyfaces (as per the crowd reaction in that match) so why turn them?

The answer is there isn’t really a good answer. The company just thought that it would be something worthwhile to shake up the undercard and keep the feud alive by taking it in another direction. The fact of the matter is that, particularly when it comes to undercard angles like this one, there aren’t great rationales or grand plans behind why things are done. The main events get much more focus, and changes on the undercard are often orchestrated just so that the wrestlers will have something to do.

And that does it for this week! Again, if you’ve got a question that you would like for me to answer specifically as opposed to Mat, I will also be here next, and I will try to get to it then. All you have to do is drop an e-mail to [email protected].