Ask 411 Wrestling: Who Should Beat Roman Reigns and MJF For Their Titles?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 Wrestling. I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling.

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When two readers send in more or less the same question in the same week, I should probably answer them. Let’s start with the version of the question asked by Jon:

Short of an injury or health issue, when Roman eventually loses the title, it has to be well thought out and it has to make sense and be believable.

After what we saw at NoC, who makes the most sense to you? Is it Cody? Gunther? Or are they really that serious about Jimmy?

What are your thoughts? Who’s the “correct” choice for next Universal Champ?

And now let’s head to the version of the question asked by Mladen:

First and foremost, I’d like to thank you for all your hard work.

Second, thank you for your gender-inclusive language. Although I am cisgender, I appreciate others being allies to often targeted and harassed groups. We need more people like that.

Lastly, my wrestling question for you is: At this point in time, is there anyone that’s a “legitimate consideration” to dethrone Roman Reigns and MJF in the near future? Although one is more established than the other, it’s hard to fathom either of them being dethroned by anyone else in their respective companies right now.

When it comes to Roman Reigns and the Universal Championship, it essentially has to be Cody Rhodes at this point. There’s only one reason for WWE to build Cody up as big as he was earlier this year and have him drop the fall in the main event of Wrestlemania, followed by spinning him off to another feud as opposed to continuing WWE’s usual pattern of almost every program between two wrestlers consisting of three matches wrestled on three consecutive PLEs. Basic storytelling dictates that has to all be leading to a Rhodes title victory at a later point this year or next – unless the company totally wants to neuter the American Nightmare.

Things are a bit more open with MJF. As Mladen notes, he is not nearly the dominant champion that Rhodes is at this point, but there’s not a clear next “guy,” either. In fact, it seems that just about every top wrestler in AEW is headed in a direction other than challenging for the championship, which is probably why we wound up with the fairly weak Friedman/Allen/Perry/Guevara championship match on the company’s last pay per view.

I’m not aware of any backstage rumor or buzz on who is going to unseat him. I suspect that the answer may well be either Kenny Omega or CM Punk, as that seems to be the program that will eventually be the focal point of the company, even if it is not where they are headed immediately upon Punk’s return.

HBK’s Smile, coincidentally, wants to ask about somebody other than HBK losing a title outside the ring:

Quick question – Why did Tito Santana forfeit the ECW Title to Shane Douglas?

Though it certainly wasn’t the most time consuming question I’ve ever researched for the column, this one unexpectedly took more time than I expected, and I wouldn’t exactly call it “quick.”

First off, let’s set the scene for everybody. It’s 1993, and, though he would later come back for a couple of quickie appearances, Tito Santana wrapped up as a full-time wrestler for the WWF in early August. On August 8, he wrestled on the one and only ECW show he ever appeared on, which occurred at the ECW Arena. (We’re still in “Eastern Championship Wrestling” at this point, for what it’s worth.) The company taped several weeks of television at that event and, in his first match for the promotion, Santana defeated Don “The Rock” Muraco for the ECW Heavyweight Championship. Then, in a match taped to air the week after the title change, Santana and Stan Hansen defeated Muraco and Shane Douglas via disqualification in a tag team match. Finally, in a dark match on the same card, Santana successfully defended the ECW Title for the first and only time against Vladimir Koloff, the indyrific trainee and kayfabe relative of Ivan Koloff.

And then, that was it. As soon as he entered, Tito Santana exited ECW.

Why is not exactly clear. In the September 6, 1993 Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer wrote in running down ECW news that there would soon be a “fictitious title change” with Tito dropping the belt because he was “unavailable for future dates.” There was no explanation as to why he was unavailable, and that doesn’t seem to jibe with reality, at least not from a pro wrestling perspective, as ECW’s next recorded shows were on September 18 in Philadelphia and October 16 in Maryland, and Tito kept somewhat active in the ring around that time – though it was possible something was ongoing in his personal life.

The real reason for Santana’s departure may have been that he just didn’t like the promotion. In 2010, a documentary about pro wrestling called Card Subject to Change was released digitally. If you go to the film’s official YouTube channel, you can see extra clips of interviews that were filmed for the movie, and one of them is Tito stating that he didn’t last in ECW because he didn’t like the “extreme” direction of the promotion and felt his pure wrestling was more than enough to keep fans entertained. Given that the September 18, 1993 show that I mentioned above was headlined by a barbed wire baseball bat match featuring the Head Hunters, it seems entirely plausible that this is what turned off the former El Matador.

As reported by Metlzer in the Observer there was, in fact, a fictitious title change that got the ECW belt off of Tito. The promotion stated that there was a show in Roanoke, Virginia, on September 9 that Santana did not appear for, causing him to forfeit the championship to Shane Douglas in their scheduled match. However, per a report of PW Insider, the Roanoke show was completely made up. It’s true that Tito wasn’t going to make future ECW bookings and they stripped him of the belt as a result, but there was not a card in Virginia with a Douglas/Santana match on top that Tito no-showed.

(For what it’s worth, some title histories – including Wikipedia – list this like there really was a Roanoke show. There wasn’t. Go fix that stuff. I’m a reliable source for Wiki purposes, dammit.)

There you have it. Tito Santana didn’t truly forfeit the ECW Title to Shane Douglas, but he did leave the promotion as champion, causing the company to come up with a scenario to get the belt off him that was as real as Pat Patterson’s IC Title tournament win in Rio De Janeiro.

Uzoma is asking about wrestling’s second most famous Brent, right behind Kremen:

Whatever happened to Brent Albright, who had a brief spell on SmackDown as Gunner Scott?

According to the October 23, 2006 edition of the Figure Four Weekly newsletter, Gunner Scott was pulled off of WWE television because the company developed the opinion that he was not getting over well enough and was thus not quite ready for television. A little less than three months after his main roster debut in February 2006, he was shipped back to OVW for a while before ultimately getting cut by WWE altogether.

He hit the indies from there, primarily working for Ring of Honor and becoming part of the Hangman Three stable with current WWE authority figure Adam Pearce and current alleged domestic abuser BJ Whitmer. After that unit dissolved, Albright traded the NWA World Heavyweight Title with Pearce on ROH shows, with Brent winning it in August 2008 and dropping it back to Scrap Iron in September.

Albright’s time in Ring of Honor overlapped with a run that Jim Cornette had there, and Cornette was asked about Albright on an episode of his podcast earlier this year. Corny alluded to the former Gunner Scott having personal issues that impacted his “reliability.” Additional details were not offered, but people who have followed wrestling for a while can likely read between the lines.

Albright’s last match for ROH was on March 6, 2010. He didn’t wrestle again until September 2011, when he started a series of matches for an independent promotion called IZW that ran in his home state of Oklahoma. He would finish up with them around the end of the year, and that was also the end of Brent Albright’s wrestling career.

From what little online footprint the man has made since then, it appears that he has a family and is working a regular job in Oklahoma. If that’s what’s healthier for him, then so be it.

Marcus from Mobile, AL is spinning right round, baby, right round:

I’m asking this question shortly after NJPW announced the contenders for the G-1 Climax. Do you think WWE or AEW could or would do a variation of the round robin style tournament or do you think it would turn off audiences in the West?

Yeah, I don’t think that it would work in the States, absent some significant reeducation of fans to follow wrestling in a way that they are no longer accustomed to doing.

The G-1 Climax and similar round robin tournaments work in Japan because fans are used to watching wrestling like it’s a legitimate sport in which wins and losses are very significant and affect eligibility for championships. AEW tried to have some of this flavor early on by tracking win-loss records and stating that people would only receive title shots if they had good records, but that all got tossed out the window after about a year. I just don’t think that American fans would latch on to the league concept.

That being said, it has been attempted at least once that I can think of. In its early days, Ring of Honor held the “Field of Honor” tournament, which saw eight men divided into two blocks compete in a round robin tournament that was ultimately won by Matt Stryker (the guy with the unibrow, not the teacher). The fact that ROH never tried this again probably tells you what you need to know about how successful it was. However, in that case, I would argue that part of the problem is that matches were so spread out that the tournament never really built any momentum. ROH was really only running about twice a month at the time, so you had an eight-man tournament that took almost three months to complete.

I also have to take a moment here to shit on TNA, because that’s been my gimmick for the last fifteen or so years. In 2011, 2012, and 2013, they held the Bound for Glory Series, which was promoted like it was a round robin tournament, but it . . . wasn’t, actually. Instead it was just a vaguely defined series of matches, and nobody pretended each wrestler was wrestling each other wrestler. In fact, there wasn’t even really an effort to make sure all the wrestlers had the same numbers of matches, which is truly idiotic because you don’t exactly have a fair athletic competition if all the competitors don’t have the same opportunity to earn the same amount of points. It would be the equivalent of having a basketball game but forcing one of the two teams to sit out the third quarter. The 2011 Bound for Glory Series was the worst of the lot, with Samoa Joe, who came in dead last in the rankings, only having ten matches, whereas Gunner, who came in third, had twenty matches.

The AWA Team Challenge series was booked better than the TNA Bound for Glory series, and that involved a raw turkey on a pole match.

Tyler from Winnipeg has a question about Droz. No, wait, I’m sorry. He has a question about draws:

If prime Hogan, Austin, Rock were given a score of 100 for drawing power; what would prime Vince McMahon get for a number?

I don’t think you can compare them. It’s really apples and oranges.

When people talk about a main event wrestler like Hogan, Austin, or Rock (or even Sammartino or Backlund) being a “draw,” you’re talking about whether that individual wrestling a match on a card is going to result in more fans buying tickets to a show than would have otherwise. Vince McMahon only ever wrestled a small handful of matches, and he wasn’t wrestling a full schedule the way the others were in order for them to be evaluated as draws.

Vince had a critical role as a character in the late 1990s, don’t get me wrong, but he wasn’t positioned to be a money drawing attraction in the same way that top wrestlers were.

Marcus from Mobile, AL has a question that is sacrelicious:

If you could be a modern day Moses and deliver the 10 Commandments of Pro Wrestling what would they say?

This was a difficult question for me to answer, because both my brain generally and my preferences in wrestling don’t contain a lot of absolutes. For almost every rule I can think of, I can also think of at least two or three major exceptions. However, I think that I ultimately managed to put together list in which almost all the entries will control the vast majority of the time.

Here goes:

1. Thou shalt not hire Vince Russo: The guy arguably had one successful run a quarter-century ago, and everything he’s produced since has been critically panned and financially unsuccessful. I’m a guy who believes in second chances, but I don’t believe in forty-second chances.

2. Thou shalt not doubt El Dandy: Because who are we to do that, really?

3. Thou shalt not allow unprotected head shots: CTE is real, and it’s nasty. I feel guilty for cheering on some of the things that I was seeing in hardcore matches in FMW and ECW back in the 1990s.

4. Thou shalt not accept WWE’s version of events as the gospel: This is targeted more at fans than anybody else, but some in the wrestling industry need to remember it as well. Any time WWE publishes an account of wrestling history, it is publishing it to advance its own agenda and narrative. Remember that there are other perspectives and interpretations of events. Also, that leather and gold thing that Roman Reigns carries around is a “belt,” not a “championship.” A championship is an abstract concept. A belt is a physical item that represents the championship.

5. Don’t be a dick: I’m dropping the biblical phrasing for this one because I think mine works better. Sorry, Jesus (or whoever wrote the Bible). Don’t run any storylines or gimmicks that invoke stereotypes of marginalized groups.

6. Thou shalt not piss off Jeff Jarrett: You know, there was a whole t-shirt about it in the 90s.

7. Thou shalt sell injuries: This is a trend in modern wrestling that I’m sick of. Sometimes, a wrestler needs to be hurt enough in a match or an angle that they miss one television show if not multiple television shows. Sometimes, a wrestler needs to be hurt enough in a match or an angle that they can’t perform their entrance or their high spots perfectly. However, that’s all been forgotten in the name of wanting everything to be uniform week in and week out. Stories are better when they have stakes, and stories about people fighting don’t have stakes if they can’t get hurt.

8. Thou shalt stand up for yourself: This one is directed to the wrestlers themselves. A whole lot of bad angles, gimmicks, and matches could have been avoided over the years if individual performers would have refused to go through with plans that would have been harmful to their careers.

9. Thou shalt not repeat blown spots: This is a pet peeve of mine that goes back a while. Nothing makes wrestling look more fake than a spot not going exactly how the wrestlers intended it to go and them then doing the exact same thing as a “fix.” This is where guys like Sabu, who intentionally made some spots look rough, had a point. Wrestling is supposed to be a fight. It’s supposed to be a struggle. It shouldn’t always be pretty.

10. Thou shalt not fuck with the Dudleys: I heard this one somewhere else. It sounded good, so here we are.

We’ll return in seven-ish days, and, as always, you can contribute your questions by emailing [email protected]. You can also leave questions in the comments below, but please note that I do not monitor the comments as closely as I do the email account, so emailing is the better way to get things answered.