Ask 411 Wrestling: Will We Ever See Vince McMahon Back in WWE?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 . . . the last surviving weekly column on 411 Wrestling.

I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling. If you have one of those queries searing a hole in your brain, feel free to send it along to me at [email protected]. Don’t be shy about shooting those over – the more, the merrier.

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Big Al is making my job difficult:

If by some freak chance Vince McMahon is found innocent of all charges do you think he would be welcome back in the WWE or at least get inducted into the Hall of Fame?

First off, just so there is no confusion, the phrase “innocent of all charges” is usually language that you would use if somebody were being prosecuted for criminal acts. No criminal charges have been filed against Vince McMahon as of the time of this writing. There have been reports of a criminal investigation, but an investigation does not necessarily lead to charges, and of course neither an investigation nor charges equate to guilt.

At present, the legal action pending against McMahon is purely civil in nature.

However, what I assume the question really meant was whether McMahon will be allowed back into the company and/or into its Hall of Fame if he is found to not be liable to Janel Grant in the civil proceeding.

I do not think that we will see McMahon back in anything approaching his former capacity. Even if he prevails in Ms. Grant’s suit, it still seems pretty unquestionable at this point that he did have a relationship with her (though they dispute the level of consent that was involved) and that he did pay her off in order to keep quiet. A high level executive engaging in that sort of behavior – even if it did not reach the significantly more problematic levels described in the suit – has the potential to be disruptive for the company in the future. If I’m in any way, shape, or form involved in the WWE’s board of directors or other high level management, I don’t want McMahon back in an executive capacity. Period. This goes double when you realize that they appear to have been pretty darn successful without him these last several months.

That being said, could I see him back for a Hall of Fame induction and/or some other on camera appearance if he successfully defends himself in the present legal action? Maybe. I think that it depends on how damning the evidence is that comes out in the process of the suit. If there is credible evidence of impropriety even if it does not result in a verdict against McMahon, the court of public opinion could still be so heavily against him that it would be a public relations nightmare to have him back, one that the company probably would not want to invite.

However, if the case falls apart as it proceeds and the evidence ultimately points to something more in line with McMahon’s version of events . . . then it’s entirely possible that he could be brought back into the fold as a character or an HOF honoree.

Of course, the other factor here is time. If Ms. Grant’s suit is going to trial, I would guess that the final word on this case is years away, not weeks or months. Vince McMahon is 78 years old. Though I’m not aware of any ongoing health issues he has, just given normal human lifespans it is well within the realm of possibility that he may not live long enough to see his public image rehabilitated.

Peter is invading our hearts:

1. Who were the wrestlers that came over from WCW in the Invasion? Not those who came over later like Flair, etc.

When the WWF purchased WCW, they purchased 24 lower to mid card wrestlers’ contracts. These were all wrestlers whose WCW deals said that they could be terminated at any time with 90 days’ notice, and the WWF picked them up with the idea that they could pay them their WCW salaries for three months, cut them, and then re-sign them under contracts that were more in line with what the WWF was doing at the time.

Some of the original 24 were featured on WWF television, those being:

Lance Storm, Hugh Morrus, Stacy Keibler, Mike Awesome, Chuck Palumbo, Sean O’Haire, Mark Jindrak, Shawn Stasiak, Chavo Guerrero Jr., and Shane Helms.

The remaining names of the original 24 were definitely signed by the WWF but didn’t make it on to television as part of the original Invasion, instead being assigned to developmental. A few of them did eventually become part of the company’s main roster, but many were cut before they saw the light of day. They are:

The Wall, Elix Skipper, Shannon Moore, Mike Sanders, Kaz Hayashi, Johnny the Bull, Evan Karagias, Jason Jett, Kwee Wee, Jamie Noble, Reno, Kid Romeo, Lash LeRoux, and Jimmy Yang.

Chris Kanyon was not part of the 24 wrestlers whose contracts were purchased by the WWF, because his contract actually expired in April 2001, after the WWF purchased WCW but before the Invasion really kicked off. So, the WWF let his deal run out and signed him to a new contract and brought him in as part of their version of WCW.

Similarly, Buff Bagwell’s WCW contract expired the day before the final episode of Monday Nitro, March 25, 2001. Originally the WWF didn’t seem to have interest in signing him based on him being one of the wrestlers who Vince McMahon “fired” on camera during the Nitro/Raw simulcast on March 26. However, they apparently reconsidered their position and did bring him in . . . though he didn’t last long at all.

Then we have the trio of Diamond Dallas Page, Booker T., and Billy Kidman. These are all individuals whose contracts the WWF did not want to purchase as part of the sale, because they were higher dollar contracts that couldn’t be cut on a 90 day cycle. However, all three of these men decided that they would like to take buy-outs of their WCW/Time Warner deals for pennies on the dollar so that they could join the WWF (or rather a WWF-owned version of WCW as the belief at the time was the Fed would run their old competitors as a separate brand).

Torrie Wilson was also signed by the WWF to be part of their version of WCW, though she actually hadn’t been in WCW for several months by the time the company went out of business. Her deal there came to an end in December 2000. “Squire” David Taylor was also cut from WCW in 2000 and signed with the WWF in 2001, though he was actually brought in primarily as a trainer and only wrestled in the HWA developmental territory. (He did eventually have a main roster run, but that was several years later under a different contract.) However, he was portrayed as part of a WCW faction in the HWA and did step into the ring.

And that is everybody who was signed as part of the original Invasion crew or very shortly thereafter. Of course, we should also note the team of Kronik, Brian “Crush” Adams and Bryan Clark. Originally the WWF passed on bringing them in, but, by the fall of 2001, they changed their minds. Reportedly, it was the Undertaker’s longstanding friendship with Adams that resulted in the tag team getting their jobs, though after Kronik had an all time stinker of a match with the Brothers of Destruction on the 2001 Unforgiven pay per view, not even a bromance with the Deadman could keep them on the main roster.

2. Objectively who got over? Booker T is the only one who comes to mind.

Definitely Booker T, though I think he actually got over more after the Invasion than he did during it, when he was portrayed as a buffoon who couldn’t buy a win. Shane Helms definitely got over more than he was pushed once he adopted the Hurricane gimmick. I would also give some credit to Lance Storm, who was a decent enough Intercontinental Champion for a time and got over enough to become a mainstay on the roster for several years, including a good run with the Un-Americans that saw him share the ring with Hulk Hogan.

3. Who came over from ECW?

Barely anybody. If you look at the crew of wrestlers who represented ECW in the Invasion, they were almost all people who were already on the WWF roster when the invasion kicked off or were WCW wrestlers with history in ECW who flipped allegiances once ECDub was added into the mix.

The only two ECW wrestlers who truly joined the WWF for the Invasion were Rob Van Dam and Tommy Dreamer.

4. Which of the ECW stars got over? I can think of RVD.

Definitely not Dreamer, that’s for sure. Meanwhile, RVD was probably the biggest success story of the entire Invasion in terms of a new star being made.

Tyler from Winnipeg is in the business of hurting people:

When were you at the height of being a fan of Bobby Lashley? For me it was vs Umaga, but when did you really dig Bobby?

Honestly, my favorite Lashley moment may be when he force fed Simon Dean a bunch of cheeseburgers.

Redmond beats people up:

When I was a kid I liked Hacksaw Jim Duggan – didn’t love him, but I liked him. As time has passed, I have found a deeper appreciation for Hacksaw – great babyface, thought his run as King Duggan was one of the most fun runs of the late 80’s. I do think Bret Hart was the way to go, but there’s always been this talk about them possibly putting the belt on Tito Santana in late ’92 (to bolster business in Mexico) as opposed to Bret – but what about Hacksaw Jim Duggan as WWF Champion at that point?

I’m not aware of Hacksaw ever having been seriously considered for a WWF Championship run, which is totally fine in my book – not because I didn’t like him but because we’re talking about an era in which championships weren’t passed around nearly as much as they are now. You needed talented wrestlers who never held the big belt to help show you just how special the champion actually was.

As far as whether he would’ve been a good candidate for the championship, I’d say that by 1992 Duggan had lost enough steam that it probably wouldn’t have been a good idea. Though he was still popular enough, he was on the downswing of his WWF run as opposed to his upswing, spending part of the year in a fairly insignificant tag team with Sergeant Slaughter and the rest of it putting over guys like the Repo Man and Nailz (though the latter were technically DQ wins for Duggan in most cases). In fact, he was done with the company by the summer of 1993.

Meanwhile, though Bret had been with the company for many years by ’92, his trajectory was always upward, so it felt like a more natural ascendancy to the belt.

Matt B. raps with us:

In the 1993 Royal Rumble, Earthquake eliminated Typhoon, then holds his hands out to say ‘that’s the way it is’. Did they ever wrestle together again after that? I know they redid the spot at Wrestlemania XXVII, but it never felt like there was a purpose or a pay-off for it.

Aside from the gimmick battle royale that Matt mentioned, they never wrestled again in the WWF, either as partners or opponents. In fact, at the time that they did the spot, it was already known that Earthquake was finishing up with the WWF that week. This is according to the February 1, 1993 Wrestling Observer Newsletter. After the Rumble, Quake wrestled at a set of TV tapings the next night, losing to Bam Bam Bigelow in a televised match and losing to Yokozuna in a Coliseum Home Video exclusive bout. Then, he was gone from the company for a while, spending the rest of 1993 wrestling primarily for the Japanese promotion WAR.

The WWF did bring Earthquake back for another run in the first half of 1994, where he first won a program against Adam Bomb to set him up for a run with Yokozuna . . . which saw Yoko prevail.

During his 1994 stint in the promotion, Quake actually just missed Typhoon, as Earthquake’s last match in the company was on May 15, 1994 while Typhoon returned to the promotion after some time away (including his Shockmaster run in WCW) on May 25, 1994.

Of course, you may still be asking what the purpose of John Tenta eliminating his partner from the 1993 Royal Rumble was. Given that one of them was on the way out the door, it certainly wasn’t to set up a program. If I had to guess as to why it was done, I would say that it was to build up Earthquake a little bit. The goal of the ’93 Rumble match was to continue the build of Yokozuna as a main event star, and one of the spots which did that was Yoko squaring off with and eventually eliminating Quake. By having Tenta throw out another superheavyweight earlier in the match, he looks like a bigger threat when it’s time for him to go toe-to-toe with Yoko.

In a coda to this story, the Natural Disasters actually did have one last match as a team. On April 29, 2000, the Florida independent group Future of Wrestling put on a show that was headlined by a six man tag match that pitted the trio of Earthquake, Typhoon, and Bobby Rogers against Dennis Allen, Sean Allen, and Larry Lane. Also on the card were Duke Droese and Steve Keirn’s version of Doink, so it was a real 1994 WWF reunion.

Richard from Sweden is getting all up in our ears:

Conrad Thompson has about a gazillion podcasts. Some of them I genuinely really like and some not at all. If you’re a listener – how would you rank them?

I don’t listen to Conrad’s shows on the regular, to be honest with you. That’s not meant as a knock on the guy. I just have so many other podcasts in my feed, wrestling and non-wrestling, that I never really got around to his stuff. I do listen to clips from his shows a decent amount as part of my research to answer questions in this column, and from that I generally get the sense that Jim Ross’s is the show that I would like the best, as he comes across as the straightest shooter with little to no personal agenda. Bruce Prichard can be entertaining but tows the WWF/WWE company line quite a bit (to the point even Conrad calls him out), though you can’t really blame him too much given that’s where his main paycheck comes from. Bischoff’s version of history often seems to be at odds with the consensus, and it happens often enough that I question his memory. Jeff Jarrett comes off as a nice enough guy, but his takes on things are often shallow to the point of not being particularly interesting.

And that’s really all the more that I’ve gotten into the shows.

Even a well payed high level executive like Bruce Prichard still does his outside the WWE umbrella. To do that and get McMahons blessing for it tells me that they pull in quite a lot of dough on it. How much would you guess that they pull in on the more successful wrestling podcasts?

According to a 2021 article I found promoting Conrad speaking at a podcasting conference, he had more than 3,200 people subscribed to his Patreon at that time, and his Patreon tiers were (and still are) between $9 and $49 per month. If we assume that the majority of those are on the lower side of the range and guesstimate an average Patreon contribution of $15 per month, that’s $48,000 per month or $576,000 per year in terms of gross revenue on Patreon alone. That’s before you consider other revenue streams, like podcast ads, YouTube ads, merchandise, sponsorships, and more. You also have to consider indirect benefits, like free promotion for other ventures like Conrad’s mortgage refinancing business.

Of course, there are expenses, and, of course, the wrestling personalities no doubt take a bit cut off this as well, but there is no doubt in my mind that Conrad is doing just fine with his podcasting empire.

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.