Ask 411 Wrestling: Why Wasn’t Mike Awesome Used More 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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Fight, Will, fight:

My question is regarding Kevin Owens. With most any wrestler, whether I like them or not, I can see SOME appealing thing about them and kind of see why they get pushed and/or are popular (or hated). With Owens, I just don;t get it. Yeah, his physique is part of it, but I don;t even feel like a wrestler needs to have a muscular or athletic physique. He also has no real character; he is laughable as a mean, tough guy bully type, and doesn’t work as an underdog babyface type. His in-ring skills are painfully mediocre. He kind of seems like an 80s jobber who is somehow getting pushed, or maybe some dude off the street who won a contest to be a wrestler for a day, and here we are 20 years later and he’s still doing it. In your opinion, what is his appeal?

At the risk of being one of those guys who makes The Big Lebowski his entire personality, I think I’ll quote the Dude on this one:

That’s just like, your opinion, man.

And it seems to be a minority opinion. If you were to read reaction to Owens’ work online or go to live shows and listen to audience reactions to him, you would see and hear that his promos are working, and you would hear and see that his in-ring performances are working. At the end of the day, if you get the kind of reaction he gets and can convince a major promotion to book you into the sort of position he’s been booked in, you’re doing a great job as a professional wrestler.

And, really, perhaps the biggest professional compliment that could ever be paid to Kevin Owens has been paid to Kevin Owens:

Steve Austin, one of the five biggest stars in American wrestling history, who is also remarkably protective of his own in-ring work, was willing to wrestle Owens in his return match after 19 years of inactivity.

So, I’m sorry, Will. I can’t say that your opinion is objectively wrong, but I can say it falls far outside the mainstream. To the vast, vast majority of fans and people whose opinion matters to Owens’ career, he can wrestle an entertaining match, he can cut a good promo, he portrays his character well, and his look is not a deterrent.

Admittedly, Owens has never really been my favorite wrestler. When I was first exposed to him in the mid-2000s, I thought he was too much of a “spot monkey” as they used to be called and had a bad habit of building his matches around getting all his cool moves in as opposed to listening to the audience and working to lock them in to the match. Also, in those days, his “look” did bother me, as he didn’t appear too dissimilar from the people in the audience of the indy matches that he was wrestling on.

My initial negative impression of the guy have lead me to a space where I don’t get particularly excited about anything he does, even though admittedly I think he has gotten over a lot of his former worst habits in the ring and grown into his look, now appearing to be someone who could fuck you up in a barroom brawl as opposed to a rejected design for one Nelson Muntz’s running buddies in The Simpsons.

In other words, he’s not my favorite either, but he’s not awful I’m willing to accept that I’m outside the mainstream on my overall preference for him. Hopefully you can join me there some day, Will.

Tyler from Winnipeg asks a question befitting a Canadian:

Any notable NHL players ever get involved with WWE?

No, not really.

Despite wrestling having a ton of crossover with professional and collegiate football and some lesser degree of crossover with baseball and basketball, the connections between high level hockey and pro wrestling have been pretty low over the years.

(Insert lame joke answer about Bill Irwin’s gimmick as the Goon in the WWF in 1996 and 1997.)

I was not able to find any significant NHL/WWE crossover, but let’s talk about other professional hockey players and other professional wrestling organizations.

Over the last few years, probably the most notable person to transition between ice hockey and wrestling is Darren McCarty. McCarty played 15 season in the NHL with the vast majority of them being for the Detroit Red Wings, where he was on four Stanley Cup-winning teams. After he stopped playing hockey, he trained to become a pro wrestler and has mostly been active on independents in Michigan and Ontario since 2021. He did make a handful of appearances for Impact Wrestling in 2023, wrestling in two tag matches with Tommy Dreamer as a partner.

Also, though it’s amateur and not professional, wrestlers Vampiro and Glen Kulka did play junior hockey at a relatively high level, and ODB played hockey in college.

And some people in the comment section would probably yell at me if I didn’t mention that, even though he didn’t play professional hockey himself, Chris Jericho is the son of Ted Irvine, who played in the NHL for 15 years.

Bryan is accompanied by Judge Jeff Jones:

When the WWE bought out WCW and ECW, is there a reason Mike Awesome wasn’t used more? Did it have anything to do with Heyman being mad at him? He just seemed to have been custom made for the WWE and could have had awesome matches with Taker and Kane, and it was a missed opportunity.

Awesome did a shoot interview in 2003 that has been archived by Title Match Wrestling. In it, he points to three reasons that he thinks he didn’t get much of a shot in WWE. The first is, in fact, he thought that Paul Heyman was against him behind the scenes, even though Heyman was nice to him to his face. Second, he didn’t feel he was allowed to wrestle his style of matches, with several wrestlers not wanting to take some of his more high risk offense, specifically telling a story about Edge and Christian refusing to participate in spots like a top rope powerbomb. (Because when I think of wrestlers who were really cautious in the ring, I think about Edge and Christian circa 2001.) Finally, and I think this is the reason that may have the most validity behind it, he blew out his knee fairly early in his run during a match with the Big Show, and he came back sooner than he should have because he was afraid of losing his spot. He feels that working through the injury ultimately hampered his performance and made him less desirable.

Brad is playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon with a very old man:

Excluding former wrestlers on Legends deals, can you think of any current WWE employees who knew Vincent J McMahon? The only one I can come up with is Paul Heyman, according to his old documentary. Vincent K, Linda, Shane, and Stephanie McMahon obviously knew him, but none of them are with the company anymore. Michael Hayes had a few WWF matches back in 1984, but they were after Vincent J’s death.

Heyman is the obvious answer, but other than him I really struggled to come up with anybody. At the time I originally got this question in, Paul Ellering was still in the company, and while he would have been in the business early enough to potentially encounter Vince Sr., I couldn’t find any record that he would’ve gone to the northeast during that timeframe.

So, I’ve got nothing. I’m glad to have the commenters throw out some ideas should they have any.

I feel a little gross answering this question from Bucky:

I saw a question on your Ask 411 about wrestling footwear. In one of the WWE video games where Asuka was first a playable character, I noticed her character wrestled barefoot. I found out after the fact she wrestled that way in Japan and the programmers developed her before she first wrestled in NXT. My question is was there any other women like her that wrestled barefoot and changed when they joined a big promotion? And if so, what was the reason?

And a second part, can you think of any similar changes to attire / style for women wrestlers when they joined American promotions? Such as masks etc.

There are a handful of female wrestlers who wrestled barefoot at one point in their careers but changed it up later on. One notable example is Vicki Williams, a Fabulous Moolah trainee who was active in the 1970s and first couple of years in the 1980s. She wrestled barefoot for much of her career, but, when she went to All Japan Women’s Wrestling, she put boots on. (Think of that as a “reverse Asuka.”)

In WCW, Miss Madness / Mona would wrestle barefoot, wearing high heels and an evening gown to the ring and then taking off the heels when the action started. She would jump ship to the WWF and become Molly Holly, where she started wearing boots.

In her handful of independent matches, Lacey Von Erich wrestled barefoot as a tribute to her uncle Kevin. However, when she became a regular on the TNA roster, she wore boots . . . and then eventually just stopped wrestling altogether once people realized she wasn’t particularly good at it.

As to the reason these women started covering their tootsies . . . your guess is as good as mine. I presume it had at least something to do with safety, because obviously wrestling barefoot leaves you more open for broken toes, sprained ankles, and other similar maladies. In the case of Williams, I also have to wonder if the more strict culture of Japanese wrestling at the time required her to don footwear.

As far as other major attire changes for U.S. imports goes, yes I can think of a couple.

Legendary joshi wrestler Chigusa Nagayo completely revamped her gimmick when she appeared for WCW in 1996. She applied facepaint and black leather to become the even more intimidating character known as Zero.

Sareee came to NXT and was renamed Sarray and also started dressing like a stereotypical Japanese school girl with a magical amulet for some reason.

A Different Ryan is hopping the guardrail:

When ECW invaded the WWF in early 1997, was there something more that was supposed to come out of it? It seemed like just as the angle was heating up, it was dropped without explanation.

No, nothing more was supposed to come of it on the WWF side. It was a way to pad out the roster for an episode of Raw that took place when most of the company’s talent was away on a European tour. However, it furthered storylines that were ongoing in ECW headed into their pay per view debut, Barely Legal.

Bret tugs at the heartstrings:

Was there ever any heat that you know of between Luger and Savage when Luger was with Miss Elizabeth? I know Randy was pretty heartbroken when she left him in 92.

Apparently not. Luger was interviewed on Sean Mooney’s Prime Time podcast several years ago and was asked this very question. He said that things were always cordial between himself and Savage, attributing it to the fact that the Macho Man and Elizabeth had been apart for a decade when they began their relationship.

Patrick U. asks us about the Hulk Hogan lie of the week:

Do you think Hulk Hogan was right when at Bash at the Beach 2000, he said that WCW is in bad shape because of BS like of Jeff Jarrett lying on the mat to be pinned on purpose? Or was Hulk Hogan full of crap himself and being a hypocrite since he probably let it happen?

The latter. Hogan was in on that part of the evening’s festivities. He only got angry and filed a shoot lawsuit over the comments that Vince Russo later made about him on the microphone.

Ron is how my name is pronounced in the deep south:

I recently got to thinking about all the wrestlers from the back end of the WWF Golden Era who may have had a world title on their resume if they competed in today’s two world title era. It seems odd to compare the careers of Roddy Piper and Jake Hager with Hager having been a WWF/E World (Or WWE or whatever the hell they call these titles) champion and Piper not.

Who do you think from that era would have held a world title had there been two like today? Specifically folks who never ended up winning a world title. To narrow it down, let’s say anyone on the roster between Survivor Series 1989 and Survivor Series 1991.

This sounds like a cop out answer, but I still think it’s the honest answer:

Every single main eventer would have held a world title. That’s how things are booked today. Can you name a bona fide main eventer in 2025 WWE who isn’t a former world champion in some way, shape, or form? (Aside from a couple of exceptions for guys who only just reached that status.)

Warrior, Andre, Perfect, Rude, Flair. Piper, Slaughter, Undertaker, Earthquake, Snuka, Roberts, Hogan, DiBiase, and Savage all definitely would have been world champions.

I’d say there would even be chances for guys like Big Boss Man, Jim Duggan and Dino Bravo, who were at least as high on the card as some former world champions today like Mike the Miz.

APinOZ is roping this dope:

Continuing my obsession with rope colours. Why have WWE returned to white ropes for all their TV shows and PLEs? At one point, Raw was red, Smackdown blue and NXT yellow, and I felt it was a distinctive nod towards each of the “brands.”

I have no idea, and I doubt that there’s any deep explanation beyond “somebody in the production department thought it would look cool.”

Not to be confused with APinOZ, it’s Ossie:

You often see/hear wrestlers call moves in the ring, or tell stories about calling moves. Often it’s clear: “kick *ME* in the knee”, “dropkick *ME*” etc. But often it’s a single word: “clothesline”, “spinebuster” etc. In these cases, what determines who is delivering the move, & who is taking it? The one who calls it? The one who is currently “on top”? The heel/face? I feel like I’ve seen multiple cases of each & there almost never seems to be any confusion between them.

If you watch videos of wrestlers calling spots – of which there are currently many on the internet – it really seems to be based on the context. Sometimes the guy who calls the move delivers it, and sometimes the guy who calls the move takes it. Positioning, body language, and the general flow of the match all have to come into play.

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.