Ask 411 Wrestling: How Often Did Vince McMahon Attend WWF House Shows?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals . . . through Hel Stryer and brimstone, it’s Ask 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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While the cat’s away, ”Triple T” Ticking Time Bomb Taz will play:

When the WWF use to run a consistent house show circuit back in the late 80s and early 90s, how often was Vince McMahon there?

Very rarely. One of the things that you have to keep in mind is that when the WWF was at its peak popularity, they were running two and sometimes three separate house show tours with different crews of wrestlers on them that would be in wildly different parts of the country (or world), and that fact alone meant that the Chairman could not be at a majority of the company’s house shows.

On top of that, it’s not as though McMahon was going to go on tour with one of the two or three groups, because he had plenty to do in terms of running the business affairs of the promotion and coming up with creative, which kept him more tied to the geographic area around company headquarters. He might pop in on the house shows from time to time, but he was not a regular fixture there.

This is actually a big part of how and why the WWF invented the role of agents (now often call producers). Originally, the full title of the position was not agent but rather “road agent,” which meant that you were a representative of the office who went on the road with the wrestlers. They would handle the business of the house shows and send reports of how things were going back to McMahon and the other higher level executives.

Lee is the dominant force in sports entertainment:

We all know Undertaker has the most wins at WrestleMania but has he beaten the most people? Near all of his matches were Singles beating 1 person but in a 6 man tag match you beat 3 people, Money in the Bank win nets you quite a few, win a Battle Royale and that’s a huge boost.

So for main card only, including duplicates like Taker beating Kane 14+20 counts as two, which wrestlers have beaten the most people?

Tied with ten defeated wrestlers each are Grayson Waller, R-Truth, the Big Boss Man, and Drew McIntyre. Interestingly, Waller and Truth both got all their wins in the same match, namely the six-way ladder match for both the Raw and Smackdown Tag Team Titles at Wrestlemania XL. Really, this was two matches in one, one match for each set of belts. This means that Waller’s team and Truth’s team both won, and they both beat ten other guys. Boss Man, meanwhile, benefits from winning two tag team matches and one eight man tag at Mania, which gooses his numbers. More than half of McIntyre’s victories come from one match, the twelve man tag between feuding GMs Teddy Long and John Laurinaitis at Wrestlemania XXVIII.

There are four individuals tied with eleven victories each: Austin Theory, The Street Profits, and Jimmy Uso. Theory was in the same ladder match as Grayson Waller plus has one more win thanks to his defeating John Cena. Dawkins and Ford benefit from largely winning tag matches, including one regular tag match, one tag team triple threat, one tag team four-way, and one six man tag. Like the Street Profits, Jimmy Uso racks up most of wins by being a long-time part of the tag team division.

Clocking in with twelve wins each are Bret Hart and Triple H, with Bret getting a boost from being a tag team wrestler for the first part of his career and Triple H from having had a couple of triple threats on Wrestlemania.

Four more wrestlers are tied with thirteen wins each. Jey Uso has all the same wins his brother does plus two additional victories, one over Jimmy himself and the other his World Title win over Gunther. Daniel Bryan also has a lucky thirteen victories, with that number being bumped greatly by his winning the Intercontinental Title in a seven-man ladder match at Wrestlemania XXXI. John Cena also has downed thirteen wrestlers, mostly in singles bouts but with a small number of tags and triple threats thrown in. Finally, there is one more man who seems a bit out of place among these former world champs, and it’s Hardcore Holly. Holly’s thirteen wins come in just two matches, a Hardcore Title three-way at Wrestlemania XV and a Hardcore Title battle royale at Wrestlemania XVI.

Two people have defeated fourteen wrestlers at Wrestlemania, and they are rather mismatched. The first is CM Punk. The bulk of Punk’s wins come from winning back-to-back Money in the Bank ladder matches at Wrestlemania XXIV and XXV. The second person with fourteen wins is the first woman we’ve seen on our list, Naomi Knight. She jumps up this high on the list because of a win in a four-way tag match on Mania XXXVIII and a six-way singles match on Mania XXXIII.

There are five folks who have gone over fifteen wrestlers at Wrestlemania. First off, AJ Lee edges out her hubby by one. The vast majority of her numbers come from pulling off a win in the Vickie Guerrero Invitational at Wrestlemania XXX. Seth Rollins ties AJ at fifteen. He’s won quite a few singles matches at Mania but is bumped up by two six man tag wins early in his career as part of the Shield. Recent Power Slap loser Jack Swagger also notched his Wrestlemania belt fifteen times, largely due to an MITB ladder match victory as well as being party of the same twelve man tag we mentioned in connection with Drew McIntyre. Randy Orton is next, and he’s not won a ton of multi-man matches at Wrestlemania. He’s just been around forever. The same can be said for the last man on this list, which is Kane.

Two men have defeated sixteen wrestlers at Wrestlemania. One is Roman Reigns who has been fairly dominant in singles matches on the show in addition to benefiting from those two Shield matches we mentioned when discussing Seth Rollins. Roman’s counterpart here is Rob Van Dam, who scootches up the list thanks to winning a four-way tag match and an MITB ladder match.

We now skip up to two wrestlers who have defeated nineteen men at Wrestlemania, and both of them are Canadian heroes. One is Edge. Again, you’ve got a long-term main eventer with tons of singles wins, though it’s his origin in the tag team division and two three-way ladder match victories that get him above others who are otherwise similarly situated. Joining him is Bad News Brown, who won only a single Wrestlemania match during his career, but it was a twenty-man battle royale that brings him high up on the list.

In fact, most of the rest of the names on the list are guys who have battle royale wins. The next two certainly are. With twenty wrestlers defeated each, it’s Andre the Giant and Baron Corbin. Yeah, those are two names that don’t go together. Andre of course won the battle royale at Wrestlemania II in addition to his match with John Studd on the first Wrestlemania, while Corbin won the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royale at Wrestlemania XXXII, one of the few years it was on the main card before getting shuttered to the kickoff show or Smackdown.

With twenty-one defeated wrestlers each, it’s another odd couple, namely Mike the Miz and the Iron Sheik. In addition to generally having a long career with lots of Mania appearances, Miz is bolstered by the twelve-man tag from Mania XXVIII and Mania XL tag team ladder match that we’ve both discussed a couple times. Shieky Baby has two tag victories on early Wrestlemanias and then comes back as the winner of the infamous gimmick battle royale on Wrestlemania XVII.

Are you surprised we haven’t seen The Undertaker yet? Well, here he is with twenty-six wrestlers defeated. What’s most impressive about this number is that he got there without a battle royale or other huge schmoz with a ton of guys in it. He just hung around that long and won that often.

Surprisingly edging out the Undertaker by just one defeated wrestler is Santino Marella. He of course won the Miss Wrestlemania battle royale at Wrestlemania XXV as well as an eight man tag against the Corre at Wrestlemania XXVII.

And now we’re at the top of the list, where three men are tied for number one. All three of these fellows got to this position by winning a battle royale. The first two are Road Warrior Hawk and Road Warrior Animal, who won a fifteen tag team battl royale at Wrestlemania XIV as part of an effort revitalize their careers in the Attitude Era. Joining them is Antonio Cesaro, who won the very first Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royale, held on the main card of Wrestlemania XXX.

So, there you have it. It’s a weird statistic, but we aim to please our readers.

Marc thinks a XXXL hockey jersey is the height of fashion:

Why was The Public Enemy’s time in the WWF so short in 1999? If I remember correctly, they had a storyline in which nobody wanted them to be there, and it apparently turned into reality because they were gone not long after.

I actually covered this back in May.

Bryan just chortled:

What’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in wrestling? Intentionally or unintentionally doesn’t matter.

For me it was the early days of TNA and Dusty Rhodes referred to ..how can I keep this G rated.. a little person behaving inappropriately in a trash can hilarious. Even if it didn’t get anyone over.

What’s your all time favorite funny thing?

Honestly, mine may also involve Dusty. Back in 2006 when WWE put out his DVD set, he made an appearance during a Raw taping and cut a promo trying to sell the DVD, which didn’t air on television but was put on the company’s website as exclusive content.

In the promo, Dusty talked about how he knew his fans didn’t have a lot of money, so when they were out shopping – which he referred to as “easing on down the Walmart” – they might have to decide whether to buy his DVD or to buy something essential like “baby butt wipes.” He then acted out his fans trying to make the important decision between “baby butt wipes” and “DVDs.”

He concluded that most of his fans would buy the DVD, go home, and wipe their baby’s butt with a clean towel.

I swear that I am not making any of this up, but I cannot find it online today to save my life. If you happen to work in WWE’s digital media department and read this column, get that sucker up on the YouTube channel IMMEDIATELY.

Steve is back and better than ever:

When WCW Monday Nitro launched in 1995, its announcing team was headed up by Eric Bischoff on play by play. Bischoff continued in this role until he turned heel and joined the NWO, at which point Tony Schiavone took over play-by-play duties for the entire telecast.

You can say what you want about the talents of both Bischoff and Schiavone, but I don’t think there are many people who would argue that Schiavone wasn’t the superior announcer. My question is this: At the time, was there any justification for putting Bischoff in the top spot besides the fact that he was running WCW as Senior Vice President and could do whatever he wanted? Maybe they wanted a fresher face than Schiavone, who had been WCW’s top voice for the better part of the last decade? Maybe they thought Bischoff had a hipper image for what was supposed to be a hipper show? Maybe Schiavone sounded too Southern at a time when they wanted to get away from that reputation? I want to give Bischoff the benefit of the doubt here instead of just assuming that he was hogging the spotlight.

Bischoff himself addressed this in a July 2023 episode of his 83 Weeks podcast. In that conversation, Easy E openly acknowledged that he was not as good of a play-by-play announcer as Tony Schiavone. However, he still took the job for two reasons.

First, as predicted by Steve, Bischoff said that he wanted to give Nitro a different “feel” than WCW’s other shows, which Schiavone was already the face of.

Second, he had difficulty trying to explain to Schiavone and others the particular vibe that he wanted for Nitro, and he decided that putting himself in the lead announcer’s chair would help him convey the vision for the program without having to have it pass through another person. There is something to this, as folks have long said Bill Watts was a great announcer for Mid-South because he knew exactly what they angles were meant to be, as he booked them. Similarly, though Vince McMahon has his detractors as an announcer, one of the things often cited as a positive quality of his is that he knew the reactions he was trying to elicit from fans through the booking.

Tyler from Winnipeg jumped off his roof after submitting this question:

When Foley debuted as Dude Love vs Steve Austin on Raw, what was the Nielson rating?

First off, just to correct the record, Dude Love’s debut as a character on Monday Night Raw saw him teaming with Steve Austin, not wrestling against Steve Austin as the question implies.

This moment occurred on the July 14, 1997 episode of Raw, and the entire episode did a 2.59 rating with the specific quarter-hour segment in which the match aired pulling a 3.3 rating. Back in 1997, one ratings point equaled roughly 970,000 viewers, which would mean about 2.5 million people watched the show overall and 3.2 million people saw the match itself.

For what it’s worth, both the episode and the segment were less popular than what WCW was offering on Monday Nitro. Nitro’s rating that evening was a 3.55 while its competing segment got a 3.9 ratings points or 3.4 million and 3.78 million viewers, respectively. The Nitro segment in question included both Ric Flair vs. Jeff Jarrett and a show-closing promo involving Lex Luger, the nWo, and Sting.

Marcus from Alabama wants to see his name in Jeremy Thomas’s box office report some day:

If a filmmaker came to you and said he was considering making a bio pic about the life and times of a professional wrestler and asked you to name several candidates that would make for a good movie, which wrestlers would you recommend and why?

I feel like Ric Flair is an obvious answer. You’ve got drama from the very beginning of his life, as he was adopted under circumstances that seem unusual today, leaving him with no knowledge of his birth parents or even his name at birth. From there, you’ve got his immeasurable success in wrestling but also a litany of behind the scenes issues, including blow ups with WCW management, several marriages and divorces, money troubles, and, most solemnly, the death of his young son Reid. There actually were reports of Dwayne Johnson’s production company developing a Flair biopic a couple of years ago, but I haven’t heard much of it since the original reports.

A lesser known name but one who still has a story to tell is Atsushi Onita, who was a young, undersized kid who made it into wrestling despite the odds only for a massive injury to seemingly end his career . . . until he thought back to a style of wrestling that he saw while on a tour of the southern United States and became a cult icon by bringing hardcore and eventually deathmatches to Japan. Just think about the wild set pieces that deathmatch wrestling could provide for the big screen. Plus, topping it all off, he also had a political career.

Finally, with a lot of focus on the “Dark Side” of wrestling, what about a story that could be more upbeat? Unfortunately those seem to be hard to come by in our favorite pseudosport, but what about a romantic comedy about the relationship between Renee Paquette and Jon Moxley, set against the backdrop of pro wrestling? There has to be some conflict in order for a film to work, and that could come in addressing Moxley’s struggle with addiction, but there is a largely positive outcome and focusing on romance in wrestling (with apologies to Genichiro Tenryu) could be a new twist on the genre.

That does it for this week. 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.