Ask 411 Wrestling: What Was the Rock’s Longest Title Reign?

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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Mike Too Hotty won’t bomb with this question:

What was supposed to happen with Mr. McMahon during his “funeral” after his limo exploded? I know the Benoit tragedy ended whatever angle that was, but any idea what the plan was for this?

According to the April 23, 2013 issue of Figure Four Weekly, there would be an investigation into who actually blew Vince up and, somewhere along the way, it would come out that Ken Kennedy was Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son. Kennedy would feud with some combination of Shane McMahon, Stephanie McMahon, and Triple H over who would control WWE with the chairman gone. Eventually, Vince would come back and reveal that he survived the explosion and side with Kennedy in order to continue the feud among the McMahons.

If you couldn’t tell, much of this was going to be repurposed in the Vince McMahon illegitimate son storyline that we got after the heat died down from the Benoit murder-suicide, though even that backup story eventually went in a different direction when Kennedy was suspended due to wellness issues and fell out of favor with the promotion.

Blake skipped a grade:

Outside of celebrities such as Bad Bunny, who was the last superstar to debut on Raw or Smackdown without first appearing on either AEW or NXT television?

First off, let me say that I’m focusing on in-ring debuts here, because those are easier to track.

With that in mind, we turn to the October 1, 2025 episode of WWE Smackdown in Newark, New Jersey, where two men who had never competed in AEW or NXT made their main roster debuts.

Their names?

Psycho Clown and Mr. Iguana.

The two AAA stars faced Los Garza on that show, coming up short in an effort to take the Garzas’ AAA World Tag Team Titles.

Stand back, Tyler from Winnipeg is coming through:

Why did Molly Holly ditch Spike Dudley for The Hurricane?

Hurricane and Spike had already been feuding for a bit, and it seemed as though Hurricane was developing an obsession with Molly and talking about making her his sidekick. Ultimately, during a match between Molly Holly and Ivory on the September 27, 2001 episode of Smackdown, the two women bumped heads and Molly was knocked unconscious, not only taking the three count but remaining down for some time after the bell rang. When she was in this vulnerable state, the Hurricane came out to the ring and tended to her, taking her backstage.

On the next episode of Raw on October 1, Hurricane defeated Spike in a singles match, after which Hurricane was seen going backstage to ride off on his “Hurri-cycle.” At that point, it was revealed that Molly Holly had become sidekick Mighty Molly, as she joined him in the cycle’s side car.

On the following episode of Smackdown, Molly was asked why she switched sides, and she explained that she had become enamored with Hurricane’s superpowers and gift of flight, things that Spike Dudley just didn’t have.

HBK’s Smile wrote this question without using his hands:

In the spirit of the World Cup; there have been wrestlers with prior experience in football, basketball, baseball, boxing and MMA but has there been one with significant soccer experience?

I’m obviously answering this a bit late since the World Cup has now come and gone, but better late than never.

Obviously, soccer is the world’s most popular sport, so there are tons of wrestlers who played it as children or in youth leagues, but for this answer we’re looking for something beyond that – something that would at least be the collegiate level in the United States or its functional equivalent elsewhere in the world.

One of the most successful soccer players turned wrestler is actually a current WWE star, none other than NXT’s Jaida Parker. Parker, under her real name of Tiana Caffey, played four years of NCAA Division I soccer for the Louisiana State University Tigers.

Another prominent wrestling name associated with collegiate soccer is Paul Diamond, who some may know better as Kato of the Orient Express or the second man to take on the moniker of Max Moon in the WWF. Diamond played goalie on the soccer pitch at Norfolk, Virginia’s Old Dominion University. His father and son were also soccer players, making it a family tradition.

Welshman Mason Ryan had several stop and start pushes during his time with WWE between 2009 and 2014. Before he headed down that road, he played with a football club called Porthmadog F.C., which was part of the Welsh Premier League.

Joshi puroresu has also had a touch of soccer, thanks to Ami Sato. Sato played soccer for team called Bunnys Gunma FC White Star based in the City of Maebashi in central Japan. In the late 2010s, she joined Meiko Satomura’s training camp and wrestling promotion Sendai Girls. She only lasted a couple of years, though, and from what I can tell she has gone back to soccer and is no longer actively playing but now serving as a trainer for a team called FC Nobeoka Agata on the island of Kyushu.

From Japan we head to Mexico and long-time AAA star Chessman. Like Paul Diamond, he was the son of a soccer player, though he claims that his inadvertently injuring another player during a match brought an end to his own time as a player.

Now we come to the two guys on this list who probably played soccer at the highest level but didn’t exactly pan out as professional wrestlers.

First is Stuart Tomlinson, a professional soccer player from Chester, England, who played goalie for a variety of teams between 2003 and 2013. Citing injuries, he retired in ’13 and later that year signed wit WWE’s developmental program. In NXT, he was renamed Hugo Knox and had 62 recorded matches between 2014 and 2016, though only one of them made NXT television. He was cut by WWE in fall of that year and did try a return to soccer afterwards, though it was short-lived.

And we’ll wrap things up with Tim Wiese. A German footballer, he was in the sport professionally between 1999 and 2014 and was part of his home country’s team in the 2010 World Cup. In 2016, word came out that he was exploring a relationship with WWE. He made some personal appearances on European WWE shows in 2016 which culminated in a six man tag match on November 3, 2016 in Bayern, Germany that saw Wiese team with Antonio Cesaro and Sheamus to defeat Primo and Epico Colon as well as their partner Bo Dallas. That was the last we saw or heard of Wiese in WWE. Like Tomlinson, he had a one-season comeback in soccer in 2017.

Brandon is getting into a measuring contest:

What was The Rock’s longest reign with world title? I remember them not lasting very long.

Rocky’s longest reign began on June 25, 2000 at the King of the Ring pay per view in Boston, where he pinned Vince McMahon in a six man tag team match where the stipulation was that whoever on the babyface team scored the fall would win the WWE Championship then held by Triple H. The Rock was ultimately unseated by Kurt Angle on October 22, 2000 at that year’s No Mercy pay per view in Albany, New York.

That’s a tile reign of 120 days or roughly four months, which is not particularly long in the grand scheme of things. However, Rock was always one of those guys who didn’t need a championship to bolster his popularity, so it made more sense to keep the title with those who were in greater need of it.

Chad and Jonfw2 sent in more or less the same question. Chad writes:

Who would you put on the Mt. Rushmore for pro wrestling jobbers?

Jon writes:

What is the Mt. Rushmore of enhancement talents?

As with most of these list, there will be room for reasonable minds to disagree, but my personal rundown looks something like this:

George South: South was a long-term enhancement guy in Jim Crockett Promotions and WCW, though later on he made numerous appearances in the WWF as well. There have been many low card wrestlers who had tenures in the big leagues of similar length to South’s, but the one thing that puts him over the top and on this list is the fact that he was a highly respected in-ring performer to the point that Ric Flair gave him a well-remembered competitive match in 1988. You can actually still see South, who is in his early 60s, wrestling on independent shows to this day.

Steve Lombardi: Also known as the Brooklyn Brawler, the Black Knight, Abe “Knuckleball” Schwartz, and even Doink the Clown, Lombardi was a fixture on WWF shows losing matches between 1984 and 1997 with sporadic appearances through the 2010s owing to his role as an executive with the company. If there’s anybody on this list who could wind up in the WWE Hall of Fame some day, Lombardi is probably the guy.

Barry Horowitz: He started his career as Barry Hart and was later Jack Hart and Brett Hart (no, not that one) but regardless of the name, Horowitz was an enhancement wrestler par excellence. Perhaps what sets him apart from the others is just how many promotions he had the role in, starting with the WWF, then moving to Mid-Atlantic, next on to Florida, then to Memphis, then back to the WWF for his longest stretch, then WCW in the early 1990s, then a period where he was splitting time between WWF/SMW/AJPW/GWF, a period where he was back to the WWF almost full-time in the mid-1990s, and WCW during the Monday Night War.

Duane Gill: Perhaps more than anybody else on this list, Duane Gill turned being a jobber into being a superstar. Known as an early 1990s enhancement guy, he often tagged with his partner Barry Hardy, sometimes under masks as the Executioners. He was so memorable that, in 1998 when the WWF wanted to run an angle in which Vince McMahon gave Mankind an easy opponent in the first round of the Deadly Game tournament for the WWF Championship at Survivor Series, Duane Gill was the guy selected. He parlayed that into another role: Gillberg. As a parody of Bill Goldberg, he became an icon in the late 1990s and even a title holder, capturing the WWF Light Heavyweight Championship and holding it for over a year. (He also regularly defended it on the indies.)

And that’s it. There are plenty of other names that you could argue belong, whether it’s SD Jones, Mike Sharpe, or the Mulkeys, but a four-person list is a four-person list.

Ignacio is a serial entrepreneur:

Alberto del Rio started Nación Lucha Libre and Lucha Libre Mexicana 52. Jeff Jarrett started TNA, Global Force Wrestling and All Wheels Wrestling and Ring Ka King. There are any other person who started more pro wrestling promotions than Jarrett?

First off, I’m going to have to take one off of Jarrett’s list because All Wheels Wrestling wasn’t really a promotion. It was a concept for a television show which taped one and only one pilot episode. The show was produced by TNA. So, it wasn’t a new promotion as much as it was a new television show for an existing promotion.

Going to the heart of the question, though, I think the guy who has been involved in the founding of the most pro wrestling promotions is a name many readers might not think of at first:

Kevin Kleinrock

Kleinrock was part of a group that founded indy promotion Southern California Championship Wrestling, which ran shows from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s. From there, he joined a consortium that aided porn magnate Rob Zicari – better known as Rob Black – with the founding of Xtreme Pro Wrestling (XPW) in 1999. While working for DVD distribution company Big Vision Entertainment, he made connections that allowed him to help create Wrestling Society X, the short-lived pro wrestling series that aired on MTV in 2007.

Finally, in the 2010s, Kleinrock was involved in the founding of Masked Republic, a company that is involved in a variety of different lucha libre-related ventures, including a pay per view series called Viva La Lucha and a national touring show called Masked Mania that is running a variety of cities in 2026, including a card in Laredo, Texas later this month.

Rahil wants specifics:

Has Sting ever faced Ricky Steamboat or Terry Funk?

Aside from being participants in two different battles royale, Sting and Steamboat have never been opponents, likely owing to their both being perennial babyfaces. In fact, during one of those battles royale that I mentioned, which occurred during the 1989 Great American Bash tour, the Stinger and the Steamer were declared co-winners, likely so the two good guys didn’t have to duke it out.

Terry Funk is a different story. They faced each other in quite a few matches on WCW house shows during the summer of 1989, most of them being on the same Great American Bash tour during which the previously mentioned battle royale occurred. They also had one tag team match that made television on August 4, 1989’s episode of the Power Hour, which saw Sting and “Dr. Death” Steve Williams beat Funk and Terry Gordy via disqualification. All those 1989 matches ultimately lead to an encounter on the first-ever Halloween Havoc pay per view when, inside the Thunderome cage with Bruno Sammartino as referee, Sting and Ric Flair defeated the J-Tex Corporation of Funk and the Great Muta.

The two men didn’t interact for five years, but then they had a one-off singles match on a July 30, 1994 WCW house show in Jacksonville, Florida followed up by participating in a six-man tag that aired on the September 11, 1994 episode of WCW Main Event, which was Dustin Rhodes, Ricky Steamboat, and Sting getting the victory over Funk, Bunkhouse Buck, and Arn Anderson, all of whom at the time were part of Col. Rob Parker’s Stud Stable.

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.