Ask 411 Wrestling: What Were the Original Plans for the Outsiders in WCW?

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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We know who Marc is, but we don’t know why he’s here:

Was it true that when Scott Hall and Kevin Nash went to WCW in 1996, they were originally slated to do individual gimmicks other than the Invasion-nWo, and that the Outsiders was a last-minute change?

I can’t say I’ve ever heard that. In the Outsiders’ 2007 shoot interview with RF Video, Scott Hall does say that he didn’t really know what he was doing creatively in WCW until close to the time of his debut on Nitro, but that doesn’t mean it was a last minute change. It just means that Hall wasn’t clued in on everything that was happening.

Looking back on contemporaneous reporting from the time, the Wrestling Observer Newsletter was aware of Hall and Nash leaving the WWF and jumping to WCW in February of 1996, with Hall’s debut coming in late May. The Observer‘s reporting doesn’t say anything about the two men being portrayed as invaders until it actually happened but the reporting also doesn’t say anything which indicates that wasn’t the plan. Interestingly, one issue does say that the plans for the men’s initial matches on pay per view were singles bouts pitting Nash against the Giant and Hall against Hulk Hogan, but again that is not necessarily inconsistent with the two of them doing an nWo-style gimmick.

I will say that, in one of the more hilarious instances of Dave Meltzer missing the mark, one Observer features speculation (and it is truly speculation, not reporting) from Big Dave that the “Blood Runs Cold” vignettes that started airing on WCW television in early 1996 must have something to do with Hall and Nash’s debut, when, as we all know, those vignettes were to hype of Glacier.

This makes me ponder an alternate universe in which Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were Glacier and Wrath rather than those roles going to Ray Lloyd and Bryan Clark.

Oh, what could have been . . .

Thomas knows that stealing from one place is plagiarism but stealing from multiple places is research:

We’ve all seen the spot where during a match Wrestler A will hit Wrestler B with their own finisher in an attempt to win a match but I can’t recall it ever actually ending the match other than recently where Jey Uso made Gunther tap out to the sleeper hold. I was wondering if you could give any more examples of a time where a wrestler actually won a match with their opponents own finisher?

At Summreslam 1994, the Undertaker defeated the Undertaker with the Undertaker’s own tombstone piledriver.

Seriously, though, this happens. It’s not something that happens frequently, but it occurs enough that I wouldn’t call it unusual, either. For purposes of this answer, we’re going to be disregarding situations in which to wrestlers share the same finisher, as that seems to go against the spirit of the question.

The most noteworthy match in which this occurred was Survivor Series 1997 where, at least technically, Shawn Michaels defeated Bret Hart with a sharpshooter, though there were some, ahem, extenuating circumstances.

Perhaps Micheales was just getting some revenge for Bob Backlund, because Bret Hart put his WWF feud with Backlund to bed in an “I Quit” match at Wrestlemania XI. One might think that the Hitman would submit Mr. Backlund with a sharpshooter in that bout, but he actually used Backlund’s own cross-face chicken wing.

Moving to another member of the Hart family, Over the Edge 1998 included a six man tag between the Nation of Domination and D-Generation X. At the end of the battle, Owen Hart managed to pin Triple H with pedigree onto a championship belt.

Sticking with famous Canadians, at Vengeance 2001, when Chris Jericho pinned the Rock with the Rock Bottom to win the World Heavyweight Championship (previously the WCW Championship) en route to becoming the first “Undisputed” WWE Champion. Granted, there was also some interference from Vince McMahon and a low blow along the way, but the Rock Bottom was the final maneuver.

At the 1993 King of the Ring, we saw what could have been the death of Hulkamania in the WWF had the Hulkster not returned to the company in 2002. At that show, Yokozuna recaptured the WWF Championship from the Hulkster, pinning him with a leg drop. This always seemed particularly odd because Yoko used a leg drop often but not as a finish, just as a relatively inconsequential mid-match move.

On a show that basically everybody has forgotten about, Seth Rollins retained the WWE Championship over Randy Orton at Extreme Rules 2015 in a steel cage match with the RKO having been banned. Despite said ban, Rollins beat Orton with Orton’s own hold, which was meant to demonstrate Seth being favored by the heel Authority faction that dominated WWE at the time.

AJ Styles has the distinction of being pinned with his own finisher at least twice. At TNA Final Resolution in 2010, Doug Williams beat AJ with a Styles Clash and just two years later at Final Resolution 2012, Christopher Daniels did the exact same thing.

Moving to WCW, at Spring Stampede 1999, Konnan beat Disco Inferno with Disco’s finishing move, the Chartbuster (a.k.a. the Stone Cold Stunner). There was an interesting storyline reason for Konnan stealing his opponent’s finisher here, as the whole feud had been built around Disco creating his own version of K-Dawg’s recent music video and otherwise appropriating catchphrases and mannerisms of the lucha libre star.

Hailing from Disqus, it’s Richard C.

How about a future ditty on the Zambuie Express?

The Zamauie Express was a tag team that formed in 1983 in the Florida territory. It was formed by bringing together two Black journeyman wrestlers who were each in excess of 300 pounds, Ray Candy and Leroy Brown. They were renamed Kareem Muhammad and Elijah Akeem, respectively. The two men also starting wearing camouflage to the ring, giving them a paramilitary look that combined with their new ring names were likely meant to evoke the Black Panthers and/or the Nation of Islam.

For what it’s worth, I could not find any indication that “Zambuie” is a real word in any language except for Romanian, where it apparently means “smile.” My assumption is that the name was chosen because it sounded vaguely African, perhaps evoking the Zambezi river that flows through the central and eastern portions of the continent, bordering Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Immediately upon being put together in ’83, the team was a top act in Florida, regularly having matches with various combinations of their three key babyfaces: Dusty Rhodes, Blackjack Mulligan, and Barry Windham. Less than a month after their debut, they won the NWA Global Tag Team Titles, which were eventually replaced by the NWA United States Tag Team Titles. They did drop those belts to Rhodes and Mulligan in November 1983, though they continued to fight for the belts in rematches for the rest of the year.

In 1984, Muhammad and Akeem headed the Memphis territory, where they also won a championship within a month of debuting, this time the AWA Southern Tag Team Titles, which they traded back and forth with the Pretty Young Things, a team consisting of Norvell Austin and Koko Ware. After wrapping up with the PYTs, the Express set their eyes on the biggest target in Memphis: Jerry Lawler. Lawler, along with his partner Jos LeDuc, took the belts off the big men on March 12, 1984, which actually set the stage fro the Zambuie Express to go somewhere a bit unexpected . . .

. . . Japan.

Starting in late March of ’84 and continuing through most of April, the duo was on a tour of New Japan Pro Wrestling, where due to their massive size they were actually booked in several three-on-two handicap matches, a match type that is incredibly rare in Japanese promotions. They also mixed it up with some notable names like Tatsumi Fujinami and even Antonio Inoki.

Upon returning to the United States, Muhammad and Akeem hit the San Antonio market for a brief feud with the Sheepherders before setting their sites on the latest territory where they would go on an extended run: Mid-Atlantic. However, the Express weren’t as successful here as they were in other places. They spent about a month squashing enhancement wrestlers like Mike Jackson and Brett Hart (a.k.a. Barry Horowitz), but when they went up against more pushed teams, they couldn’t get things done. They were on the losing end of a feud with the team of American Starship, which consisted of a young Scott Hall and Dan Spivey, and they dropped some NWA World Tag Team Title matches to their old foe Dusty Rhodes and his new partner Manny Fernandez. Perhaps their most widely available match for current audiences occurred at the end of this run, as they were defeated by Buzz Tyler and the Assassin on Starrcade 1984 in Greensboro.

That brings us up to 1985, when the two men went their separate ways aside from a couple of one-off reunion matches in later years. I am not sure exactly what happened to him, but I don’t see any record of Leroy Brown/Elijah Akeem wrestling for the first couple of months of ’85 at all, though he would be back in NJPW under the Brown name in March. He wrestled through early 1987 and then died in 1988 after suffering a heart attack brought on by complications from cirrhosis. Ray Candy continued as Kareem Muhammad for most of the rest of his career, though he would go back to Ray Candy in Japan and in 1989/1990 was “Commando Ray” in the tag team of the Commandos with Grizzly Boone. Candy retired in 1990 and also died of a heart attack, his occurring in 1994.

Donny from Allentown, PA will not forget to include everyone:

Would ECW icon the Sandman even ever have been over if it wasn’t for Enter Sandman by Metallica? His entrance was epic with that song during the ECW days but once the music stopped there was basically nothing but a bunch of sloppy punches and cane shots.

I think that he still would have gotten over to a degree, particularly in a smaller environment like ECW, but it might not have been nearly as big.

You have to keep in mind that the song “Enter Sandman” first showed up in ECW in roughly August of 1994. By that point, Sandman had already ditched his happy-go-lucky surfer gimmick and turned heel. He had already started smoking on the way to the ring, ditched his real-life wife Lori “Peaches” Fullington for Nancy “Woman” Sullivan, and adopted the Singapore cane as his weapon of choice. That general persona was already working with the small promotion’s crowds even before the song got added into the mix.

Given that he was already getting over, I think he could have had a decent ECW career without the aid of Metallica and perhaps even crossed over into larger promotions eventually (since almost everybody from that organization did), but I doubt he would have been seen as being iconic as he was without those drawn out, freewheeling entrances.

Also, I have to say that this question reminds me of an appearance that Raven made on Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Live internet radio show back in the late 1990s or early 2000s when a fan called in to troll Raven and told him that all the pops he got in ECW were for the Offspring singing his entrance music and not anything Raven was doing himself.

What was Raven’s response?

“Yeah, because the Offspring kick ass . . .”

So at least one ECW alum acknowledged the role his music had in his popularity and had a good sense of humor about it.

Tyler from Winnipeg is going back and forth:

Could you tell me about the best of 7 series where Booker T vs Chris Benoit had on Thunder and Nitro?

In the spring 1998, Booker T and Chris Benoit were embroiled in a three-way feud for the WCW World Television Title that also involved Fit Finlay. Finlay wound up with the championship, and it was decided that Booker and Benoit would have a best-of-seven series of matches to determine who would get the next title shot at the Great American Bash.

In an interesting bit of trivia, the matches in the series happened in a slightly different order than what the fans saw on television. The first match in the series that actually occurred was on May 19, 1998 in Portland, Maine at a taping of WCW Saturday Night. Benoit pinned Booker with a bridging German suplex in that match, which didn’t air until May 30 and was actually played off as being the third match in the series. Fans at the taping didn’t even know what they were seeing, as the series hadn’t been announced yet.

In what was billed as the first match of the series, Benoit defeated Booker on the May 25, 1998 episode of Monday Nitro in Evansville, Indiana, using the Crippler Crossface to score a submission victory.

What is either the second or third match of the series depending on how you want to count it occurred in Nashville, Tennessee on May 27, 1998, which was a rare Wednesday night episode of Thunder due to a preemption from its normal Thursday time slot. Booker got his first win of the series here, pinning his opponent following a missile dropkick from the top rope.

Match four was from our nation’s capitol, Washington, D.C., on the June 1, 1998 episode of Nitro. Finlay was watching the match from ringside but did not interfere. Instead, Benoit reversed a suplex attempt by Booker into the Crippler Crossface and got another submission win to go up 3-1 in the series.

The June 4, 1998 episode of Thunder emanated from Peoria, Illinois and opened with match five. This is the first match of the set that could be considered to have any sort of outside interference, as Booker T.’s brother Stevie Ray came to ringside to encourage his Harlem Heat partner. A verbal exchange between Stevie and Benoit created the distraction Booker needed to hit another missile dropkick to get the win.

Booker T. tied the series up at three wins apiece on the June 8 Nitro in Auburn Hills, Michigan as Benoit missed a charge into the corner and Booker caught him with a variation on the unset flip for a three-count.

The series was supposed to have come to an end on the June 11, 1998 Thunder, but things took an odd turn. Bret Hart was at ringside and attempted to align himself with Benoit by braining Booker T. with a chair in order to set up an easy victory for the Crippler. However, Benoit refused to take the tainted win and told referee Nick Patrick what happened, causing Patrick to disqualify Benoit and presumably give the duke in the seven-match series to Booker T.

However, Booker came out later in the show with WCW authority figure J.J. Dillon and said he didn’t want to take the win that way, despite the protestations of Stevie Ray (who was in the process of turning heel). Booker requested and was granted an eighth match in the series, effectively nullifying his win earlier in the evening.

Then we head to the Great American Bash pay per view on June 14. Benoit and Booker opened the show, and the Booker man took the victory with two side kicks and a missile dropkick. Because the extra match was added to the best-of-seven series, that meant Booker T.’s TV Title match with Fit Finlay was later the same evening, and Booker did capture the championship after spiking Finlay with a piledriver.

In all, this was an amazing series of matches with the two wrestlers obviously going to great lengths to vary things up to avoid a situation in which it felt like they were having the same bout every night. Both men were elevated in the fans’ eyes, with Booker in particular looking like a guy who WCW was gearing up for the main event.

WWE did try to call back to the best-of-seven series on two different occasions. In 2004, Booker T found himself involved in a best-of-five series against John Cena for the United Sates Championship that ran between the No Mercy and Summerslam pay per views. The next year, Benoit and Booker started a second best-of-seven series between them, which was also for the U.S. Title. It didn’t live up to the WCW version, though, as Booker was injured after match four and had to be replaced by Randy Orton.

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.