Ask 411 Wrestling: Did AJ Styles’ Retirement Tour Go As Originally Planned?

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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Nick is headed off to Shady Pines:

Was A.J. Styles retirement tour originally supposed to have been longer (like John Cena’s at the end of 2025), or was it always supposed to end when it did?

The Phenomenal One himself actually addressed this in a “WWE Vlog” that was released on the company’s official YouTube channel back in February. He said that he was originally planning to retire earlier than he did, not later.

Styles apparently had designs on retiring at Wrestlemania XLI in 2025. However, in October 2024, he suffered a Lisfranc injury that kept him out of action until the following February. He thought that it would be anti-climatic if he he returned in February only to have his retirement match in April, so he extended his career out to the Royal Rumble in 2026.

Of course, that wound up being a nice bookend to Styles’ WWE career, given that he debuted for the promotion at the same event in 2016, ten years earlier.

Triple T Ticking Time Bomb Taz has a nickname that’s a hat on a hat on a hat:

Ludvig Borga was given a big push in the WWF. He ended Tatanka’s winning streak and got a high profile feud with Lex Luger. Why did he suddenly leave? What happened?

Borga’s last WWF match was on a January 17, 1994 house show at Madison Square Garden against Rick Steiner. During the bout, the Finnish wrestler suffered a very bad ankle injury which sidelined him and took him out of that year’s Royal Rumble.

It was originally believed that Borga would be back in time for Wrestlemania, and for a while he was promoted as wrestling on the card against Earthquake, but ultimately it proved that he would not be healed up in time, so Earthquake instead got Adam Bomb as an opponent.

Ultimately, while he was sidelined, it was decided that he just wasn’t going to be coming back. By that point in time, it was spring of 1994, and the company had moved on from “All American” Lex Luger as being their new top face. With Borga having been intended primarily as a rival for Luger and with the Fin never really getting over all that well with U.S. audiences, it was decided that there was just no purpose in bringing him back. Also, he was a white supremacist piece of shit who walked around with a literal SS tattoo, but that’s a story for a different time.

Wrestling Fan Since 1977 has a surprisingly modern question:

Are the Briscoes a top 10 tag team of all time?

Based on the presence of the “e” in the name, I presume you are talking about Jay and Mark Briscoe rather than Jack and Jerry Brisco.

If that’s the question, the answer is decidedly “no.” The biggest promotions they ever worked for were New Japan and NOAH, and they were in NJPW for less than half a dozen matches as part of a talent exchange with Ring of Honor and they only ever had the one tour with NOAH.

I’m sorry, but no matter how good you are in the ring, if that’s all the more time that you have in major wrestling promotions, you’re not going to be anywhere close to sniffing the top ten of all time.

Big Al will be teaming with Night Wolf the Wise to take on Tyler from Winnipeg and Johnfw2:

During the Attitude Era, it was popular to take the two faces and have them face the two heels that made up the two biggest matches of the next PPV. Could something like that still work today or do you think it took away from the singles matches on the PPV?

I think that, like most things in wrestling, it can work in the right context. If we are talking about a first-time singles match for the PLE, I would never do this because under those circumstances you don’t want the competitors to touch until the big show.

However, if you’re dealing with feuds where combatants have already shared the ring, I don’t see anything wrong with mixing up the formula and having the wrestlers face each other in tag action.

I think much of the criticism in this practice during the Attitude Era was that it happened so often that it became a bit of a cliché.

I will also say that I remember this particularly way of booking to be an effective way to build up fan interest in matches when playing Extreme Warfare Revenge back in the mid-2000s.

Night Wolf the Wise is mixing things up:

What was the first gimmick match in wrestling? By gimmick match I mean steel cage, bull rope match, casket match, etc.

I don’t think there are good historic records to allow us to definitively answer this question, at least not without doing an exhaustive amount of primary source research in very old newspapers that is well beyond my capabilities at this point.

That being said, the first gimmick match was most likely something far less extravagant than what Night Wolf is envisioning in his question. The original “gimmicks” focused in on basic modifications to the standard rules of a pro wrestling bout, such as a no time limit match or a no disqualification match.

Those technically are gimmick matches, even if they don’t involve a fancy structure being erected around the ring or a sanctioned weapon being used by the wrestlers.

La, di, da, di, da, di, Bryan likes to party:

First, I wanted to give you and other readers something useful. If you ever come across a historical wrestling program guide for an event and if has the date and day of the week but no year and can’t figure out the take a guess and look at the calendar for the year you’re guessing. If you’re off just remember dates move one day of the week later ever year and two days ever leap year. 1982 Christmas was Saturday. 83 Sunday. 84 leap year it jumps two days to Tuesday.

Anyway, my question is why was Public Enemy’s tenure in WWE so short lived when the Dudleys got way more over? Their gimmicks are almost identical?

First, I guess thanks for that description of how calendars work.

Moving on, Public Enemy was cut by WWE pretty quickly because their in-ring work was viewed as not being up to snuff with the rest of the roster, and they had a reputation of having a bad attitude which was highlighted when they refused a planned finish in a match against the Acolytes, causing Faarooq and Bradshaw to rough them up on national television. All that let to the briefest of brief runs and a prompt return to WCW.

We can’t miss Brendan if he won’t leave:

The Ultimate Warrior was meant to be Hulk Hogan 2.0, and there are myriad theories as to why this didn’t work out like his limited in ring ability, inability to connect with fans, the cyclical nature of the business, etc. I’d like your thoughts on another theory: The continued presence of Hulk Hogan. Granted, Hulk took some time off from the house show circuit but he had a key storyline on TV with Earthquake leading to their match at Summerslam. So he was still very much an integral part of the company. So, fans still had their standard main event star to root for. A promotion needs secondary babyfaces, but in this case you essentially had two primary babyfaces. Again, this is not the only reason that Warrior failed as the champ but am I correct in saying that having Hogan around certainly didn’t help?

You’re 100% correct. There have been plenty of people over the years who have pointed to Warrior being portrayed as secondary to Hogan not helping out his career progression at all. It really all began in the seconds immediately following Warrior’s title win, when Hogan made a big show of presenting the new champ with his title belt in a manner that was meant to put the focus on the Hulkster himself rather than on Warrior.

This was not the only cause of Warrior’s woes as champion, as Brendan noted, but it sure didn’t help.

Will Blake stop?

Reading the new Gorilla bio got me thinking, what did people think of Monsoon as a commentator? From what I’ve seen of him he always seemed perfectly fine but he also won the Observer’s worst commentator award 5 years running. Was he polarizing as a broadcaster?

Yes, I think fans are largely split on Monsoon. If you were a youngster during his heyday as an announcer, you loved him. If you were a “smart” fan at the time, you hated his guts, as indicated by the multiple Observer awards that Blake noted.

My personal take is that he was fine as a host of a show, doing things like bantering with Bobby Heenan, but I never enjoyed him on play-by-play as much as a Jim Ross or a Gordon Solie who were better storytellers and, particularly in the case of Ross, better at conveying the emotion of a match. Monsoon always just seemed so aloof and above it all, like we was too cool and/or jaded to really care about the action.

Acadeca is on a tear:

With the recent classic between John Cena and AJ Styles in Crown Jewel 2025, do you know of any matchup that has delivered 4.5 rating or more on average with a minimum of at least 5 head to head matches? I feel Cena and Styles are involved in some of the best matches together, such as Royal Rumble 2017, Summerslam 2016 etc. Or maybe it’s Cena vs Punk in MITB 2011, Raw 2013 etc.?

I was able to find some series of matches that meet your criteria, though I have to give the disclaimer that it may not be an exhaustive list. To come up with this, I used the Internet Wrestling Database‘s listing of Dave Meltzer’s star ratings which covers everything 4.75 stars and up, though IWD openly admits they do not quite yet have everything entered into their database.

And, before anybody complains about my using Meltzer’s ratings, I’m not saying that they’re the gold standard or that they’re anything other than one man’s opinion. However, if we want to compare apples to apples, he’s basically the only guy whose ratings are well documented and placed into easy-to-research formats.

With those caveats out of the way, let’s take a look at the series that Da Meltz has proclaimed have five or more outstanding documented matches.

There is only one series on the list that is not from the last fifteen years, and, interestingly it is also the only tag team series on the list as opposed to a singles rivalry. From All Japan Pro Wrestling, it’s Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue vs. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama. Those two teams had five matches which received five star ratings, namely on Budokan Hall shows on June 9, 1995; December 6, 1996; and December 5, 1997. They also hit five stars on the New Year Giant Series on January 24, 1995 and the Super Power Series on May 23, 1995. Again, all these matches are five stars, though you have to wonder what they would be rated if they took place in the 2010s or 2020s when Meltzer has proven far more willing to “break” the rating system and go above five stars, as we’ll see here momentarily.

Moving to something a bit more recent, there were also five top-rated matches in the rivalry of Kazuchika Okada vs. Kenny Omega. Four of the five matches come from New Japan Pro Wrestling and break the five-star mark, with their WrestleKingdom XI match in 2017 and their G1 Climax tour match the same year both being six stars. They did even better on June 11, 2017 for Dominion, hitting 6.25 stars, while a year later on Dominion in Osaka, they had a truly insane SEVEN star match. Rounding out the series is their July 12, 2025 match at AEW’s All In: Texas, though that was a comparatively piddly 4.75 stars.

The next few rivalries on the list actually have more than five highly-rated matches. The first of those we’ll look at is Will Ospreay v. Shingo Takagi, with six matches at five stars or above. Those started on June 5, 2019 on New Japan’s Best of the Super Juniors tour, which was 5.75 stars. On September 27, 2020 on the G1 Climax tour, they hit five stars, while on March 21, 2021 during the New Japan Cup they were rated 5.5 stars. Wrestling Dontaku on May 4, 2021 saw the single highest rated match of their series, topping out with a six star bout. The next year during the G1 Climax, they were 5.5 stars again on August 6, 2022. The final highly rated match of their series is the only match on this list to take place in the U.K., as Takagi and Ospreay had a five star affair on August 23, 2023 on RevPro’s 11th Anniversary show.

Speaking of Will Ospreay, he’s also part of our next series, which consists of seven highly-rated matches. It’s Will Ospreay vs. Kazuchika Okada. The two first had a banger against each other during the NJPW G1 Climax on July 20, 2019, clocking in at 5.75 stars. On WrestleKingdom 15 in 2021, they locked up again and garnered a 5.25 rating. Two of their exemplary matches occurred in 2022, the first on WrestleKingdom 16 and the second in the G1 Climax, both of which were rated 5.75 stars. In 2023, they once again knocked it out of the park during the G1 Climax, having a match on July 27 that was 4.75 stars. The final two matches of this series actually took place in the United states, with a five star encounter as part of NJPW Battle in the Valley in San Jose, California on January 13, 2024 and a 5.25 star match on December 28, 2024 at AEW World’s End.

For the third and final time on this list, we’re invoking the name of Okada, and we’re looking at the feud that really put him on the map: Kazuchika Okada vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi. Their first five star match was on April 6, 2013 on NJPW Invasion Attack, and they earned the same rating on October 14 of that year at NJPW King of Pro Wrestling. After a several year lull, the men had another five star bout at WrestleKingdom 10 in 2016. It was 2018 that was the high water mark of their rivalry, though, with a 5.5 star match at Wrestling Dontaku on May 4 and five star matches on August 10 in the G1 Climax and September 23 on Destruction in Kobe. After a significant break, the two men returned to form at WrestleKingdom 20 on January 4 of this year, having a six star match in what was Tanahashi’s retirement performance.

And there it is. Five series of matches that all brought the goods in terms of producing at least five top shelf matches.

We’ll let Tyler from Winnipeg close us out:

Going to the Orient, what was the first documented match with footage?

Pro wrestling didn’t really take off in Japan until the early 1950s, so we’re addressing a question here that covers a much smaller window of time than asking about the history of pro wrestling footage overall.

The earliest footage of puroresu that I’m aware of is Rikidozan & Masa Kimura taking on Mike and Ben Sharpe on August 28, 1953. (That’s the father of the Mike Sharpe who would later be a WWF enhancement talent.)

Of course, I’m talking about pro wrestling. Sumo wrestling has footage going back to the early 1900s.

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.