Ask 411 Wrestling: What Would Brian Pillman Have Done During The Screwjob If He’d Lived?

A good ‘morrow to you! Welcome to the only column that is 100% in its predictions (in that none have been made, so none are wrong) … ASK 411 WRESTLING!

I’m still not great at being witty in these intros. I should stop trying. But you don’t need to be witty to ask questions! Just send them to [email protected] and they get on the list, to be answered eventually!

And at the head of the list is always BANNER~!

Huggy Bears!

Me On Twitter~!
Check out Mat’s Drabble blog, 1/10 of a Picture!
Mat On Twitter~!
WWE Turn Alerts on Twitter~~!!
http://www.twitter.com/411mania
http://www.twitter.com/411wrestling
http://www.twitter.com/411moviestv
http://www.twitter.com/411music
http://www.twitter.com/411games
http://www.twitter.com/411mma

Feedback Loop

Most missed talent
Daniel Bryan and CM Punk seem to be the consensus favorites. Me, I’d go with Edge. There hasn’t been a heel like him since then, and the work to build one, I don’t think they know how to put in. Edge was a million different circumstances coming together in just the right way.

You Q, I A

Rocky kicks this pig, not by running up a flight of library stairs, but asking about a hard come-down.

I’ve always wondered from a kayfabe perspective why an inverted atomic drop is a legal maneuver. The move is basically dropping a person’s nuts on your knee. It’s essentially the same as kneeing a person in the groin. What makes a drop legal but a strike illegal?

For the longest time, I thought this too. And if you Google “inverted atomic drop”, this question is everywhere; forums, Reddit, all over the place. And nobody can come up with a straight answer. So we’ll attempt to set the record, at the very least, firmly crooked.

An inverted atomic drop is supposed to execute the same damage as a standard atomic drop: dropping the opponent’s tailbone on the knee of the attacker, sending pain up the spinal column. Now, you, the vast readership, and I all know that being dropped in the way an inverted atomic drop does would place less impact on the tailbone and spine area and more on the huevos rancheros. So they can sell us whatever explanation they like about the move’s intent; it isn’t logical, even with wrestling’s faint, passing flirtation with logic.

But there’s plenty of room for it to be legal and still be a shot to the gonads, and you can run with it in one of two ways. The first is that, since the intent of the move is a tailbone strike and spinal column shock, the groin getting hurt is a secondary side effect. Even though us guys know that once you get kicked in the jimmy, nothing short of decapitation will distract from the pain of a nutshot.

Fortunately, there’s a second, more rational, explanation, and wrestling itself provides it. There are countless moments where a wrestler will use an atomic drop or front suplex to hang someone, crotch-first, on the ropes or the barricade. These are, unarguably, assaults on the ol’ twig and berries, but are not illegal by the letter of the law, because they’re not a direct strike to them like a stomp or a Ric Flair nut-percut. If those can be legal, an inverted atomic drop has no reason to be illegal, despite its obvious result.

Craig is up next and wants to talk longevity in stasis, with a caveat. Fifty cent words!

Does John Cena hold the longest record without a face/heel turn? I mean without switching companies or the company changing names (Like NWA to WCW or WWWF to WWF). I think he may have passed Hogan’s 80’s/early 90’s run and Tito Santana’s WWF run. I know Ricky Steamboat was always a face but he switched companies throughout his career.

By limiting it to people who never switched companies, that severely limits the candidates. Rick Rude was pretty much always a heel, but he jumped companies. As you said, Steamer was always a face, but likewise jumped lilypads a few times.

Of viable candidates, Sting is definitely up there, from his debut with WCW in 1987 until his incredibly stupid heel turn in 1999, for a total of 12 years. Cena’s last turn, from heel to face, happened in October 2003, which gives him 14 years and change.

But there’s someone else with another year-plus on Cena.

Deep down, are you really surprised?

His last turn, during the Big Evil era of his American Badass gimmick, came after that infamous Jeff Hardy hardcore ladder match, which occurred in July 2002. From then on, he’s been a face. He’s approaching 16 years of being lawful neutral.

Now, if you want to get fast and loose with the definitions, one could claim Stephanie McMahon has been a heel since turning on her dad at Armageddon in 1999. Or at the very least, unlikeable.

Now we venture into the realm of pure speculation with Scott, taking us back to an event that’s only been sparingly covered and someone who wasn’t around.

[all the Chandlers ever]

Had Brian Pillman not died before the Screwjob, what would have happened to him before, during and after? Would he have tried to calm Bret in the ring like the others did or escalate things, and would he have been sent to WCW? Does the answer change if he never has the car accident and maintained his abilities?

The one thing we can say for sure, based on words from the source, is where the Pillman/Goldust feud was going. Marlena was going to turn on Goldust, revealing the whole “XXX Files” angle (which is uncomfortable in retrospect) and the 30 days of her “services” were a ploy, as the two were having an affair already. They’d be partnered going forward, although why Pillman needed a second is a mystery. Not like he had trouble getting heat.

Anything after that? Pure speculation.

Some sources have said Pillman was penciled in for a main event feud with Austin after Wrestlemania, possibly as soon as the month after, taking the place of the Dude Love feud. Some rumors have him itching to go back to WCW for … hashtag reasons? Unfortunately for historical purposes, what might’ve been hasn’t been terribly well explored by those who might be in the know. At least, not that I could find.

As to what he might’ve done during the Screwjob? Might as well ask where exactly lightning will strike. Pillman was mercurial to a fault, living the gimmick to a level that kept everyone he knew guessing where the line was, if it existed at all. Maybe he tries to calm down Bret … but maybe he winds up Bret instead. Maybe, knowing he burned his bridge in WCW, keeps his cool, knowing he has nowhere else to go with a wife and baby on the way. And maybe he helps turn the one-punch fight between Vince and Bret into a full-scale backstage riot, just because it was a day ending in Y. Myself, I think he plays it pragmatic and keeps his cool and his job …

But then uses it for material going forward, until either he pisses off Vince too much, or his contract runs out and Bischoff hires him anyway, just to take him away. Lord knows, Bischoff loved hoarding talent for no good reason other than to keep them off the market (see Poffo, Lanny).

From the serious to the silly we move, courtesy of Mike Sernoski and a pair of questions that seem like Benny Hill gags.

Has a wrestler anywhere ever fell or slipped hard walking or running to the ring???

Well, he’s not a wrestler, and it’s not quite a slip, but there’s this …

Sorry about the video quality. Couldn’t find a very good one. Regardless, that’s Vinnie at the 2005 Royal Rumble, blowing both his quads at the same time by the very complicated, extremely athletic act of sliding into the ring.

There’s probably more examples, but come on. How you gonna top that?

has anything accidently flew into the crowd, or has any fan try to steal something from a wrestler as he walks down the aisle??

Don’t know of any instances of the latter, but the former definitely has some examples. One great example comes from Starrcade 1997, during the … *ahem* … Eric Bischoff/Larry Zbyszko “match”. There’s a moment where Bischoff goes for a roundhouse kick to the head after Scott Hall secretly loads it with a metal plate outside of the ref’s line of sight. The problem comes when Bischoff goes for the kick and the plate comes out and sails through the air like a frisbee. If you can find video of it (Uproxx has a gif of it in their recent Starrcade ’97 retro-review), it’s worth seeing, as it is hilarious. It’s a decent metaphor for the entire PPV, really; the best laid plans, sabotaged by total ineptitude and cluelessness.

Speaking of abject silliness, Mike of Da F’n Jungle asks about wrestling’s most notorious ribber and his highlights.

We have all heard stories of Owen Hart being a great practical joker, and even going as far as to try and make guys laugh in the ring.

Has there been any documented occasions where he has been successful? Have there been any well known situations in general where wrestlers have cracked up? (Not including Undertaker/Vince)

Most of the Owen Hart rib stories to come out involve backstage shenanigans, like pouring a liter of Coke down Michael Cole’s pants right before going on the air.

But one rib that resulted in someone breaking character in the ring has made it to public awareness, and it is legendary.

Owen considered it a personal crusade not only to prank people, but to break character in the ring. In Mick Foley’s first autobiography, one such story concerns Steve Austin. Stone Cold was a special guest enforcer for a match between Owen and Foley. During the match, a fan threw a bag of popcorn at the ring. Said bag hit Owen, who promptly sold it like he was shot with a cannon. Once on the mat, with the popcorn spilled everywhere, Owen proceeded to make “popcorn angels”, as if he were basking in a bank of snow. This, per Mick, was the final straw, and Austin’s face could no longer hold back the smile.

Now, backstage ribs? Oh, man, there’s a ton of those stories. When Owen worked with Bulldog, also a notorious ribber, they got into plenty of hijinks. One of my favorites is a tag match with Luger and Bulldog working against Owen and a partner. Early on, Luger goes to lift Owen, and Owen dead-weights him. I don’t care if you have more muscles than Bill Kazmeier after swallowed Scott Steiner, you are not lifting 250 pounds of dead weight human being in a military press without assistance. Later on, however, Bulldog has a chance to do the same spot, and Owen cooperates, with Bulldog looking at his partner, yelling “I’m the strongest!” over and over.

Really, there’s dozens and dozens of stories on the internet. Bret, Jeff Jarrett, Foley, most everybody you can think of that worked with him has an Owen story, and it’s out there. And they’re all classic.

Halftime musical act, just because!

Sticking with Owen Hart-related questions, regular questioner nightwolfofthewise has a pair of questions on the same topic.

A year after he botched a piledriver on Stone Cold, Owen Hart botched a piledriver on Dan Severn. I read Owen Hart felt guilty about it, retired as Owen Hart but came back as the Blue Blazer. Why did he feel guilty for Injuring Dan Severn and not Stone Cold?

He didn’t. It was part of an angle. The Severn injury was a kayfabe way to leverage Owen Hart into the Blue Blazer gimmick, with the Blazer now a milquetoast, self-righteous puritan, fighting against the profanity and sex and violence of the Attitude era. Owen “injures” Severn, “feels bad” about the “injury”, “quits”, then comes back under a mask and swears it isn’t him, when we all know it is (basically, the Midnight Rider/Dusty Rhodes gimmick, only tweaked for heeldom). So, all a work, but with the legitimacy of the Austin injury the year before to give it gravitas.

Following up from question 1. Do you think that’s the reason Stone Cold resented Owen Hart for so long, because he apologized to Dan Severn and Not to him or was Stone Cold even aware Owen Hart had injured Severn?

Since the Severn injury was a work, obviously the answer is no, it had nothing to do with the lingering ill will between Austin and Owen. That was solely the result of SummerSlam ’97.

Lev now takes us to WCW and one of its latter-era stars.

I stopped regularly watching wrestling after the attitude era and only returned to it at addiction levels recently. So missed a lot in the 2000s. But I remember watching and enjoying the character Vampiro. When WWE took over WCW he never came across. Cool look, cool moves, and a fued with Sting so obviously WCW rated him. Didn’t WWE?

There’s a number of different answers here. There’s the answer with nothing but circumstantial evidence, the answer Vampiro gives, and the more salacious answer. I present to you the cases, and let you draw your own conclusions.

Let’s start with at least some grounding in reality. Vampiro’s final WCW appearance before the WWE buyout was November 1, 2000. He had just come back from paternity leave a month prior and got injured. He wasn’t healthy by the time the buyout happened, so, when it all went down, his absence and health might’ve been factors in looking like a bad investment.

Now, if you ask Vampiro, you get a bit of that, with a little extra. In an interview with Ring Rust Radio, Vampiro gave a couple different reasons. On one hand, he says “I didn’t go because you have to sign your persona away”, and he was fundamentally against the idea of giving WWE control of the character he created. Fine and dandy. I can’t blame him one bit in that regard. Plenty of wrestlers have had the same apprehension. Until five sentences later, when he says that that he wasn’t hired because “creative couldn’t come up with anything” for him.

You know, WWE, at the apex of the Attitude era. Undertaker, Kane and Raven are right there for more character-driven stories. Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Kurt Angle and William Regal are there for top-sheld ring work. But yeah, no, creative has nothing for him. Sure. Okay.

And then, there’s the more salacious answer. If you believe backstage rumors, he was reportedly notorious for being protective of his spot, demanding certain spots happen in the match to make him look better. He had serious heat with multple wrestlers, to the point where it seemed like he couldn’t get with anybody who didn’t look back at him from a mirror. Vampiro had intense heat with Konnan dating back to their days in AAA. Because Konnan was boys with Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, that gave Vampiro heat with them by proxy. And because Konnan had pull backstage, he made sure to tell other wrestlers to bury Vampiro, up to and including sabotaging Vampiro directly to Eric Bischoff. Likewise, Vampiro had heat with Chris Jericho, also dating back to AAA, when, per Jericho, Vampiro tried to sabotage Jericho’s career with the promoter. He told the promoter Jericho hated being there in an effort to make Jericho want to leave, because he was afraid of Jericho taking his spot. Also, he tried to get Jericho to wrestle in a leopard print loincloth, presumably for the fans (and probably for humiliation points). Again, all of this comes from the mouths of wrestlers with their own agendas, or that most reliable font of information, Backstage Sources, which have never been wrong, not once.

Jeremiah wants to talk about wrestling’s version of Dick York and Dick Sargent. Hope that’s not too dated a reference.

Have Shawn or Hunter (or Glen or Rick themselves) ever mentioned any heat from the two remaining Kliqsters after the latter guys took over the former’s mates characters? Seems like just the thing mid-90s HBK would go apeshit over, but I’ve never heard anything.

None I could find. And I think with good reason: neither Glen Jacobs or Rick Bognar asked to be packaged in gimmicks made famous by other people. Hell, it was Jacobs’ second gimmick since joining the company, and third if you wanna count a few dark matches under the name Mike Unabomb. Clearly, he was not a captain of his own destiny. Hard to fault a guy spinning around the gimmick roulette wheel for landing on double-zero. And Bognar … poor bastard Bognar, he finally gets his big break with the Fed, and gets saddled with doing a dollar-store imitation of someone else’s gimmick. His career is dead before his entrance theme finishes its first play-through. The five months him and Jacobs had in the gimmick were met with the kind of audience reception you normally see for time-share seminars. I mean, if you’re Shawn or Hunter or Kev or Scott … how can you hate on a couple guys stuck in unwinnable spots like that?

And, finally, Richard wants to talk three familiar letters, for a completely different reason.

Okay, after that lead-in, why is DDT Japan basically an unknown promotion? I’ve followed wrestling off-and-on for forty years but never heard of Dramatic Dream Team until very recently. It sounds like it would be a very fun company to watch! Are some companies content being known only locally? Do they have no desire to promote themselves on the Internet via YouTube, ETC.? I loved the Omega vs. kid match you linked to in a previous column. Why don’t matches like that go viral?

I wouldn’t say DDT is unknown. It does have a streaming service, DDT Universe. And they’ve had plenty of moments have gone viral. I remember hearing of them several years ago, when this happened:

Yes, that’s a sex doll, “hitting” rolling Canadian Destroyers on the then-champ. That kind of thing can’t go unnoticed by wrestling fans. But I think DDT’s profile is smaller than its competitors for two reasons. And, please keep in mind, these are strictly subjective opinions.

The first thing, I think, keeping DDT from being bigger is market saturation. You look at the Japanese market, and you see New Japan, All Japan, NOAH and Dragon Gate at the top. You have indie promotions like Big Japan, Inoki Genome Federation, Pro Wrestling Zero1, Wrestle-1, Michinoku Pro and a bunch more. There’s women’s wrestling feds like Ice Ribbon, Sendai Girls and World Wonder Ring Stardom. That’s a lot of promotions competing for the eyeballs of wrestling fans in Japan. There’s only so many ways to slice a pie, and with the Bullet Club taking all the attention right now, there’s not a lot of pie left over.

The second reason, I think, would be the same thing that keeps Chikara from growing any larger than it is: over-specialization. Don’t get me wrong, DDT can be a lot of fun. The one Chikara show I got a chance to attend was, without a doubt, the most fun I ever had at a wrestling show. But there are large pockets of the pro wrestling audience that can’t wrap their heads around styles of wrestling that don’t fit their worldview. Hell, I’m guilty of it. Lucha Underground is absolutely lost on me; I couldn’t even get through an entire episode without feeling like I was watching the art of pro wrestling be smothered with a pillow. Your mileage may vary, and neither of us are wrong. But that kind of specialization of style can and will automatically limit your audience. CZW’s been around almost 20 years, and it still doesn’t run more than a show a month, because deathmatches are a love/hate thing. And that’s just an extreme extension of hardcore wrestling, which was popular in the 90’s. So now, you have a promotion that steers WAY into the crash with comedy, taking neither its characters or the sport or even itself seriously. Kenny Omega wrestles a nine year old girl and takes a beating. A ladder wins their hardcore championship … multiple times. They have a championship that is awarded to the loser of the match, like a pro wrestling championship version of the Ring videotape. It’s just so damned silly. Either you get the joke or you don’t, and a lot of people don’t want to watch wrestling expose itself and become the butt of its own joke. It’s just not for everybody; it’s for a very specific somebody.

Alright, let’s close this out. Play that funky music, white boy.

A Question I Want Answered!

WWE has made women’s wrestling a viable draw without exploiting the talent and relying on T&A.

Ring Of Honor is (finally) launching a women’s division.

Japan has multiple women’s promotions.

Why doesn’t the United States have a full time, traveling women’s promotion? Why is the country’s biggest all-women’s promotion one that doesn’t travel and only tapes four times a year?