Ask 411 Wrestling: Can Bray Wyatt Be Saved?

A good day to you all and welcome to Ask 411, and I am Jed Shaffer. If you’re confused as to why I’m here when Ryan Byers was here last edition, allow me a quick explanation; due to a family emergency, my farewell column was delayed. Bossman Larry, however, was gracious enough to allow me the opportunity to formally bow out with a final edition. So, going forward, Byers. Send your questions to Byers at [email protected]. Get your answers from Byers once a week. Get BANNER~! from Byers.

Except this week. It’s my parting shot, and I’m going out with a super-sized column and a two-fisted intro. Let’s go DOUBLE BANNER~!

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You Q, I A

Frequent asker nightwolfofthewise gets the lead-off spot today with a pair of questions, and he wants to get funereal. See, it’s like getting rea– oh, forget it.

In the early years of Undertaker’s Career, He would use a custom made coffin in is matches against: Ultimate Warrior, Kamala, Kama, and King Mabel. Do you know the reason behind why they would use a custom made Coffin? Also, when did Undertaker start using a regular coffin that we saw in his later matches?

The custom-made coffins made sense with the character at the time. Remember, he wasn’t supposed to be a tall guy with a death fetish; he originally was supposed to be a mortician, specifically patterned after the morticians of the old west, who crafted their caskets by hand. And it was also a more cartoony era, so having a casket with Yokozuna’s face or whatever painted on the side just fit the times.

The transition from a massive pinewood box to a more conventional casket you’d see at a real funeral home happened slowly. In his casket match with Goldust in 1996, it was a normal-sized casket instead of the pinewood box, but painted sparkly gold. The next casket match wouldn’t be for another two years, at the 1998 Royal Rumble against Shawn Michaels. While it went back to being oversized, it no longer had any of the customization. The next casket match – against The Rock on a Raw in 1999 – would finally bring us to a standard, no frills casket. And it’s pretty much been that way ever since.

To the second question!

When Kevin Thorn first debuted in the WWE, He debuted as Mordecai. It was a play off his Seven gimmick from OVW. His character was on a crusade to rid the world of sin. My question is: Was this supposed to go anywhere? Where they going to build him up, then have him feud with the Undertaker in a Heaven vs Hell type thing?

They were going to have Mordecai be the anti-Undertaker: white to his black, lawful evil to Undertaker’s lawful neutral, the savior and the soultaker. The problem was that Kevin Fertig was as green as a golf course, and as over with the crowd as a turd in a punch bowl. Everybody could see they were building him up as a monster-heel-of-the-month for Undertaker to chew up and spit out like they did in the early 90’s. So when it was obvious that he would never be up to snuff, he was sent back to OVW to get more seasoning.

The Hulkster is talkin’ smack and Damon is talkin’ about said smack-talkin’.

I stumbled upon this video with Hulk Hogan doing a NJPW press conference in what I can assume is the late 80’s to early 90’s. In it, he makes some rather…. disparaging remarks about the WWF title. My question is 1) Was this a straight shoot, and 2) if it wasn’t, why in the world would Vince have allowed it? Thanks again man, love the column!

So, backstory: this took place in May of 1993. Reportedly (but not confirmed), Hogan had been sent to Japan to get out of the limelight a bit, as Vince’s steroid trial was looming, and Hogan as WWF World Champion while also being a major witness was a bit of bad optics. So Hogan got shipped off to cool his heels, and while he was there, a dream match was put together: Hogan vs. The Great Muta. Hogan would defeat Muta in a non-title match, which set up the promo above.

I can’t find anything concrete as to Vince’s reaction to it. But I sort of take that as a statement in and of itself. If there was this great blowback to Hogan’s comments, you’d think there would be tales of backstage blow-ups, punishments, what have you. Instead … nothing. My opinion – and this is purely guessing here – is that this was all posturing. Hogan was there to sell an epic clash of champions, and the rematch was to be for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. Wrestling 101 says that whatever promotion you’re in has the #1 championship in the world. So, Hogan went with that. “Yeah, I’m champ back in the States, but this is the real deal, and I want it”. If Hulk Hogan, outsider and champion of another organization, is dumping on his own championship and coming after our championship, ours must be the real deal!, so the audience will think.

Plus, keep in mind that this was pre-IWC, pre-YouTube, pre-the world we know now. There was every reasonable expectation that something that happened in Japan would stay in Japan. So even if this did cross some lines, Hogan had a chance to get away with it, as there wasn’t much chance of a post-event press conference getting to the attention of stateside media.

Well, until now.

Bobby has a philosophical question for the ages.

My question is purely opinion an one, but ones I’d like your take if you’re up for giving it:
When someone doesn’t like the direction of a WWE story line or the use (or lack thereof) of a WWE performer, I see a lot of blame naturally go to WWE Creative. My question is: In your opinion when it comes to creative, what percentage of bad story lines/character usage blame should fall on the work of the actual writers/bookers and what percentage falls on Vince? Feel free to expound on this any way you like.

It’s so tempting to hit the easy button and say “50/50” and wrap up this question in a bow.

The problem is, in my opinion, it’s the right answer.

Remember, this isn’t the Attitude Era anymore. While Vince has put his trust in Triple Haitch as far as NXT and 205 Live goes, he’s still firmly got the main roster by the goozle. There is no “steer into the audience reaction, put trust in VinnyRu” anymore. It is Vince McMahon’s choice on who gets the push, who gets relegated to Main Event, and who gets future-endeavored. I mean, we’re on, what, the third coronation of Roman Reigns now? The fourth? Is there any record of a time when they weren’t trying to make Reigns “The Man”? Criticize Russo all you want – and he deserves it for a great many failings – but he did not forcibly push a talent that wasn’t getting over out of what felt like sheer spite. And before anybody says “Jeff Jarrett”, it may have been a little fast, but he got the reaction from the crowd Russo was looking for a hell of a lot more than Roman Reigns does now. WWE is Vince McMahon’s vision, pure and simple.

But Creative does play a role, and that role is to turn Vince’s senile fever dreams into reality, like a chef on Chopped with that damned basket. The only problem is, if you get shite chefs, they won’t be able to do anything with that rack of lamb, that bottle of coffee-flavored tequila, a basket of fiddlehead ferns and a box of Lucky Charms. Vince may be giving them a crappy grocery list, but a good chef can make a great dish out of what may seem like disparate ingredients. These are not good chefs, and it shows. Faces come off as whiny, bullying brats, and the heels come off as justified and well-spoken. Intelligence is now a negative trait, and most characters just bounce off each other for weeks on end without purpose other than “it’s their turn to fight now”. And don’t get me started on the women, which still has plenty of Kevin Dunn “bitches be cray-cray!” booking tendencies. If the people writing the scripts had any writing skills – and maybe, just maybe, some knowledge of the business – they could interpret Vince’s vision in such a way that we would care about Roman. We wouldn’t need a thirty-third coronation, because the first one would’ve worked.

Now, if you disagree on the share of blame, hey, your call. 60/40, 30/70, that’s on you. But when the situation can be tl;dr’ed as “garbage in, garbage out”, that comes to 50/50 by my math.

Over now to Mal Machine, who is into numbers. Not stats numbers, but actual numerals, which is I’m sure a fetish covered by Rule 32.

I miss the numbers on the new Wrestlemania logos. I think 30 was the last one to have a number on the logo. Why do you think that is? I think it makes Mania seem less prestigious. Vince probably thinks it makes Mania feel old, but I think that’s something that should be celebrated. What’s your thoughts?

I think you nailed it spot on. Vince has a weird thing about things seeming old. Look at how he abolished referring to Wrestlemania as “The Grandaddy Of ‘Em All”, because it made the event sound “old”. Numbering the event not only leads to the same conclusion, but cements it with a hard numerical value. I mean, we just had the thirty-fourth iteration. That’s twice as many events as Starrcade. It’s almost five times longer than the career of The Beatles. The United States is on its sixth President since the first one, and four of those served two terms (yes, Reagan was in the middle of his run when Mania debuted, but still). The dominant music media at the time of Mania 1 was a cassette, which held on average 12 songs; my iPod Touch is roughly the same size and, at present, has about 4200 songs on it. I could go on and on with examples … and that’s what drives Vince nuts. All of these acknowledge the massive passage of time between 1985 and now, and the numbers act as a reminder of it.

And yet, what’s really weird is that, the night before Wrestlemania, WWE spends four hours embracing long-gone eras and stars of yesteryear with the Hall Of Fame ceremony. Yet, Vince has this weird antagonistic relationship with having his events feel “dated”. Go fig.

Chris Geddis is all about leaving and coming back. I’m doing half that!

Any examples of wrestlers that left WWF/WWE, went to a different company, refined their game and got resigned, perhaps under a different name by WWF/WWE and went on to big success on their second time with the company? I mean more than a Shelton Benjamin or Drew Galloway.

Sure. Christian, for starters. Left WWE, went to Dixieland, and proved he could be more than the Marty Jannetty of Team ECK. When Sean Waltman left WWE, he’d mostly been a fun, athletic underdog white-meat babyface, save for the last few months, when he was a whiny heel. He came back as a grungy, obnoxious Gen-X’er. If one was generous with the definition of the parameters of your question, one could say Jeff Jarrett in 1997; he left WWE and the silly wannabe-country singer gimmick, had his WCW run, and came back with a more defined personality and mission statement (and weird Aztec priest gear).

But there’s another person … might not come to everybody’s mind right away, but the difference between his first run and his second is night and day:

In his first run, he was a decent but somewhat unremarkable arrogant, self-absorbed heel. Nothing particularly unique about him. When he came back, well, you know the rest. And while you can’t say his wrestling from a hold-for-hold perspective got better, he mastered the art of timing and when to launch the comeback and how to work the crowd into a fever pitch. You couldn’t ask for a bigger night-and-day transformation than that.

Another Chris (I think) has me scouring old TV results for an obscure thing. Thanks, bro.

Here’s a question that’s been on my mind for a while. Did Strike Force ever defend the WWF Tag Team championships against a jobber tag team on TV? I seem to recall catching the ending to an old episode of WWF Superstars back in the day where they dusted off a jobber team and were announced as “still the WWF Tag Team Champions”. But I’ve never been able to find any evidence to support this.

To be honest, I’m not sure. The evidence is difficult to parse. There are surprisingly few instances of them wrestling on Superstars during their title run to start with. There’s one match in 1987 that I was able to definitively determine as a non-title match. There are a few matches in 1988 against jobber tandems: Dusty Wolfe & Iron Mike Sharpe, Tom Wolfe & Dusty Wolfe, and Iron Mike Sharpe & John Ziegler.

Not gonna lie, I’m totally making up headcanon about Wolfe and Sharpe, and how they teamed, broke up and found new partners. Somebody get me to this timeline where this is true.

Anyway, the problem is, I can’t find results that indicate if these were title matches. It just says Strike Force beat these ad hoc teams. But hey, now that you have the dates, you can look it up on the Network!

Bryan Jones is comparing two rather notable bookers, but not in the way you think.

I was wondering I have heard wrestlers say they loved working for bill watts but hated working for ole Anderson…and I’ve heard them say vice versa, is there any difference between their philosophies and management styles? Because I can’t tell

Well, since you mentioned how wrestlers vary in their opinions of both men, we don’t have to bring up the Yes, Minister rules.

When you get into the weeds, yes, there were some differences. Ole was infamously protective of his buddies. Ole’s tenure when he returned to JCP/WCW in the early 90’s was the best example of this, as he rehired a bunch of old farts at lower prices, and stifled younger talent and those with more expensive contracts he didn’t feel were worth the money. Overall, his demeanor was decidedly, thoroughly, stubbornly old school, to the point of seeming recalcitrant for the sake of it. That’s fancy-talk for “grumpy old curmudgeon”. I mean, The Black Scorpion was his fault. So was Shockmaster. He just loved his cheesy, over-the-top, only-at-the-fairgrounds southern rasslin’ gimmicks.

On the flip side, you have Bill Watts. He also had his preferences as far as talent goes (the Brian Pillman/Yellow Dog story is one for the ages), protecting his friends and burying youngsters. But his old school gruffness was less a general attitude and more of a booking style. For instance, Watts had the protective mats removed from ringside because [checks notes] tough guys? During his WCW tenure, he also banned moves off the top rope because [checks notes again] damned whippersnappers? I gotta get better at taking notes.

So, were they all that much different? Not much, no. Who they preferred to work with, yeah. And little touches, like Bill Watts trying to turn WCW into a tough-man competition, or Ole and his cheesy and disappointing masked wrestlers, may be some differentiation. But the differences are subtle; Watts was out of touch in an almost precious way, wondering why he couldn’t just shave the corners off the square and get it to fit in the round hole. Ole was out of touch and that’s the way he liked it, dagummit, and damn the world for moving on, consarnit! I think, ultimately, they’re really, really close to each other, like milk and dark chocolate. Different at the granular level, but in the end, I think it all comes back to the same place.

We keep with the old school and go NWA with Gary. I mean, I don’t know why you’re asking about rap mus– yeah, no, even I can’t keep up that bad joke. I apologize.

It seems like the NWA liked to do momentous/long term World title switches in territories where the new champion wasn’t all that big or well known ( Buddy Rogers in Chicago, Dory Funk in Florida, Jack Brisco in Houston, Ric Flair in K.C.) Was this done to appease the promoters who weren’t getting their guy as champion by throwing them a bone of having a world title switch? To see if the new champion could draw outside of their normal territory? Or some other reason, like exposing the new champion to a new audience in an explosive manner?

Sadly, finding information like that is pretty difficult. The men who would really know – your Eddie Grahams, your Sam Muchnicks, your Don Owens – aren’t around to talk about it, and if they are, they aren’t talking.

But, if you’ve read the very comprehensive book National Wrestling Alliance: The Untold Story of the Monopoly That Strangled Pro Wrestling, you’d learn that the NWA, despite their stated goal of an alliance of promoters, was really a group of thin-skinned, territorial man-babies. The only time they agreed on anything was when a renegade promotion would try to run inside their borders, and then they banded together to do some things that straddled the line of legality. Otherwise, it was a constant pissing match between the voting and junior members about border lines, talent sharing, spots on the board, and most of all, champions. Not only having the champion in a promoter’s town, but having him be of said promoter’s roster, was considered the ultimate boost in business; local boy makes good, we’ve got the best wrestlers, and so on and so forth. So to crown a new champion from a promotion within a promotion would probably have been tantamount to openly shitting on the rest of the NWA membership. I have no doubts that the practice of crowning a new champion outside of their home territory was a way to show there wasn’t One True Favored Promotion over the others. Good politics, in other words.

Patrick has some questions about one of WWE’s big first-evers.

Why was the potentially huge first ever Cena-Batista match thrown together (relatively) abruptly at Summerslam ’08? With both guys on separate brands most of the time during this era, there seemed like no reason why they couldn’t be kept apart with a view to a long build towards a modern dream match down the line.

Well, for starters, they weren’t on separate brands. Both were on Raw. Batista, who was drafted to Raw on June 23, was just coming out of a feud with then-World Heavyweight Champion CM Punk, who had picked up the scraps and cashed in MITB on Edge after Batista had beaten him to a pulp. During a rematch on Raw between Punk and Batista, JBL and Cena got involved, Cena accidentally punched Batista, and the seeds were planted. After a bunch of forced-wacky-tag-partners-who-don’t-get-along matches, they were booked to face each other.

Now that takes care of on-screen. But why do it now, you ask. Well, look at the rest of the card. Undertaker and Edge were in a huge program that had taken up much of the year, and they had finally escalated to a Hell In A Cell match. They were trying to get some credibility on Punk and his reign, so he got JBL. Shawn Michaels and Chris Jericho were in the middle of that glorious feud, and neither were actually wrestling at this event. Trips was champ on Smackdown. Both guys were kind of stuck with no one to work with. A feud would have to be hotshotted for both of them anyway, so it made more sense for the feud to be with each other than suddenly shoot up someone who wasn’t ready for that kind of sudden push (MVP, Legacy) or old hat (Kane).

I’m letting Andron Smith go double-barreled, because I like both questions he has. And it’s my last column, so there.

What is the qualifications for a wrestler to be considered the top stars?

So far, I couldn’t tell. They have John Cena, and in looking for a replacement they’ve had bad luck because 2 of the stars they was hoping to become top face got injured. One had to settle for returning back as general manager. The other one got so stressed out in trying to be top star he decided to violate the wellness policy. Raw is with out a top face or a acting top face now, that the latest one they tried is on the injured list thanks to a misuse of moves. We’ve all seen what happens to guys WWE tries to push as top face, but goes on the injured list. So what is the requirements for a wrestler to be considered top face?

Vince has to like you. Cause his is the only perception that counts.

I mean, yeah, guys who successfully became The Guy – Hogan, Bret, Shawn, Austin, Rock, Cena – all have some common traits; all are charismatic, perseverant, refuse to lose, and possess a strong personal code of ethics (even if it isn’t the same code of ethics across the board). But other than that, they’re all unique; Hogan was a superhero. Bret was working class and much smaller in stature. Shawn was an athlete and a pretty boy. Austin was blue collar and gritty. Rock was self-absorbed and a cult of personality. Cena … had a padlock on a chain necklace?

But you know what else they all have in common? Hogan aside – who was brought in red-hot thanks to the AWA and Rocky III – all of them were made by the audience. The fans got behind Bret’s working-class ethic. The fans loved Shawn’s antics and athleticism. The fans soaked up Austin’s blue collar one-of-us feeling and anti-heroics. The fans went nuts for The Rock’s egotism and charisma. The fans bought into Cena’s surprisingly good raps and antagonistic attitude.

Now compare that to guys that were attempts at The Guy that didn’t go so well. Ultimate Warrior had Hogan’s charisma, but he also felt a little erratic and copycat, which didn’t sit well when the real deal was still right there. Lex Luger was a transparent attempt to re-do the Hogan formula, now with Hogan gone, but he lacked the charisma to pull it off. Diesel got everything that was cool about him stripped away and turned into a smiling, Rock-and-Jock-playing, milquetoast baby-kisser. Even Randy Orton, with all the championships he’s had, has never felt as important as they want him to be.

But what the fans want in The Guy and what Vince wants in The Guy is a whole different set of criteria. Vince looks at the bottom line of a specific demographic: kids. Dean Ambrose looks like a mechanic or a sex predator. Seth Rollins looks like a member of Type O Negative. AJ Styles is somebody else’s creation. Nakamura is from SOMEWHERE ELSE. Daniel Bryan is short and goofy-looking. But Roman Reigns? He looks like a walking GI Joe toy, and is a cousin of the world’s #1 box office star, who just so happens to be an alumni of the E. On paper, Roman Reigns should be the guy. They’ve just blown the lay-up.

So, to answer your question, the qualifications depend on who is assigning the label. For the fans, someone they can relate to, believe in, or see themselves in. For Vince, someone who ticks the most boxes on the “what will hit the target demo the best” checklist.

Question The Second!

Bray Reboot,, can Wyatt still be seen as a threat?

All of the major feuds Bray has been involved in, he’s lost. So far Bray has only been valuable as a answer for when WWE is out of answers. For example, when WWE had a championship ladder match. They didn’t want Reigns to win the title, but they didn’t want him to lose cleanly what they do? Add a Wyatt Fix. WWE has applied it a few times over the years. Now with Wyatt new beginning at Smackdown, wwe has a chance to reboot him.Make him seem like a threat. Because to be honest whenever we see Wyatt in a feud right now we automatically can predict whose going to win that Feud. For example his next feud is with Orton whom WWE would probably want to make look strong. So we’re going to have a Wyatt vs. Orton and chances are Orton would win this Feud in the long run. All bark no bite for Wyatt. If WWE is trying to sell Bray as the new Face of Fear, shouldn’t they build him to be more of a threat? I can see Bray aligning himself with NXT wrestlers like Authors of Pain and so forth as new family members . But doesn’t he needs to be considered a threat solo?

I’m a firm believer that, in wrestling, you can get anybody over with the right booking. ROH turned Jimmy Jacobs into the most feared sociopath in American wrestling, and the dude isn’t tall enough to slam dunk on a Fisher Price basketball hoop. Hugh Morrus managed to get more over than at any point in his career when he changed his name and dressed in camo, despite having a name that amounted to a Bart Simpson prank call. Booker T and Matt Hardy got more over in their career than at any other point by adopting weird accents and gimmicks that in no way fit the rest of their respective careers. It can be done, with the proper writing and a commitment to the gimmick. So, yes, with the right booker and the right angles, Bray Wyatt could be resurrected and turned into a threat. A dominant threat, even. I do believe that.

But we’re not playing with house money here. We’re in the real world, where WWE’s writers have had one story Bray Wyatt running in circles ever since John Cena murked him at Wrestlemania. Every feud starts with cryptic taunts and long-winded promos. There’s usually 2, sometimes 3 matches. He almost always loses the first one, and wins one of the remaining two, although the order is a coin flip. His promos are full of doom and gloom and proclamations of this and dire warnings of that and RUN BLERP, and … nothing ever happens. Nobody’s ever left shaken or broken or mentally scarred or even mildly put out. Once the feud is over, he moves on to his next target, and his now former nemesis just gets on with their lives, as if their time with Bray Wyatt was just some weird tangent. Dean Ambrose, Roman Reigns, Finn Balor, John Cena, Randy Orton … even Daniel Bryan, which had the best angle to date with Bryan’s fake assimilation into the Family, went right back to being D-Bry once he put Bray in the rear view mirror.

The problem is that Bray Wyatt was never given a purpose. Say what you will about the presentation of The Undertaker’s character during the Ministry era and how the angle ended, but you never doubted his purpose for doing what he did; he wanted the WWF World Championship, he wanted control of the WWF overall, and he wanted Stone Cold Steve Austin dead at his feet. He couldn’t do it alone, so he recruited an army, sometimes by force. He made his targets known, and they were consistent with his goals. Does any of that apply to Bray Wyatt since he debuted? We can’t say yes or no, because they’ve never given us any kind of definition to the character. If he wants a large following, he certainly wasn’t an aggressive recruiter. If championships were what he desired, he didn’t try very hard to earn a title shot. If control was what he was after, he never even tried targeting the Authority. Even if his raison d’etre was “I just want to see the world burn”, he never said it, and he never went about it in a way that made any sense. Good example, his feud with Roman Reigns where his rallying cry was “anybody but you, Roman”. All well and good … until Roman defeated him. If Bray Wyatt was so dedicated to causing chaos for the sake of it and not wanting Roman to succeed, WHY STOP THERE?!? Nothing was ever consistent about him and nothing was defined.

And now you have four years plus of this booking dragging him down like a millstone. Will this Lake Of Reincarnation run with Woken Matt Hardy serve as a reset? I sure hope so. The problem is, if this is building to a heel turn by Bray (my sneaking suspicion) … then what? He’s the same old Bray now in all but alignment. He smiles now, has a bit of a sense of humor, but otherwise, what’s the difference? They had a chance to erase everything on the board, and instead, they just flipped the HEEL sign to FACE.

So, right now, I’m saying no, they cannot save Bray Wyatt. Under the current regime and booking plan, he’s running in place at best, and worst, heading for an eventual return to the same crappy merry-go-round he was on when he had worms projected onto the ring.

Okay, one more, and then I’m outta here. It’s been a long, strange trip, and I don’t think there’s any better way than to cap it off by having my predecessor, Mathew Sforcina, see me to the door.

Ok, so here’s a nice little thought exercise to go out on.

Congratulations! You’ve been hired to hire a roster of a new wrestling company! And even better, you got a time machine, and a replicator that can make enough cash or hookers or blow or video games or whatever you need to bring together the best wrestlers ever and have them work hard for the betterment of the company!

There’s one problem though. One of the major sponsors of this new company is the Children’s Television Workshop. And their requirement is that the roster for the company is 26 wrestlers, and there has to be one worker per letter of the alphabet. So you need someone with an A name, a B name etcetc.

Now, doesn’t have to be their first name (John Cena is fine for C, for example), and if their name is almost always said with a nickname part you can use that (So Randy Savage could be used as M for Macho Man). But you can’t use a previous name (So if for some reason you wanted The Godfather as your permanent opening act, you couldn’t take him as K for Kama. You could have Kama as K though).

Oh, and all your ring announcers, commentators, managers, refs, and/or authority figures will be played by robots, who neither add or subtract to the show. If you want a better one, you gotta fit them in a letter.

So. 26 names. Who you got?

… you son of a bitch.

Okay, from the top, all the ring announcers, commentators, etc … I’m keeping the robots in all but one position. I want as robust a roster as possible. I love The Fink as a ring announcer, but I’m not sacrificing a spot when the Announcatron-3000 can do that for me. Ditto refs. Long gone are the days when the refs were actually distinct, like Nick Patrick, Earl Hebner, Tim White, that guy in WCW that looked like Jason Voorhees from Friday The 13th Part 3 with Homer Simpson’s hair (Scott something?). I’m skipping authority figures entirely, as I’ve seen quite enough of them in the past 20 years.

And here’s the controversial one: no women wrestlers.

Not that I don’t love women’s wrestling. Hell, the first thing I did when I got WWE 2K18 was rechristen Smackdown into Shimmer. But with only 26 spots, I’m barely gonna have enough of a functional roster for ONE division, let alone two. I don’t want to short-change the women by giving them some token 6-person division, so, this will be a man’s wrestling promotion. Maybe I’ll impress the CTW enough so they’ll give me an all-woman’s show too.

Anyway, here it is:

A – Arn Anderson. Always been a big fan of The Enforcer. Plus, his nickname is “Double-A”. It’s like a grammar lesson, which fits with the sponsor.
B – Bret Hart. One of the faces on my personal wrestling Mt. Rushmore.
C – Steve Corino. Another of the faces.
D – Dynamite Kid. Peak form. Let him go all New Japan/Stampede on this hizzy.
E – Edge. Because the roster needs a slimebag.
F – Terry Funk. Preferably the middle aged-and-crazy era.
G – Eddie Guerrero. If I have to explain this, you’re nuts.
H – “Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels. DUH.
I – “Iceman” Dean Malenko. Because Malenko vs. most everybody on this list never happened, and it’s a crying shame.
J – Joey Styles. My one and only non-wrestler. He’s doing commentary by himself. E-C-DUB E-C-DUB
K – Kurt Angle. Again, duh.
L – Larry Sweeney. Bit of a left field choice, but I dug him. He could be both wrestler and manager, pissing people off everywhere and defending the ICW-ICWA Texarkana Television Championship.
M – “Macho Man” Randy Savage. Him versus many of these guys is a dream come true. But really, I want Savage vs. Funk. THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES AND BE HORRIFIED.
N – “Nature Boy” Ric Flair. Again, if I have to explain this one, the problem is yours, not mine.
O – Kevin Owens. Good antagonist, good wrestler.
P – Brian Pillman. We’re talking the end of his WCW run, when he was deep into the “Loose Cannon” gimmick, but hadn’t had the accident yet.
Q – Mike Quackenbush. You’d think Q would’ve been harder, but nope. Quack in a heartbeat. Imagine the dream matches. Weep with me for what we did not get.
R – Raven. Because we need a psychological heel, and it was him or Jake Roberts. I like the character of Jake better, but I think Raven was a better worker overall.
S – Samoa Joe. ROH Champ era, when he was a walking four-and-a-half snowflake machine.
T – Tully Blanchard. That’s 3/4’s of the Horsemen. Pick someone else from the list for the fourth spot. Not Pillman, though, he stays solo and unhinged.
U – Undertaker. DUH SQUARED. His mid-2000’s form, when he’d finally found his groove and was putting on solid matches with most everybody who wasn’t a stiff (Koslov, JBL).
V – Vader. We need a monster heel. And he’s bringing the helmet.
W – William Regal. Because Regal rules and you know it. Inaugural champion right here.
X – X-Pac. Look, the options for wrestlers with X in their names in a prominent place are slim pickings. It’s him, some luchadores and puro guys I don’t know, and “Dr. X” Dick Beyer. Besides, I need midcarders.
Y – Yoshihiro Tajiri. None of the comedy crap from WWE. I want the guy that was so feared, Taz had to wrap barbed wire around his arm when applying the Tazmission to win the match.
Z – Sami Zayn. Can’t have Owens without Zayn.

Surprisingly, it was the letters that don’t get used so often – Q, X, Z, V – that were easiest. More common letters were much harder because there were more candidates; Shawn Michaels, for instance, couldn’t go in S or M, due to others occupying the spaces. Eddie Guerrero was originally the E entry, but then I didn’t have a G entry, and I really wanted Edge too. It was all very difficult. AJ Styles, Jake Roberts, Chris Jericho, Christopher Daniels … all were wrestlers I just couldn’t find a spot for and had to let go. Damn you, Sforcina.

And thank you, for recommending me for this. It was a short run, but it was fun.

And thank you to the readers, for giving me a chance and sticking around when you saw I didn’t stink up the joint too badly.

I’m looking to get back on the site in a totally different way … a podcast in the Music section. Still putting together some details, but look for it in the coming months.

And to Ryan Byers, good luck, man. I know the ship’s in good hands.

Somebody drop me a phat beat to play me off.