wrestling / Columns

Ask 411 Wrestling: Can HBK’s Return Succeed?

October 27, 2018 | Posted by Ryan Byers
DX HBK's Triple H Shawn Michaels D-Generation X Raw 10818 Image Credit: WWE

Welcome, guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals to Ask 411 Wrestling. As always, I am your party host Ryan Byers, and we’re here today for what will unfortunately be a somewhat truncated version of the column due to some personal scheduling issues.

If you’re somebody who would love to see a question show up in these virtual pages, feel free to send them to me at [email protected]. I’ll answer them as soon as I can!

And now, on to the meat of this column.

Long-time asker Night Wolf the Wise thinks he’s cute and knows he’s sexy:

So HBK came out of retirement, which is a big surprise to no one, because like Ted DiBiase said, everyone’s got a price. Anyways, I guess there is concern one how much ring rust HBK will have having not wrestled for eight years. I know some people will say he retired before, came back and proved he could still wrestle. But that was a different situation. HBK was 33 when he retired and came back at 37. HBK retired again at 45 and is now 53. Do you know of an example of a wrestler that came back to wrestle in their later years (40s and 50s) who could still wrestle like they did when they were 20 and 30?

There are almost always going to be some changes in a wrestler’s style throughout his life, in part because if you do anything over the course of several decades you’ll alter the way that you do it and in part because physical changes as you age are darn near unavoidable.

However, there are still some wrestlers who have come out of retirement in the later stages of life and have done remarkably well for themselves. Most of them are guys who never had styles that were flashy or relied on high flying spots, because those are typically the first things that you’re going to lose the ability to do when you get older.

Probably the best example that I can think of a wrestler who had a great run after coming out of retirement at an older age is Fit Finlay. Finlay started wrestling in 1974 when he was 16 years old, and he worked fairly consistently until the year 2000, when he was 42. He returned to the ring in 2005 at the age of 47, and he continued to wrestle fairly regularly until 2012, when he was 54.

A retired wrestler getting back into the game at 47 is fairly unique, and there were some questions at the time about whether he would be worthwhile as a full-time member of the WWE roster. However, when he was given the opportunity, he absolutely outperformed expectations and turned out to be one of the more valuable members of the locker room in several respects, consistently working good-to-great matches in the upper mid-card.

Tyler from Winnipeg says it’s time to play the game:

When WCW had the THQ license for wrestling games did the WWF just outbid WCW to get the better developer or did THQ know WWF was the future?

I don’t play a lot of video games, and consequently I don’t follow that industry all too much, so feel free to take my answer with a grain of salt.

Based on the research that I’ve done, you’ve actually got things backwards regarding who pays who for a video game license, at least as of the time that THQ switched allegiances from WCW to the WWF. The wrestling promotions weren’t paying the video game developer to make video games. Instead, the video game developers were paying the wrestling companies for the ability to produce games featuring their wrestlers.

As near as I can tell, the license that WCW had granted to THQ was set to expire, and Electronic Arts (EA Sports) was willing to give WCW more money for the rights to make their games than what THQ could or would pay. In order to get the better payday, WCW decided to partner with EA, and THQ then moved towards the WWF so that they could keep developing games with their existing professional wrestling engine.

Ultimately, the WWF/THQ relationship wound up being the better deal for fans of wrestling games, as it gave us No Mercy, perhaps the greatest wrestling game of all time – unless you’re one of those Fire Pro snobs.

Scott D. has a couple of random nuggets:

Went to Smackdown a month ago and came up with two unrelated questions.

1. When the crowd isn’t full at a TV event, is it difficult for the wrestlers to play to the camera when there’s not very many fans on that side?

The answer is probably not, for a couple of different reasons. First off, at a lot of televised shows, if there is a crucial part of the arena that is low on fans, the folks in charge of production will just arrange for fans from other parts of the arena to fill out the important-yet-sparsely-populated sections.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, at least in modern professional wrestling, top-level performers are trained quite extensively on where the cameras are and how to play to them. That’s one of the big reasons that several very experienced wrestlers (e.g. Shinsuke Nakamura) have had to spend time in developmental before debuting on the main roster. They’re getting used to the company’s media setup.

2. In mixed tag matches, why does the hot tag still work when both partners are equally fresh? It’s not like regular tag matches where the heels were both working and the face team has a fresh partner.

It’s because a lot of professional wrestling in the twenty-first century has become lazy and creatively bankrupt, and people don’t think about things like this, or, if they have thought about them, they decide to go ahead and just run the basic “hot tag” structure for a mixed tag team match regardless, because they’ve been taught that’s how all tag team bouts should be structured, regardless of any other considerations.

One of the things that we’ve been doing recently in this column is tracing linear championships, including the Million Dollar Title last week. This lead to a lot of folks writing in to ask to have their own linear titles tracked, including comment section poster mjh, who asked about the FTW Title that Taz created for himself in ECW.

I thought that was an interesting championship to track because it orginated outside of the “big leagues” of wrestling as opposed to the other linear titles we’ve looked at, so let’s give it a shot!

For those of you who don’t recall our linear championship rules, they are essentially that:

1. The title can only change hands in one-on-one matches, not in triple threats, four-ways, or the like.

2. The title can only change hands via pinfall, submission, or stipulation in a gimmick match (e.g. escaping the cage in a cage match).

3. All of the results I’m using to track these come from the excellent cagematch.de. I understand that there are some gaps in the results on that site, but checking multiple databases for matches makes this exercise too unwieldy.

The last two linear titles we’ve tracked have both wound up around the fictional waist of Roman Reigns, so let’s see if this ECW-based belt is any different.

Taz introduced the FTW Title at a May 14, 1998 ECW show called “This Ain’t Seinfeld” in Queens, New York. I’m not sure why Paul E. and company decided that they needed to take a shot at the era’s most popular situation comedy, but I guess that’s what you have to do in order to be edgy and EXTREME.

Interestingly, when Taz actually loses the FTW Title, he doesn’t lose it in our linear championship timeline, because our rules state that title changes must occur in one-on-one matches, and Taz dropped his FTW belt for the first and only time in a three-way dance on December 19, 1998 against Sabu and Justin Credible, with Sabu being victorious.

However, Taz still loses the linear FTW Title to Sabu several months later, after he had won it back in reality. Sabu managed to get the better of Taz at a house show held in Jacksonville, Florida on September 3, 1999.

Sabu’s title-reign is short-lived as Justin Credible defeats him at the 1999 installment of ECW’s Anarchy Rulz pay per view, held on September 19 in Villa Park, Illinois.

A week later, on September 26, 1999, Sabu takes our fake championship back from Credible at a house show in Flint, Michigan.

In a match between two regular opponents and tag team partners, Rob Van Dam pins Sabu to become the linear FTW Champion on the fourteenth edition of ECW on TNN, taped on November 18, 1999 in Chicago, Illinois at the Aragon Ballroom. RVD’s real world ECW Television Title was also on the line in the match.

Speaking of regular opponents, Jerry Lynn is the next man to hold the championship, beating Van Dam at Hardcore Heaven 2000 on May 14 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Just a few days later, Justin Credible becomes our FTW Champion for the second time, as he defeats Lynn on ECW Hardcore TV episode number 371, taped on May 20, 2000 in Columbia, South Carolina. Credible was also defending the ECW World Heavyweight Championship against Lynn in this match.

Jerry Lynn regains the championship on October 1, 2000, pinning Credible on that year’s Anarcy Rulz show in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lynn also becomes the ECW Champion in this encounter.

Lynn lost the ECW Title in a “Double Jeopardy” match a few months later, but that doesn’t count given that we, again, only change our fake titles in singles matches. Interestingly, Lynn doesn’t lose another singles match until he joins the WWF roster, dropping a fall to Essa Rios at a Waco, Texas house show on April 21, 2001. Yes, Essa Rios is now the linear FTW Champion.

If you remember anything about Essa Rios’s WWF career, you can probably guess that it doesn’t take him too long to lose that distinction, as Al Snow pins him on the eighty-eighth episode of WWF Jakked, which was taped on April 30, 2001 in Milwaukee. Hey, at least we’re largely keeping the FTW Title in the ECW family so far.

Well, so much for that “ECW family” thing. Christian pins Al Snow at the 2001 Survivor Series in Greensboro, North Carolina. Christian was also the WWF European Champion at the time of this match.

Uh oh, I think I can see where this one is going. Edge defeats Christian to become of the linear FTW Champion on November 23, 2001 in Dayton Beach, Florida at a house show. Edge was also defending his WWF Intercontinental Title in this bout.

Kurt Angle beat Edge on the November 27, 2001 edition of WWF Smackdown, and, even though Edge’s IC strap was not on the line, our linear FTW Championship is.

In perhaps one of the more fitting FTW Champions outside of ECW that we’ve had on this list, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin pins Kurt Angle in the famous Joe Louis Arena in Detroit on December 1, 2001. This was a house show match in which Austin was defending the WWF Title.

As Chris Jericho will no doubt tell you, he beat the Rock and Steve Austin in the same night to become the Undisputed WWF Champion, and his defeating Stone Cold that evening also makes him our linear FTW Champion. The night in question was the 2001 Vengeance pay per view in San Diego, California.

Jericho remained unpinned until Wrestlemania XVIII in Toronto, where Triple H defeated him to become both the Undisputed Champion and the linear FTW Champion.

Well, here’s a name that you never imagined holding the FTW Title. None other than Hulk Hogan, right in the middle of his big fat 2002 nostalgia run, pins Triple H at Backlash on April 21 to become the Undisputed Champion and also the FTW Champion.

Continuing the unification of the Undisputed Title and the linear FTW Title, The Undertaker earns both distinctions when he pins Hulk Hogan at Judgment Day 2002 in Nashville, Tennessee on May 19. (Yes, THAT May 19.)

However, the two titles are decoupled when Kurt Angle beats the Undertaker in a match in which the Undisputed Title was not on the line on the June 18, 2002 episode of WWE Smackdown.

In a somewhat unusual result that might take this linear championship in a different direction than I thought it was destined for, Rikishi upends Kurt Angle on a WWE house show on June 22, 2002 in Huntington, West Virginia.

If I could be serious for a minute, another ECW alumnus takes back the FTW Title when Lance Storm defeats Rikishi on the July 2, 2002 edition of Smackdown from the Fleet Center in Boston, Massachusetts.

Lance Storm was mostly a tag team wrestler during this period of time, but he did have another singles match that he lost on the August 12, 2002 episode of Monday Night Raw, getting pinned by and losing the linear FTW Title to Booker T.

Perhaps getting revenge for his former Thrillseekers partner Lance Storm, Chris Jericho defeats Booker T. on September 29, 2002 on a house show in Beaumont, Texas to recapture the FTW Championship. Jericho is also the WWE Intercontinental Champion at this time.

Jericho has one of the shortest FTW reigns we’ve looked at, as Kane pins him on the September 30, 2002 episode of Monday Night Raw in Houston. Jericho also lost the Intercontinental Title to Kane in this match, and, if that wasn’t enough, the bout was also for a shot at the World Heavyweight Title.

Triple H becomes the linear FTW Champion next, defeating Kane at No Mercy 2002 in Little Rock, Arkansas, which also served to merge Kane’s Intercontinental Title into HHH’s World Heavyweight Championship.

Oddly enough, Kane regains the fake title before the end of the month, as he defeats Triple H in a casket match on the October 28, 2002 episode of Monday Night Raw from the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit (the second time that arena has come up in this linear title history). Triple H’s World Heavyweight Title was not on the line in the match.

Roughly one month later, Dave Batista pins Kane on the November 25, 2002 Raw from the confusingly-named North Charleston, South Carolina, which was part of Big Dave’s initial push in Evolution.

It seems a bit unusual given that aforementioned push, but Batista lost an obscure house show match to Rob Van Dam on January 12, 2003 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I know that on house shows the rule of thumb is to give the victory to the babyface, but the upset still seems oddly-timed.

Making his third appearance in our title history and giving us another house show “title change” is Chris Jericho who beat RVD on January 25, 2003 on one of the company’s Japanese tours at Tokyo’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium.

When WWE came back to the United States, Scott Steiner beat Jericho on the February 3, 2003 edition of Monday Night Raw in a match that was also for the number one contendership to the World Heavyweight Title. Of anybody else who has held our fake title up to this point, Steiner is probably the person who has best embodied the “FTW” attitude behind the championship.

Of course, we all know that Scott Steiner was never a World Heavyweight Champion in WWE, so he had to lose the linear FTW Title at some point. He drops it to Triple H, who successfully defended the Big Gold Belt against him at Now Way Out 2003 in Montreal, Quebec, the show perhaps best known for Sylvan Grenier helping to reenact the Montreal Screwjob for the 5,000th time in six years.

On September 21, 2003, Goldberg defeated Triple H at that year’s Unforgiven pay per view to become both the World Heavyweight Champion and the linear FTW Champion. This reminds me that scene from the first season of Tough Enough in which one of the cast members had a Goldberg poster up on his wall and Tazz pitched a royal fit when he saw it.

And here’s where things start to look a little familiar.

During his original WWE run, Goldberg doesn’t lose another one-on-one match. (He did drop the World Title back to Triple H, but it doesn’t count for our purposes because it was in a triple threat match also featuring Kane.) Goldberg leaves the company in 2004 and doesn’t return to the ring until late 2016, and he didn’t lose any singles matches in that run until April 2, 2017, when Brock Lesnar defeated him at Wrestlemania XXXIII.

And, as we all well know by now, Brock Lesnar does not lose any singles matches until August 19, 2018, when Roman Reigns pins him at Summerslam. If you follow our linear championship rules, Roman Reigns is YOUR current FTW Champion. Taz and all of his friends in Red Hook, Brooklyn would be proud . . . I think.

So there you have it. It’s the third time we’ve tried an exercise of this nature in our lil’ ‘ole column, and each time it has wound up in the exact same place, with the linear championship we’ve been tracking merging into the WWE Universal Championship.

Of course, now that Reigns has stepped away from professional wrestling for the time being, it will be interesting to see what happens to all of these linear championships. Will Roman return to the ring and eventually drop the linear Million Dollar Title, the linear FTW Title, and our totally fictional championship of “The Man”? Or will we have to invoke the rule established by Half-Pint Brawler Teo, who retired while holding the title of “The Man”? Only time will tell.

And that will do it for this week’s Ask 411 Wrestling. Again, feel free to send your questions for me to [email protected]