Ask 411 Wrestling: Can WWE Make the John Cena Classic Work?

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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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Marc hustles, loyaltys, and respects:

What do you think of this “John Cena Invitational” the WWE is going to be doing? Personally, I think it’s one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard of in pro wrestling, which covers a lot of ground.

First off, it’s difficult to say what I think of the John Cena Classic, because nobody knows what exactly it is.

The only details that we have as of this writing are that it is going to involve both established and up and coming talent, there is going to be some sort of fan voting element, and the fan voting element may allow wrestlers to win the event even if they’re “lost” their match in a kayfabe sense.

Take those criteria and there are many different formats that you could come up with, all of which have their own positives and negatives.

That being said, I assume what Marc is asking about is the notion that a wrestler could win a title based on a fan vote despite losing a match, which is the aspect of the Cena Classic that I have seen the most discussion of since the initial announcement was made.

The first thing that I’ll say is that this is not the first time I’ve seen a concept of that type used in wrestling. For most of its existence, Japanese promotion Dragon Gate has recognized the Open the Owari Gate Championship, which is a title created by wrestler Stalker Ichikawa to be defended in the promotion’s comedy matches. From the very beginning, the Owari Gate included a stipulation under which the wrestler who got more support from the live audience would win the title. This has lead to all sorts of shenanigans, including two instances in which the referee won the title because he was the most popular person in the ring.

That being said, the Owari Gate was expressly for comedy matches, and that’s not the case with the Cena Classic . . . or at least we all assume it’s not.

Could this work in a serious bout?

The best take on this I’ve seen actually comes from Lance Storm, who basically said that if results are being controlled by fan votes, wrestlers lose a big incentive to cooperate to produce the best possible match, because they are likely to focus on making themselves look good as opposed to making each other look good – particularly as it relates to established wrestlers attempting to give younger talent a “rub.”

If Storm is right, then this whole thing could actually do more to bury up and coming talent than it would to promote it. That would be a disaster.

Mike Minutags!! (yes, the exclamation points were in his signature) is marking an anniversary:

I recently was watching Scott Hall’s first time on WCW Nitro. He came through the crowd and entered the ring and spoke on the mic. The crowd was really dead for it (I remembered the crowd reacting much better, but no they were totally dead for it). I heard somewhere that Hall was in a dark match earlier and told the crowd he would be back, hence the lame crowd reactions. Any truth to that?

Looking at contemporary reports from the show, I see no record of any dark matches, which makes sense because up to this point Nitro had been a one-hour show and this was a special two-hour episode. With an extra hour of televised wrestling, there would be less need for a dark match to make fans feel as though they’d gotten their money’s worth.

Plus, this is such a famous moment in wrestling history that, if the dark match story was true, it would be very well documented.

HBK’s Smile is going Hollywood:

The 2005 remake of The Longest Yard has onscreen roles for Steve Austin, Kevin Nash, Goldberg, The Great Khali and Bob Sapp, who actually was a wrestler before becoming a kickboxer. Is there any other movie not about wrestling that stars 5 or more current or former wrestlers?

They exist, but there aren’t a ton of them, that’s for sure.

The non-wrestling movie that I found which contains the highest number of professional wrestlers comes to us from – believe it or not – the Insane Clown Posse. The cult music group has obviously been tied to wrestling for decades, but they’ve also branched out into tons of other media, including movies. In the year 2000, they released their straight-to-video feature film debut, Big Money Hustlas, but I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about the western-themed follow-up they put out ten years later, Big Money Rustlas

Featuring Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J as cowboys, Rustlas shoehorned in many wrestlers, most of whom had worked on Juggalo Championship Wrestling shows promoted by the clowns. Eagle-eyed viewers will be able to spot Scott Hall, Jimmy Hart, Sabu, Scott D’Amore, and Joe Doering on camera, PLUS you’ve got Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J, who at this point qualify as wrestlers themselves. On top of that, the band Twiztid – consisting of Jamie Madrox and Monoxide – are both in the film, and they did some wrestling early in JCW. We’re not done yet, though! Also in the cast are Dustin Diamond (Screech of Saved By the Bell fame) and Todd Bridges (Willis of Diff’rent Strokes fame), both of whom trained to wrestle as part of the short-lived reality show Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling.

Depending on who you want to count, that’s anywhere between five and eleven wrestlers coming at you.

If we’re talking about major theatrical releases, let’s talk about 2010’s MacGruber, an SNL spinoff movie starring Will Forte that lead to Forte himself guest hosting Monday Night Raw during that abysmal era. This movie saw the title character MacGruber assemble a team of the toughest men he could find, who were played by six WWE stars of the day: Chris Jericho, Mark Henry, Montel Porter, Great Khali, Kane, and the Big Show.

Death From Above is a 2012 straight-to-DVD sci fi movie that lined up six wrestlers for its cast: Kurt Angle, Sid Vicious, Matt Morgan, James Storm, Rhyno, and ODB. (And, for the record, I sincerely believe ODB couldn’t possibly have committed all those crimes. Coolio did some of that shit.) Angle’s wife Giovanna has a small role as well.

Another example is Ultimate Death Match 2, a 2010 straight-to-DVD movie about underground fighting that contains a large bevy of wrestling personalities, namely Kenny Bolin, Lodi, Kid Kash, Melissa Coates, Johnny Swinger, Shane Douglas, Sandman, April Hunter, Brutus Beefcake, Raven, Kevin Nash, Dan Severn, Al Snow, and Jimmy Valiant. That’s fourteen in all, though you could argue that the subject matter of this movie is something close enough to wrestling that it really shouldn’t count.

Another marginal case is Thunder in Paradise. Most readers will know this as the action adventure TV Hulk Hogan starred in between his WWF and WCW runs, though the pilot of the show was shot as a feature-length presentation and eventually released on VHS as a “movie.” It included six wrestlers: Hogan, Jim Neidhart, El Gigante, Brutus Beefcake, Jimmy Hart, and Hercules Hernandez.

After Thunder in Paradise became a TV series, one of its two-part episodes was edited together to create another feature-length bit of entertainment, which was sold on home video under the name Thunder in Paradise 2. That film brought Hogan, Gigante, Beefcake, and Hart and also added Fred “Tugboat” Ottman to the mix.

There was also a Thunder in Paradise 3 which was another VHS release of a two-part episode of the show stitched together. It does not have enough wrestlers in it to qualify as an answer to this question, but I still had to mention it since Terry Taylor appears in a role listed in IMDB as only “photoshoot admirer,” which for some reason I find hilarious.

There are also plenty of movies that have lots of wrestlers in them because they have wrestling scenes, even if the films aren’t movies about wrestling overall. Included here would be 1984’s Micki & Maude starring Dudley Moore, 1986 fantasy movie Highlander, the 1993 Hulk Hogan classic Mr. Nanny, and 2003’s Head of State starring Chris Rock.

Rahil is pouring one out for the working man:

Has anyone ever wrestled seven days a week?

Yes. In fact, in the territorial era of wrestling, a lot of guys would have wrestled seven days a week, sometimes twice on Saturdays or Sundays.

As one example, I looked back over the match records of Hulk Hogan, and he wrestled every night of the week beginning May 24, 1981 on a tour of New Japan Pro Wrestling.

On Sunday, May 24, he was in six man tag action with Chris Adams and Stan Hansen in a losing effort to Antonio Inoki, Kengo Kimura, and Riki Choshu. Monday, May 25 was Dusty Rhodes defeating Hogan by count out. Tuesday, May 26 was a no contest in a tag match with Rhodes and Inoki against Hogan and Hansen. Wednesday, May 27, saw Hogan get a singles victory against Tatsumi Fujinami. Thursday, May 28, was another win for Hogan, this time over Choshu. Friday, May 29 was a tag again, as Rhodes and Bob Backlund wrestled to a double count out with Hogan and Hansen. To close out the week on Saturday, May 30, Hogan got a disqualification victory in his match against Tiger Jeet Singh.

It’s also worth nothing that, as part of this tour, Hogan worked on several more consecutive days than just the one calendar week that I focused on because of how the question was structured. The Hulkster’s run of consecutive matches started on May 20 and continued through June 5. In fact, the last match of the series on June 5 was back in the United States, as Hogan beat Mike Masters in Los Angeles that day, after wrestling in Japan on June 4, beating Choshu again.

Tyler from Winnipeg gets me to state the obvious:

In five words, describe Bad Bunny in WWE.

Puerto Rican rapper turned wrestler.

Jase‘s personal effects were shipped to him by Mark Carano in a trash bag:

What are your personal thoughts on the recently released WWE talent?

I never really saw enough of the NXT guys who were cut to form an opinion about them, so we’ll set those aside for purposes of this answer.

For the last couple of years, every time somebody wrote into the column and asked me who I would cut from WWE if I had to, my first answer was the Wyatt Six. I enjoyed Bray Wyatt’s character when he first came in and had a southern gothic vibe, but once he was turned into a supernatural character and started doing his shallow-but-pretending-to-be-deep Firefly Funhouse schtick, I lost all interest in him. The same is true of this stable that was put together in his image. I did not see any redeeming qualities in any of the male members, though I have always been a huge fan of Nikki Cross and am a bit sad she never got larger opportunities in WWE.

On the complete opposite side of the coin, I’ve always been an advocate of Apollo Crews going back to when he was Uhaa Nation pre-WWE. He had some difficulty with injuries, but I always felt that he was a great in-ring performer who was never put into a position to connect with the crowd as well as he could have. He previously did a lot of work in Japan for Dragon Gate, and I wonder if now he might be a good fit for New Japan, perhaps getting a look through his old DG stablemate Shingo Takagi.

There was far more that the company could have done with Kairi Sane, particularly given that she was cut mid-storyline. She is light years better than many women the company retained, so this one really left me scratching my head.

I’ve loved the Motor City Machine Guns for almost 20 years now. I love the fact that they finally got to compete on wrestling’s biggest stage and love that they got to hold WWE tag team gold. That being said, I don’t know why you hire a couple of talented veterans and cut them after less than two years when they did everything that the promotion could have hoped for. They could have been utilized well in a “player-coach” role for talent just out of developmental.

I was totally indifferent to Zoey Stark and Alba Fire. I’ve seen a hundred better female wrestlers than the two of them, and I’ve seen a hundred worse. They were just sort of fodder for the midcard of that division, and periodically you have to turn that fodder over to prevent things from getting stale. I’m not offended that they were let go.

Aleister Black and Santos Escobar were both signed, left the company, and re-signed, and I’m scratching my head as to why the company bothered to re-sign them if the game plan was to do as little with them as WWE did. As to Zelina Vega, I thought pairing her with Black could have revitalized her well but, if you weren’t going to do that, it did seem as though she’d run her course with the company.

Nick is putting his best foot forward:

What do you think was the biggest botched debut that may or may not have been the wrestler’s fault? For example, I’d go with Asuka on the main roster WWE in 2017. On her PLE debut, they had her going toe to toe with Emma when it should have been a glorified squash. Thankfully, she overcame it.

I feel like this is a cliched answer, but it genuinely is perhaps the worst debut in pro wrestling history:

The Shockmaster.

Ignacio has gone to the well one too many times:

Is there any moment where Hulk Hogan performed a top rope move? A splash, an elbow drop, anything?

Yes, he famously superplexed the Big Boss Man during their Saturday Night’s Main Event steel cage match and many of their house show bouts that occurred around the same period of time.

Nick is toughing it out:

I once read that Bill Watts said if a wrestler got into a fight with a “normal” person back in the day and lost, they were fired from whatever wrestling promotion that they were working in. My question to you is, has that ever happened before?

At a 1997 banquet honoring the late Eddie Gilbert, footage of which has found its way online, Bill Watts himself states that he fired Bob Orton Jr. for losing a bar fight. Though Orton was reportedly attacked by several people and thus didn’t have a realistic shot at winning the brawl, Watts let him go anyway because he didn’t have any bruising on his knuckles, which Watts claimed was evidence that the Cowboy did not fight back as strongly as he should have.

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.