Ask 411 Wrestling: Could Oba Femi Win The WWE Royal Rumble This Year?

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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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Tyler from Winnipeg is havin’ nothin’ but a good time:

Was Shawn Michaels named after Brett Michaels from the band Poison?

No.

Shawn Michaels was using that name at the very beginning of his career in 1984. Though Poison formed in 1983, they didn’t really break out and become popular nationally until 1986 when they released their first studio album, so Shawn almost assuredly would not have known who Bret Michaels was when he was picking out his ring name, particularly since Poison was based out of Pennsylvania originally and later moved to LA, while Michaels was growing up and training in Texas.

Shawn Michaels’ full legal name is Michael Shawn Hickenbottom, though he always went by Shawn starting in his childhood. “Michaels” is just derived from his given first name.

Matt B is taking it to the him:

Do you think if they hadn’t come up with the ECW one night stand concept, i.e. either didn’t do it or just launched ECW without the reunion PPVs – that RVD would ever have been WWE champion? It seemed like the heat for him had dipped from when he come over in 2001.

Can you think of any other times someone became a single issue champion? Not to get them or general WWE over but purely to market a side venture of the company and the person was never WWE champion again.

No, I don’t think that Rob Van Dam ever would have become WWE Champion without One Night Stand. RVD came into the company super-hot in 2001 and was believable in the ring with that year’s main eventers, including Kurt Angle, Steve Austin, and the Rock. However, by 2005 when the first ONS came around, the company had cooled him off significantly, even putting aside the injury that kept him out of action for most of that year.

Had it not been for the extra wind that the ECW nostalgia and revival put at his back, I think he would have spent the rest of his career hanging out at a Tito Santana or Dolph Ziggler level, where he was always the bridesmaid but never the bride.

On the subject of other “single issue champions,” Jinder Mahal immediately came to my mind, as the story is that he was made champion solely to help WWE’s expansion into India and not because he was the best guy for the job on any other measure.

You also have the case of David Arquette, who I strongly suspect would not have been the WCW World Heavyweight Champion had the company not wanted to promote the movie Ready to Rumble, in which Arquette starred.

And that’s about the only parallel you can draw between RVD and Arquette’s world championship reigns.

Jonf2d, Not in Australia or Winnipeg chartered a private flight here:

“Anything can happen in WWE” has always been far more of an empty cliche than anything resembling reality. Shoot- we still talk about 1, 2, 3, Kid beating Razor Ramon 20 years later.

But what about this: how about a truly shocking winner of the men’s royal rumble? A debuting Oba Femi, a midcarder, someone from TNA or NXT? A shocking returning or retired star?

Could you see this actually happening in Triple H’s WWE? If so, who would you choose and how would it play out?

First off, Razor versus the Kid wasn’t twenty years ago. It was over THIRTY years and one Sean Waltman porno ago. If that doesn’t make you crumble into a pile of dust, I don’t know what will.

I would argue that we did get a truly shocking Royal Rumble winner a few years ago when Shinsuke Nakamura won the match in 2018. He was less than a year out of NXT at the time and, though he was protected to a degree, he didn’t feel like a star in his own right on the main roster and was instead the babyface who teamed up with the “real” stars when they needed a partner for a tag match. Heck, in his last major feud before winning the Rumble, he was a punching bag for JINDER MAHAL of all people, who I’ve already cited in this column as one of the weaker world champions in recent memory.

Nakamura winning in 2018 felt a lot like Aleister Black winning would feel in 2026. No, he’s not a job guy by any stretch of the imagination, but you also get the sense based on his booking that the promotion feels like he’s just a guy on the roster as opposed to a Wrestlemania main eventer.

Given that we’re now in a world where Triple H is even more in control than he was eight years ago, I imagine that this sort of thing becomes more likely and not less.

Last time Bryan wrote in, I accused him of being under the influence, but he appears to be doing better today:

Do you know exactly why and when they started having people who competed in individual matches during the Royal Rumble ALSO in the Rumble itself? From a kayfabe sports view isn’t it unfair? The year of the Luger-Bret hart tie finish, Bret had a tag match with Owen where he got injured and Owen turned on him. If he’s injured, how are we supposed to believe him winning the rumble?

In the early days, nobody was in the Rumble match if they wrestled elsewhere on the card. The first person to pull double duty on one of these shows was Roddy Piper, who in 1992 defeated the Mountie to become Intercontinental Champion and then came back for the Rumble match. At least you could somewhat justify that one, because the Mountie match was a five-minute near-squash.

Though it started in 1992, the phenomenon did not occur again in 1993. However, it hit once more in 1994, where Tatanka, Bam Bam Bigelow, Bret Hart, and Owen Hart all wrestled in two matches on the same night, with Bret co-winning the Rumble despite a supposed injury as Bryan notes.

1995 and 1996 are clear of repeats, but then things just go off the rails in 1997 when everybody on the undercard except for the Undertaker and the lucahdors were also in the Rumble.

From that point onward, all bets were off in terms of competing in both the Rumble and another match on the show. Interestingly, even though the company had a really thin roster from 1993 to 1995, they didn’t use as many repeats then as they would come to in the later 90s and the 00s when they had significantly more bodies under contract.

Ultimately, I think that the whole thing comes down to the erosion of kayfabe and wanting to make the Rumble match as exciting as it can be. If you’ve got a big star whose story necessitates that you put him in a singles or tag match on the pay per view, you don’t want to miss the pop that he can get when he comes out again later for a big rumble entrance. However, I 100% agree with Bryan that this makes zero sense if you’re trying to portray wrestling as a legitimate sport, because it’s not like high level MMA fighters have a match on pay per view and then decide they’re going to come back and fight again just half an hour later, unless it’s a situation like a tournament where both competitors in the later fight will typically have had the same number of matches earlier in the evening.

If I were king of the world, there would be no repeat performer on Royal Rumbles, but I probably lean a bit too old school in my philosophies.

(And, before anybody says it, yes there were tons of shows, particularly in the territorial days, that featured a series of singles matches followed by a battle royale with repeat performers in the main event, but in those battles royale the competitors were typically only guys who had wrestled earlier in the evening, making it more akin to my MMA tournament example above.)

We’ve answered some Royal Rumble questions, so let’s switch to War Games with APinOZ:

Since the first War Games match in the NWA in 1987, to the end of WCW in 2001, was there ever one occasion in those matches that the babyface team won the coin toss and got the extra man’s advantage? I’m assuming War Games was never done as a regular house show event but was saved for major shows and PPVs?

Yeah, the heels always won the coin toss during that period, because THAT’S WHAT MAKES THE MATCH WORK. Just like tag team matches shouldn’t feature the face team getting heat on the heel and the heel ultimately making the hot tag, face teams should not win the coin toss in War Games.

Regarding War Games being saved for major shows, that depends on your definition of “major show.”

From 1992 through 1998, War Games was exclusively on pay per view, so that’s easy enough.

In the year 2000, there was a match called “War Games 2000” on the September 4 episode of Monday Nitro, but it was really just War Games in name only as the rules were completely different, so I wouldn’t count that here.

The ambiguity as to major shows, then, comes from 1987 through 1991. All but two War Games matches during that time were during the Great American Bash. Some later WCW fans may know the Great American Bash as a pay per view, but when it was first created it was actually a summer tour of live events. In 1987 and 1989 there were two War Games matches each on the Bash shows. In 1988, there were eleven War Games matches on the tour, and, in 1991, there were four.

Do you want to consider these major shows? They would have been mostly considered house shows, but they were house shows that were more heavily promoted than usual. So, you could probably argue it either way.

Separate and apart from the Great American Bash, there were two War Games matches on house shows, the first being on August 16, 1987 at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago and the second on November 25, 1987 in New York’s Nassau Coliseum. Again, those were house shows, but they were house shows that were in major markets outside of the promotion’s historic territory, so you can see why they wanted to do something a bit different.

In that same period, how many times did the heel team win the match? Also, apart from Wrestlewar ’91, did the Horsemen ever win a War Games match? Speaking of Wrestlewar ’91, up till then, all War Games events were 5 vs 5. Was there a specific reason why the Wrestlewar match was 4 vs 4?

I was only able to find four heel victories in War Games, the first of which was the 1991 Wrestlewar bout mentioned by AP – and, in fact, that was the only Horsemen victory in the history of the bout. The heels also won in 1996 and 1997, with both of those being victories by nWo teams. Finally, if you want to count the aforementioned War Games 2000, the heel “team” did win that, even though it came off a lot more like a singles match than it did a team versus team bout, because the whole point was to capture the WCW Heavyweight Championship belt, with the man who left the cage with it becoming the champ.

Regarding the Wrestlewar ’91 match being four-on-four, it’s likely because there was no real purpose served by adding a fifth person to the Horsemen team that year. If you look at most of the War Games matches prior to that date, the main reason for the fifth man was to get J.J. Dillon – the Horsemen’s manager – into the ring so that faces could give him a bit of comeuppance. In 1991, you didn’t have that factor at play, and they weren’t going to add a man to the team just for the sake of adding a man to the team. (Yes, Arn Anderson was at ringside for the heels during the match, but he was injured and totally unable to compete.)

Promotional consideration is paid for by A Different Ryan:

Wrestling is crazy in that matches almost never end during a commercial break (for obvious reasons). However, I can think of two: Jannetty and Michaels on Raw back in ’93 and Orange Cassidy on Dynamite in 2019 or 2020 (though that happened during a picture-in-picture break so you could still see it). Am I missing any?

In another 1993 Raw match, Mr. Perfect pinned “The Model” Rick Martel with a Perfect-plex during the commercial break. The bout was on the March 8, 1993 episode of the show and was likely booked the way it was to promote the “unpredictable” nature of Raw as a “live” show.

As part of the build to ECW One Night Stand in 2005, Chris Benoit was booked against Gene Snitsky in an “ECW Rules” match on Monday Night Raw from St. Louis. The Dudley Boys interfered on Benoit’s behalf and put Snitsky through a table with the 3D, and the show went to commercial with security chasing the Dudleys out of the building. Upon returning from the break, Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler threw to a reply of Benoit pinning Snitsky with a diving headbutt during the commercial. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect the show was put together this way because they wanted to go to break on the high point of the Dudley run-in, which was a bigger story than the actual finish of the match.

On the June 30, 2014 edition of Raw held in Hartford, Connecticut, Kofi Kingston pinned Antonio Cesaro during a commercial break. This was during a time when the company was heavily pushing the fact that you could continue to watch Raw on the WWE App during television ad breaks, similar to what AEW was doing with picture-in-picture at the time referenced in the question.

Similarly, on the August 4, 2014 episode of Monday Night Raw, Alexander Rusev defeated Sin Cara (the Hunico version, not the original) in the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas. The match both started AND finished during a commercial break after Rusev made his entrance on television.

Donny from Allentown PA is carrying this column:

I was just wondering in your opinion who are some examples of one man tag teams. One man tag teams meaning that one partner was the complete star with the other partner really with not much to offer.

It didn’t happen often, but occasionally Andre the Giant and SD Jones would team up, and you always wondered exactly what SD was supposed to be bringing to the table in that situation.

Ignacio has gotten into the good stuff:

What do you think about my idea?

An independent promotion books a Royal Rumble. Participants, Blue Kane, Gayne, Candy Kane, CoKane and Doc Gallows, With Stevie Ray as referee. Then, last entrant. The freaking GLEnN JACOBS himself. Enters the match and eliminate everyone. Thoughts?

Almost a year ago, Ignacio wrote in with a question about various indy Kane variants. So, if you have no idea what he’s talking about, you can click the link to learn more.

Now, he’s back for more.

The answer is that your idea would never work, because WWE already sent a cease and desist letter to Blue Kane, forcing him to change his name to Blue Pain. If WWE sees these gimmicks as violations of their intellectual property, I have a hard time seeing Glenn Jacobs participating in it, because he’s still on friendly terms with the company.

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.