Ask 411 Wrestling: Could Steiner Take Lesnar in a Shoot?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals to Ask 411 Wrestling, everybody’s favorite wrestling column written by a guy who doesn’t really watch that much wrestling anymore.

We’re now about halfway into October, meaning we’ve got two more columns left in the month. Wouldn’t it be great if folks sent in a bunch of questions about some of the spoooooookier aspects of pro wrestling so that I could run a special, Halloween-themed column? I think that would be pretty need. If that sounds like something you’d like to participate in, feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected]

While you mull that over, let’s get to this week’s questions!

Bryan wants to tell us the story of two brothers, Rick and Scott:

Do you think either one of the Steiner brothers in their prime would have been a good opponent against Brock Lesnar? Do you think it would have gotten good matches and do you think either of them could beat him in a legit shoot, in their primes?

Throughout his career, there have been two types of match that Brock Lesnar excels in. His first specialty is matches in which his opponent has an amateur background and can go to the mat with him. His second specialty is matches in which his opponent is willing to hit him as hard as he hits them and throw him around with as much reckless abandon as he throws them.

Both Steiner brothers, Rick and Scott, were strong collegiate wrestlers, neither one of them has ever shied away from throwing out a stiff shot, and they’re both freakishly strong and capable of putting their opponents anywhere in the ring that they like.

In other words, the brothers check just about every box necessary to be perfect opponents for Brock, assuming that we’re talking about Rick and Scott’s athletic primes. I would’ve loved to see them in the ring together.

(As an aside, I did some searching to see if there WAS some obscure Steiner versus Lesnar match, even something as limited as being on opposite sides of a tag team encounter, that I just wasn’t thinking of. I couldn’t come up with any, despite Scott and Brock being on the WWE roster at the same time in the early 2000s.)

So we’ve discussed the working side of things . . . now what about a shoot?

First off, let me just say that all three men are terrifying and could probably kill me just by looking at me hard enough, so everything I’m getting ready to say should in no way be considered a criticism of them.

Further disclaimer: Anything can happen in a legitimate fight and there is almost always the chance of an unexpected result.

However, if I were a betting man, I would take prime Brock Lesnar over prime Scott Steiner or prime Rick Steiner in a shoot most days of the week.

The Steiner brothers were both high-level amateur wrestlers in college, particularly Scott, who was the second best wrestler in his weight class in the Big 10 for three years running and finished as high as sixth in the nation during his career. (Rick, though a strong performer in the Big 10, never did as well at a national level.) However, Lesnar’s collegiate wrestling accomplishments were significantly greater, as we all know that he was an NCAA champion in the heavyweight division.

Also, I would think that in terms of shoot fighting, Lensar’s prime would have to be considered somewhere during the peak of his UFC career, meaning that he would have significant formal training in other disciplines as well. Though I have no doubt that the Steiners were both taught how to take care of themselves pretty well as part of their old school wrestling training, I don’t know if that would translate to taking down someone who has training as a high level professional fighter.

So, in a battle between Lesnar and either Steiner, I would always bet on Brock.

HBK’s Smile (We found him!) has a princely question:

With speculation about what the Saudi Prince wants to see on the upcoming Saudi shows and that reportedly affecting booking, has there ever been an outsider who exerted influence over the direction of a product? Not like the creation of the fake Razor & Diesel to combat Hall & Nash’s presence in WCW, but actually directly influencing creative and/or affecting title changes and the like?

First off, I don’t know if I would actually consider the Saudi prince to be an “outsider.” He’s not a WWE employee or executive, to be sure, but his family/government (they’re basically one and the same) are pouring ridiculous amounts of money into these shows, and I don’t know if I would call the people who are financing a wrestling card outsiders.

That being said, there are examples of individuals in similar positions who exerted influence over a wrestling promotion’s creative direction. One of my favorite examples of this is famous music producer Rick Rubin, who in the early 1990s was providing financial backing for Jim Cornette’s Smoky Mountain Wrestling. (No, seriously.) Rubin was a long-term wrestling fan, and, in some of the older promotions that he had watched, there had been wrestlers who did mummy gimmicks.

Yes, you read that correctly: Mummy gimmicks.

Apparently Rubin was a fan of the wrestling mummies of yore, and he suggested to Cornette that SMW ought to have a mummy on its roster. As everybody knows, Jimmy is a wrestling purist, but wrestling purists still have to have roofs over their heads and Dairy Queen hamburgers in their station wagons, so Cornette created a wrestling mummy to please his backer. That mummy’s name was Prince Kharis.

To be fair to Cornette, he tried to promote the Kharis gimmick in the most logical way possible, with the announcers putting him over as a guy who was playing a mummy and not an ACTUAL mummy, and they portrayed Kharis’s manager Darryl Van Horne (a.k.a. “Sinister Minister” James Mitchell) as being a total whack job.

Another example of “outsiders” controlling a wrestling promotion’s product that I can think of also relates to Jim Cornette. Almost anybody reading this will recall that, in the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s, Cornette and Danny Davis owned and operated Ohio Valley Wrestling, which was a developmental territory to the WWF. What some people fail to realize is that OVW was not a wholly owned subsidiary of the WWF/WWE like other developmental territories (e.g. NXT, Deep South Wrestling) have been. It truly was an independently owned and operated wrestling promotion that just happened to have an affiliation with the WWF.

The unique relationship between OVW and WWF caused some problems. One of the big ones was that OVW was not allowed to do anything in their booking that would contradict what was going on on WWF television, since just about every fan who was watching OVW was also watching the WWF. This created a variety of uncomfortable booking circumstances for Cornette, including one particularly infamous situation in which the Fed took Doug Basham and the Damaja, OVW’s two top stars who were in a blood feud, and introducing them on WWF television as the Basham Brothers tag team. This required the OVW booking team to do some quick mental gymnastics to explain why these two guys who had been beating the hell out of each other on their shows for months were now working together.

For reasons that I don’t fully understand, Kane is having a bit of a career revival, so here is a question about him from Michael K.:

What were your thoughts when Kane finally unmasked? They always portrayed him as severally burned and disfigured so I expected something somewhat shocking. Instead we got some reasonably normal looking guy with a bad haircut that was shaved bald by the next week anyhow. I thought it was underwhelming. Or did they paint themselves into such a corner with the whole burning angle that they couldn’t do any better? If so, why even take the mask off?

I actually think that it made sense for them to take the mask off at the time that they did, because the Kane character had gone on virtually unchanged for years, and it was due for a bit of a refresh. (After all, you don’t want him winding up like his former tag team partner X-Pac did.) If you go back and watch the television from immediately after the unmasking, WWE’s creative team actually did a GREAT job of building him up as an unstoppable, dangerous monster, and it could have been the basis for an awesome heel run if not for the fact that they immediately killed all of his momentum by having him go toe-to-toe with Shane “Dad Bod” McMahon, a guy that by all rights Kane should have been able to crush in 2.5 seconds flat.

As far as the backstory with the burns is concerned, I don’t think that there was a cost-effective way to make him look burned that would also hold up in the ring on a week-to-week basis. Thus, if they were going to unmask him, they almost had to find a way to walk back the storyline about the scarring. Frankly, I didn’t mind how they chose to address it. Kane had always been portrayed as a mentally unbalanced character, and, if anything, he was portrayed as being even more unbalanced once he exposed his face. If somebody is that unchained, I don’t think it’s a stretch for the audience to believe that he saw himself as being hideously disfigured even when he actually was not.

All-in-all, I guess that I was OK with how the Kane unmasking was handled, though, again, they chose the absolute worst possible person for him to have his first major feud with.

Richard is never last picked and has a cheerleader chick:

The IWC doesn’t think WWE listens to the fans but apart from live reaction and IWC chatter, what other factors do WWE place their feedback on? Is it merchandise, fan polls? I presume these must be more valued as otherwise why push “perceived” disliked wrestlers. It can’t just be stubborn out of touch Vince?

There are a variety of metrics that can be considered.

First off, in terms of audience reaction, you have to realize that sometimes the fans who show up at television tapings and pay per view are significantly different than the fans who show up at house shows. Typically house show audiences consist of more families and children as opposed to jaded older fans, and house shows are often held in more rural, less populated markets that would never get television tapings. These different audiences, not surprisingly, have different reactions to the same wrestler. So, in terms of the “live reaction” metric, you have to consider both live reactions on TV /PPV and reactions on house shows.

Speaking of house shows, another metric to consider is how well house shows draw when one performer is promoted as being on top of the show versus another performer being promoted on top of the show. If one guy consistently draws better live houses than another guy, then he is probably more popular. Unfortunately, this measure of popularity has probably become less effective over time, because WWE has done less and less to promote that specific matches or specific stars will be on their non-televised events.

Television ratings also play a role. Though typically on wrestling news websites we only see an overall rating for a show (or perhaps hour-by-hour ratings for Raw), WWE and other content producers actually have access to quarter-hour ratings and even minute by minute ratings. Thus, WWE can track which wrestlers’ segments correlate with people turning off the show or sticking with the show. One popular example of this is Eddie Guerrero and Rey Misterio, Jr.’s feud against each other in the mid-2000s, during which their segments were always significantly higher-rated than any other segment on a given episode of Smackdown due to increased Latino viewership.

One final factor that I haven’t read much about but I am sure has to be a consideration is the WWE Network. As with house shows, you can’t necessarily figure out what specific matches or stars caused somebody to subscribe to the Network in the first place, but WWE can get some pretty precise figures about show frequently certain shows and archived material are accessed through the platform. If a wrestler is in a key position on a show and it generates more streams on the Network, chances are good that person will be perceived as a bigger star. The same was true of fans buying pay per view events during that era.

Richard U. (who is not the same Richard as the Richard who asked the question above) has a pretty easy one, all things considered:

What do I have to do to see WALTER vs Jeff Cobb?

This match will actually be main eventing Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s “Smokey and Bandido” show, which will take place on October 19, 2018 at the Globe Theater in Los Angeles. As of the time that I’m writing this (which is about two weeks out from the show), PWG’s website says that there are still some $80 standing room tickets available, which you can buy here.

If you can’t make the trip out to LA on this short of notice, most of PWG’s shows are released on DVD and Blu-Ray through Highspots, and I assume Smokey and the Bandido will wind up there as well.

If you need something to tide yourself over, you can see a tag team match pitting Cobb and Matt Riddle against Walter and Timothy Thatcher on PWG’s Mystery Vortex V show from January of this year, which is currently out on DVD.

Cobb and Walter did have one more singles match, which took place in Germany’s Westside Xtreme Wrestling (wXw) on March 11, 2017 as part of a shoot-style tournament called AMBITION 8. The full show can be downloaded through Highspots’ video on demand service, though the Walter/Cobb match is only about three minutes long.

That’s it. That’s how you see Walter versus Jeff Cobb.

And you can see more of this column by coming right back to this little ole’ website in one week’s time. Plus, be sure to send your questions in to [email protected], as they are the life blood of what we do here.