wrestling / Columns

Ask 411 Wrestling: Did Flair/Steamboat Happen in the WWF?

July 8, 2018 | Posted by Ryan Byers
Flair WWF NWA Chi-Town Rumble 1989

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals to Ask 411 Wrestling, where we may not be the best wrestling column on the internet but we certainly have the most fun.

If you’d like to help create the content for this column, shoot your questions over to [email protected].

Dylan wants to talk about one of the greatest in-ring feuds of all time:

Did Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat ever wrestle each other in WWF/WWE? And if they didn’t, was there ever a time when it would have been possible (i.e. they were both active in the roster at same time). If it was possible and they didn’t, why do you think that was?

In the same vein, what other highly-regarded feuds/matches from other companies could have been (or still are) possible in WWE but never happened (or haven’t yet, but still could).
The first one that springs to mind for me is Samoa Joe vs Kurt Angle.

No, Ric Flair vs. Ricky Steamboat never happened in the WWF or WWE. There’s not even a match that even somewhat qualifies, as they were never even in a tag match, battle royale, or the like while in the Fed.

Could the showdown between the two rivals have happened under Vince McMahon’s watch? The answer is yes, but the window was very small.

Though Flair did appear as a special attraction on some WWWF Madison Square Garden shows in the 1970s and though he did have some WWWF vs. NWA Champion matches with Bob Backlund, most fans know that the Nature Boy was never full-time with the WWF until the fall of 1991. His first match of that run appears to have been a September 10, 1991 bout against Jim Powers on a house show in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Ricky Steamboat was part of the WWF roster for part of 1991, wrestling exclusively under the name “The Dragon.” That run began on March 11 with a match against Skinner taped for WWF Superstars in Pensacola, Florida and wrapped up seven months later on October 20 in Saginaw, Michigan, also against Skinner.

So, there was a period of about 40 days between September 10, 1991 and October 20, 1991 during which Flair and Steamboat overlapped on the WWF roster and potentially could have revived their feud. However, it seems unlikely that this ever would have been in the cards, as the Dragon was not a particularly well-pushed wrestler at the time and Flair was almost immediately in the WWF Title mix.

Steamboat did return to the ring in 2009 for a feud with Chris Jericho, including matches at that year’s Wrestlemania and Backlash shows. This run kicked off at Mania on April 5, 2009. Steamboat also hung around for a little while after that and was a house show opponent for Drew McIntyre and Sheamus; in addition to working a tag match with his son Richie in Puerto Rico. The last of those matches was on August 15, 2009.

During the time of Steamboat’s comeback, Flair was under a WWF contract until June 2, 2009, though he had been retired by Shawn Michaels on the prior year’s Wrestlemania. This means that WWE technically could have booked a Flair/Steamboat legends match between April 5 and June 2, 2009, though it seems unlikely that the company would consider doing so given the recency of what was supposed to have been Flair’s final match.

As an aside, there are five promotions that Flair/Steamboat ever occurred in as near as I can tell: Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling (a.k.a. Jim Crockett Promotions), WCW, Maple Leaf Wrestling (the NWA affiliate in Toronto), All Japan Pro Wrestling (a one-off match on June 4, 1982), and Pro Wrestling USA (a short-lived attempt by the AWA and various NWA promoters to team up against Vince McMahon).

Moving on to the second half of Dylan’s question, there are a few examples of significant feuds that could be reborn in new promotions:

1. AJ Styles and Samoa Joe could reignite their rivalry from TNA in WWE, though to really make things special they should probably also sign Christopher Daniels.

2. Daniel Bryan and Brian Kendrick trained together and were regular opponents early in their careers, and they could theoretically clash in WWE today despite being on separate brands at the moment.

3. In 2013, La Sombra and Shinsuke Nakamura traded New Japan’s IWGP Intercontinental Title between each other. Sombra has now unmasked as Andrade Almas, and the two could face each other on Smackdown.

4. Similarly, Karl Anderson faced Nakamura several times for the IWGP IC strap in New Japan, and the two now find themselves in WWE together.

5. Bobby Roode and Eric Young, former Team Canada stablemates and later rivals in TNA, could now compete in WWE (though it may be a stretch to call their TNA feud “well-regarded”).

That’s what I could come up with. If there are any additions to the list feel free to call them out in the comments section.

Michael K.‘s question will shock us, because it is about the SHOCK . . . . MASTER!

We all know about the Shockmaster debacle. After he fell, do you think his career is WCW was salvageable? I think they could’ve used this to their advantage and made him a monster heel who destroyed opponents because he was sick of being treated like a joke. Maybe turn on Sting even at WarGames during his debut match. Or was he just done after he fell regardless of how they spun it?

I don’t think it was salvageable to be honest with you, and it wasn’t salvageable because, even though everything I’ve read about him behind the scenes makes him sound like a nice guy, Fred Ottman wasn’t a particularly good professional wrestler, nor was he a standout promo, nor was he particularly charismatic. He lacked the skills to help him overcome his shoddy debut. It probably didn’t help Ottman’s case that Vader was on the roster at the same time, which made Shocky look all the worse by comparison.

Also, they did attempt to salvage his career post-fall, and it didn’t work. Immediately following the incident, the Shockmaster was remade into a klutzy babyface who was also referred to as “Uncle Fred,” but, after several months, Ottman was repackaged as the masked “Super Shockmaster,” who the announcers speculated was a completely different wrestler than the original Shockmaster. He continued to flounder after being repackaged and was out of the company by February 1994, less than six months after he debuted.

Here’s another Michael K. question that is related to the one above, though he may not realize it:

Why did the Nasty Boys always get pushed? They really, really, really sucked. I know Knobbs (I think) is buddies with Hogan, but I assumed this friendship was down the road. Or where they friends longer and that’s why they always got a push?

I think that you’re underrating the Nasty Boys somewhat. They weren’t technical virtuosos, but they could have pretty decent brawls when they were called upon to do so, particularly in a no disqualification environment. Go look up their WCW matches against the team of Cactus Jack and Maxx Payne (and later Kevin Sullivan) if you want examples. However, when the Nasties had to work in the more family-friendly environment of the WWF, they weren’t quite as impressive . . . and they obviously slowed down quite a bit when they got older and injuries started to mount.

You are correct that part of the reason that the Nasties got a lot of breaks was a friendship between Brian Knobs and Hulk Hogan. Knobs popped up pretty much everywhere that Hogan did in the 1990s and beyond: Thunder in Paradise, WCW Nitro, the XWF, the Hogan/Bischoff era of TNA, the Hulkamania tour of Australia, and even Hogan Knows Best.

However, there is one other important connection that the Nasty Boys have which you may not be aware of. The other half of the team, Jerry Sags, is Dusty Rhodes’ brother-in-law and has been since 1982, when he married Dusty’s sister Laura. This likely also would have helped the duo get some breaks throughout their career.

Lost member of the Orton family Aaron O. has a question:

I had a strange question for you. Oftentimes I watch random shows on the Network, and I stumbled on some shows from 2001 WCW, just before it ended. The Magnificent Seven were a stable then, and they were being attacked by a mystery person off-camera. Any idea on who that was supposed to be if they hadn’t been bought?</b

This is one of the few questions that has been sent in that actually has me a bit stumped.

The angle never concluded, so we don’t KNOW the answer. I’ve been to the typical resources regarding backstage gossip on who this might have been, including the Observer newsletter archives, but nobody was focusing in on the story because the mystery attacker angle didn’t begin until March 2001, by which point it was well known that WCW was either being sold or going out of business altogether, which pretty much consumed all of the news coverage coming out of the company.

If I were going to take an educated guess as to the identity of the attacker, it was most likely Goldberg. The big man had been out of action since January’s Sin pay per view, when he was beaten by Buff Bagwell and Lex Luger in a match that supposedly had Goldberg’s career on the line. (In reality, he needed shoulder surgery.) Goldberg returning as a conquering babyface to take out the Magnificent Seven, which included Luger and Bagwell as members, would have been a logical storyline – and you even could have undone the retirement stipulation by claiming that the new owners of WCW reinstated him.

Brillbo Baggins will teach us the tale of the tape:

Why does Kazuchika Okada have his wrists taped up with red tape on one and purple tape on the other? There may be no significance but it would be good if you knew.

I have never read anything about Okada assigning any particular importance to his wrist tape.

However, in Japanese culture (as in many other cultures), purple is a color that is often associated with royalty or the wealthy, while red is a color that is often associated with the sun and/or heroic figures. So, even if it was never a conscious thought, it could be that subconsciously somebody thought that the purple and red color combination worked well with Okada’s character, a wealthy playboy who also demonstrates a substantial amount of guts and courage in the ring.

DavidSpadeASpade (if that is his real name) wonders whether something was real on an angle:

While watching OSW review One Night Stand 2006 they touched upon Kurt Angle and his match with Eugene at Summerslam. Angle was definitely heavy handed at the start of the match from the clips shown, how did this go down backstage? Was there previous heat between Angle and Dinmore or was this Angle’s dislike of the gimmick spilling over?

There doesn’t appear to have been any ill will between the two men for any reason whatsoever.

Was the Summerslam encounter between the two men a little bit more rough than usual? Yes, it was. However, that probably had less to do with heat between the two men and more to do with how the company was attempting to position Angle. At this point in his career, our Olympic hero really hadn’t been doing much. After his Wrestlemania bout with Shawn Michaels and a couple of rematches, he really just floated around the midcard doing Angle Invitational matches and other relatively meaningless bouts. In fact, he lost his gold medals to Eugene in one of those invitationals.

However, on the night after Summerslam 2005, Angle was named the number one contender to John Cena’s WWE Championship and would go on to have a feud with the champ that would last over four months. Most likely, Angle’s utter decimation of Eugene to win his medals back at Summerslam was an effort to reboot his character and remind fans how dangerous he could be before he was elevated back up into the main event scene.

Though it covers the earlier match in which Eugene won the medals and not the Summerslam rematch, Nick Dinsmore (the man who played Eugene) seems to confirm that theory in the video below, in which he states that the Eugene/Angle feud was meant to get heat on Angle headed into the Cena feud and that, though Angle was always snug in the ring, he never actually hurt him:

We’ll let Richard U. have the last word:

Why are the Sheepherders loved but the Bushwhackers hated?

The answer is that, even though the Sheepherders and Bushwhackers are two tag teams comprised of the same two men (cousins Luke Williams and Butch Miller), the two teams had remarkably different gimmicks and wrestling styles.

The Sheepherders were a violent, blood and guts tag team who had a lot of excellent matches against the likes of the Fantastics, the Hart brothers, and the Fabulous Ones. They were excellent brawlers, and, before they cut off all of their hair, you could almost mistake them for a pair of twin Terry Funks. They were huge in territories throughout the United States, including Memphis, Mid-South, and Puerto Rico, spilling gallons of blood (both their opponents’ and their own) and competing in an insane number of barbed wire matches.

However, by 1989, the duo had started to slow down. They Miller was 45, Williams was 42, and both men had been wrestling almost nonstop since the 1960s. They got an offer to join the WWF and decided that this transition would also involve an overhaul of their gimmicks. Instead of ripping open other wrestlers’ foreheads and beating men down, they started licking each other and hugging children. They turned into a comedy act, and the number of good matches that they had in the WWF was . . . well . . . let’s just say that I can’t remember a single good match that they had in the WWF.

Though there were plenty of fans in the WWF, particularly young fans, who enjoyed the Whackers goofball antics and happily look upon the team with nostalgia now, the DNA of popular opinion in the internet wrestling community was written by an older group of fans who, in the early 1990s, congregated in places like rec.sport.pro-wrestling and traded copies of print newsletters and third-generation VHS tapes back and forth. Those guys had a general preference for all other styles of wrestling over the WWF, and they created the conventional wisdom that the Sheepherders were great and the Bushwhackers sucked. That conventional wisdom persists today.

I’m not going to carry a grudge against Luke and Butch for what they did in their latter days, though. They’d been hard on their bodies for decades and deserved a bit of a break for the last fifteen years of their careers. Each and every one of us would have done the same thing under the same circumstances, particularly when the “break” that they took included cashing the biggest paychecks that they’d likely ever seen.

We will close on that note, and we look forward to seeing you in just seven days. Remember that questions are always welcome at [email protected]