Ask 411 Wrestling: Did Roman Reigns Forget How to Wrestle?

Welcome, guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals to Ask 411 Wrestling.

I’m your party host Ryan Byers, and we’re going to do something a little bit different this week. Many of you may not realize this, but I have a backlog of over 100 questions that people have sent into the column over the months and years, going back to the Halcion days of Mat Sforcina writing Ask 411.

Also, I’m travelling this week, so I can’t write the version of the column that I normally do.

Combine those two factors and I’m going to test out the first ASK 411 WRESTLING LIGHTNING ROUND~! There will be no gigantic research questions, but we will tackle more questions than usual – questions that I can answer relatively quickly compared to our normal fare.

Hopefully you enjoy it. If not, we should be back to normal next week.

If you’d like to help replenish the mailbag after I’ve worked on emptying it out this week, shoot me an e-mail at [email protected], or, if you’d like to yell at me for getting something wrong, use the comment section below.

With that said, on to the meat of the column! And the banner!

Brian G. has got the moves like Roman. He’s got the moves like Roman. He’s got the moooooooooooooves like Roman:

Why does Roman Reigns drop nearly all but his three biggest moves when he faces Brock Lesnar? He doesn’t have an awe-inspiring secondary move set, but it becomes extra dull watching him just try to hit home run after home run. He often does this past the twelve minute mark in any match (which still isn’t a great idea), but it’s all he brings vs. Brock. It’s not what I want to watch.

It’s not just Roman. This seems to be the style of match that either Brock Lesnar wants to work or that WWE wants to book Brock Lesnar in. A lot of his main events are explosive, shorter-than-average sprints in which he and his opponents spam their finishers and signature moves like Ryu in a Hadouken cook-off.

(No, not that Hadouken.)

So, for as much as we all like to pile on with some good, old fashioned Reigns hate, this one really isn’t on him.

Michael K. is a rugged man:

There were certain guys that Ric Flair wouldn’t (or just didn’t) drop the world title to that were considered shoo-ins (Luger and Nikita come to mind), so why drop to Ron Garvin? Now, they had a pretty decent feud so I wasn’t shocked when Garvin won kayfabe-wise, but it seems odd that’s the guy Flair wouldn’t mind losing too. Not to rip on Garvin as he was ok and mildly popular, but why him? Were he and Ric friends? Did Ric push for him? Or did Ron just ante up the alleged 10K that a wrestler had to pony up to hold the title?

The reason that Garvin got the title reign was pretty simple. The NWA’s plan was for somebody to win the championship from Flair in September and lose it back to him at Starrcade, two months later.

This was back in an era where a two month title reign was seen as a joke (as opposed to the norm), so there were not a lot of wrestlers who WANTED to have the belt for such a short run. Garvin was respected enough to hold the title but didn’t care about being viewed as a short-term champion for whatever reason, so he accepted the spot that nobody else would take.

Night Wolf the Wise gets right to the point:

If you look, a lot of the time during the Attitude Era, Stone Cold would come out get on the top ropes and put is fits in the air. Other times, he would put his two middle fingers in the air as was customary to his character. Any particular reason he switched back and forth between the two?

Not that I’m aware of.

It’s possible that he could have been flipping the bird when he was on later in the evening on a television program or on pay per view (when standards for censorship are relaxed somewhat compared to earlier or free TV shows), but if there has ever been a stated reason or the change-up, it’s not something that I’ve been able to locate.

Regular questioner Connor W. knows you can’t spell “Tito” without “tit.” Real mature, Connor:

Is there a reason Tito Santana became a jobber? The guy was super-talented.

A wrestling promotion needs to have talented performers at every level of the card. You need talented wrestlers in the main event, you need them in the mid-card, and you need them in the openers. Tito had already had many years as an upper-midcard wrestler behind him, and it was time to move him out of that position to give other guys a shot. However, his talents could still be put to use in another position on the show, so he was made into somewhat of a “gatekeeper” that new heels had to go through on their rise up the card.

Let’s go to Connor W. again:

Is there any chance we’ll ever see WWE Velocity on the Network?

There’s always a chance given that the company owns the content and wouldn’t be restricted in putting it up (that I know of), but I can’t imagine that it would be a huge priority because Velocity was pretty much a c-show from its inception. Granted, WWE has started adding episodes of Heat to the Network and Heat did have the same basic format as Velocity for a time, but Heat at least started off its run as the WWF’s second major show featuring much of the same talent and angles that would be on Raw.

Brad can grow up to be anything he wants to be:

A lot of fans have probably seen clips of WWE stars captured on video attending events as young fans, such as Mick Foley at Madison Square Garden (Superfly Jimmy Snuka’s leap from the top of the cage), and Edge at the formerly named Toronto Skydome (Hulk Hogan vs. Ultimate Warrior).

1) Can you dig up other notable examples?

2) I briefly wondered why the WWE doesn’t make a compilation video on this subject with a tagline like “YOU could be a future WWE superstar!!!”. Then I figured maybe the company is afraid that would go against the old “Don’t try this at home” message. Do you think my logic is correct?

I started to research this question to generate my own answer, but it turns out that Reddit user nocturnalfrolic actually put together a pretty decent list, and their thread is right here.

As far as your proposed ad campaign is concerned, I suppose that I could see it happening someday, but part of the problem with making it a reality is that a lot of the clips that they have of wrestlers-as-fans are very short in duration or very poor quality. It’s not like they were seeking these people out to film and feature them. They just happened to be captured for a split second, and, in a lot of cases, you need some explanation to even figure out who they are.

I don’t think that violating the “don’t try this at home” policy is that big an issue, because the photos just show wrestlers enjoying matches, not rushing the ring. Now if they did a “YOU could be a future WWE superstar!” campaign and included footage of Steve Blackman’s WWF debut, that would be a different story.

Rahil is octagonal:

Which names have also done both MMA and Wrestling (apart from Lesnar, Batista, Del Rio, O’Haire and Shamrock)?

Plenty of them. In fact, I think it’s near impossible to do a comprehensive list, but here are a few noteworthy names:

Obviously, CM Punk has now competed in UFC twice, which I don’t think was true when this question was originally asked. Ronda Rousey, Matt Riddle, “Filthy” Tom Lawler, Shayna Baszler, King Mo, and Stephan Bonnar have all transitioned out of MMA and into pro wrestling in recent years.

Dan Severn and Tank Abbott are old-school UFC names who also dabbled in pro wrestling, and Paul Varelans was a UFC fighter from the same era who was brought into ECW to do a job for Taz(z).

Bobby Lashley has gone from pro wrestling to MMA and back again, and Dave Bautista had one professional MMA bout a few years ago just to prove to himself that he could do it. Mitch of the Spirit Squad, going by his real name Nick Mitchell, also did a one-off MMA bout after leaving wrestling.

Though he did not have an extensive career in either MMA or pro wrestling, Daniel Puder came into Tough Enough with some MMA background and won a contract to become a WWE superstar.

Former WCW wrestler Craig “Pitbull” Pittman had four MMA matches to his credit.

In Japan, the line between MMA and wrestling is far more blurred than it is in the United States, and many stars have crossed back and forth between the two genres. Bob Sapp, Josh Barnett, Minowaman, Don Frye, Sylvester Terkay, and Kazushi Sakuraba are primarily MMA fighters who have had runs as wrestlers in Japan, whereas Yuji Nagata, Yoshihiro Takayama, Kendo Kashin, Shinsuke Nakamura, Masakatsu Funaki, and Giant Silva are all pro wrestlers who had occasional MMA fights or essentially became full-time mixed martial artists.

That doesn’t even include Akebono, who is a sumo wrestler that later got in to both pro wrestling and MMA.

Will wants to f#!k your rules, man:

Lita’s last match on Raw, before her retirement match at Survivor Series, resulted in her defeating a blindfolded Mickie James. She then delivered a promo that seemed to have some shoot elements to it. Was this at all a shoot? Did she get any heat for it?

No, it was not a shoot.

Lita was a heel at the time, and she was trying to get heat from the crowd to build up her Survivor Series match with Mickie James.

Hey, it’s Connor again!

Why did Jim Ross leave WCW?

It was in no small part due to the fact that he felt like he had been unfairly overlooked when Eric Bischoff was elevated to the level of WCW Executive Vice President with Ross not being given an opportunity at the position.

Warren is not your boy toy:

Hey guys, longtime reader. I’ve been re-reading Bret Hart’s fantastic autobiography and looking at Wrestling With Shadows. My question relates to the Kliq and more specifically Shawn and Vince’s relationship. It’s been said Shawn got away with more than any other person. What kind of hold did Shawn have over Vince and why did he let them get away with so much?

Shawn and the Clique (not Kliq – that spelling was used on-camera for Michaels’ fans when he was a babyface) were the top stars of the WWF at a time when the roster was paper-thin and in need of any and all stars that it could possibly get. I think that a lot of HBK’s sway over the chairman of the board had a lot to do with the fact that McMahon did not want to lose his key talent, especially when we got to 1995 and Hulk Hogan and company were starting to make inroads in WCW.

Mike S. wants to get up close and personal with the chairman:

I am just curious, but how do you think Vince McMahon spends his Monday-Friday during the day? Stupid question I know. I am just so curious about this man’s life. What does he do for fun? What does he do around the house?

Everything I have read about Vince McMahon indicates that he is an extreme workaholic, to the point that I have a hard time imagining him having any leisure activities.

To the extent that he is investing his time in something other than WWE (or I guess the XFL these days), I suspect that he’s in the gym. I mean, look at the guy. Chemical enhancement or not, you don’t look like Vinnie Mac does at his age without spending quite a bit of time pumping iron.

Andy wants to take the merriment down about 5,000 notches:

Sadly, there have been many early, tragic deaths of wrestlers in the last 30 years. Is there one in particular that bothers you more or that makes you wistfully think, “Man, that’s a tough loss?” For me, anytime I see Eddie Guerrero, that’s the one that seems like the biggest early loss. He shows up on the screen, and my wife and I will just look at each, shake our heads slowly, and say, “Damn.” Who affects you like that?

It’s probably a cliché to say this, but mine is Owen Hart. Though I understand that addiction is a disease and not necessarily something fully controlled by the people afflicted with it, I don’t get as upset by the drug deaths like Eddie’s because, at some point in their histories, there was some affirmative, conscious act by the people who died that way which set them down the path that ultimately ended with their lives being cut short. When you’re dealing with somebody like Owen, though, his passing was a truly unnecessary and tragic accident that he shoulders ZERO responsibility for.

The other aspect of Owen’s passing that probably results in it getting to me more than other wrestling deaths do is that I was a teenager when it happened, meaning I was just generally more emotionally invested in wrestling than I was years later once I had more educational, professional, and personal commitments to devote myself towards.

Bud White is a connoisseur of obese Canadians:

Could you talk for a little about John “Earthquake” Tenta? My questions:

1) Why wasn’t he pushed further? Was it timing? I mean, he feuded with Hogan when Warrior was champ, was he a year or two too late?

I’m not sure that I understand the question. He got to feud with Hulk Hogan in 1990, one of Hogan’s peak years of popularity. There is literally no bigger push that a heel could have gotten, even if the Ultimate Warrior was the champion at the time.

2) Why was there no blow off to his feud with Hogan? Hogan got only count out victory at SummerSlam 1990. Why was that?

This mentality was starting to change in 1990, but we were still at least partially in a world where the main place that professional wrestling made its money was on live gates. Pay per view was definitely an established medium at this point, but house shows were seen as being far more important in the grand scheme of things. You didn’t blow off the feud on pay per view or television because you wanted to keep the match viable on house shows.

And, in fact, they DID keep the match viable on house shows, because Hogan and Earthquake continued to main event untelevised events against each other through March 1991. (There Summerslam match was, obviously, in the summer of 1990.) If the Hulkster had gotten a widely-seen clean victory over Quake at some point, the viability of that house show program would have been substantially impaired.

Here’s another quickie from Night Wolf the Wise:

I was watching the Miracle on 34th Street Fight between Dean Ambrose and Bray Wyatt. At the Dean Ambrose sends both himself and Bray Wyatt through a table. The show goes off the air with Ambrose having this sadistic look on his face. I know people like to compare Dean Ambrose to past wrestlers. I think the direction of Ambrose is a mix between “Loose Cannon” Brian Pillman and Mick Foley. What are your thoughts on that?

If you watch the way he moves, bumps, and sells, I see a lot more of Terry Funk in Dean Ambrose than I do Pillman or Foley. If you listen to the intonation in his promos, I hear a lot more of Roddy Piper in Ambrose than I do Pillman or Foley.

However, as I mentioned in this column a couple of weeks when I ran down the entire WWE roster and gave my thoughts on them, Ambrose is pretty severely handicapped in working his gimmick, much more than Funk, Pillman, Piper, or Foley were. All four of those guys were portrayed as being a bit crazy, a bit off-kilter. Being portrayed in this manner made them seem dangerous. However, in the modern, PG WWE landscape, “crazy” means “wacky” instead of “dangerous,” so it seems like Ambrose is always walking the fine line of becoming a comedy character.

And that does it for this somewhat abbreviated edition of Ask 411. As always, keep your questions flowing in to [email protected].