Ask 411 Wrestling: Did Vince McMahon Screw Up the Launch of Hulkamania?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 Wrestling. I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling.

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I’ve heard of playing Monday morning quarterback, but Todd is playing 40 years later quarterback:

Did Vince McMahon blow the launch of Hulkamania by not leaving the title on the Iron Sheik longer?

I realize it is hard to argue the success of the Hulkamania launch but I always wonder what would have happened if Vince left the title on the Sheik for a longer period of time?

If Vince had left the title on him longer and given the Sheik’s hatred, it could have been an even bigger draw and led to a humongous match leading into Wresltemania with Hulk versus Sheik as the main event, having Hulk finally get over and with the title.

The Sheik’s short title run was too short in my opinion. Hulk would have been even bigger if Vince allowed the feud to grow given the anti-Iran sentiment at the time.

No, Vince McMahon did not blow the launch of Hulkamania. You can’t argue with success, and this is one of the most successful runs of a world champion in professional wrestling history.

I think that what we are seeing here is a phenomenon that I have come to see more and more as I answer questions in this column: It’s a modern wrestling fan attempting to apply concepts from 2023 booking to an era where the rules and fans’ expectations were different.

In the early 1980s, the WWF did not have long-reigning heel champions. That is not what the promotion’s fans paid to see. The promotion’s fans paid to see dominant superhero champions, whether it was Sammartino, Morales, or Backlund. If you had Hulk Hogan positioned as the top babyface but he couldn’t beat the Iron Sheik for months on end, fans would have said, “Well, this guy isn’t as good as Bruno . . .” and you would’ve cooled off Hogan’s eventual title win, not strengthened the crowd reaction.

So, with no offense meant to Todd or anybody else, I implore any person writing in with a question about whether old school wrestling should have been booked differently ask yourself, before you hit that “send” button, “Am I analyzing this in its proper context, or am I just applying the rules that I would expect to see applied if this were on television today?”

Doug has selected my name in his wrestling dead pool:

I was looking back at some of the older Pro Wrestling Illustrated awards, and I noticed something interesting: of the first eight wrestlers to win Most Popular Wrestler of the Year, only one (Mil Mascaras) is still alive; of the first eight wrestlers to “win” the Most Hated Wrestler of the Year, only one (The Sheik) is dead (at least at the time of this writing). Is it possible that spending most of a career as a babyface puts wrestlers at a survival disadvantage?

For the record, the men Doug is referring to are:

Most Popular: Jack Brisco/Fred Curry (tied, 1972); Jay Strongbow (1973), Billy Robinson (1974), Mil Mascaras (1975), Wahoo McDaniel (1976), Andre the Giant (1977), and Dusty Rhodes (1978 and 1979).

Most Hated: The Sheik (1972), Billy Graham (1973), The Great Mephisto (1974), Greg Valentine (1975 and 1979), Ken Patera (1977 and 1981), Ric Flair (1978), Larry Zbyszko (1980), and Ted DiBiase (1982)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8hQAboCDns

It’s worth noting that, in the time between Doug asking his question and my getting around to answering it, we did have an additional death on the most hated listed, as “Superstar” Billy Graham passed on May 17, 2023. However, Doug’s general point still stands. Far more guys on the “hated” list are living than guys on the “popular” list.

Does this phenomenon relate to the wrestlers’ heel/face alignment? No, probably not, particularly when you consider the fact that most of these individuals played both heel and face throughout their careers.

This is probably just a function of the wrestlers on the most hated list being slightly younger on average than the wrestlers on the most popular list. On the hated list, you have Patera being born in 1943, Flair being born in 1949, Valentine being born in 1951, DiBiase being born in 1954, and Hansen being born in 1949.

On the popular list, you have Brisco being born in 1941, Curry being born in 1943, Strongbow being born in 1928 (!), Robinson being born in 1938, McDaniel being born in 1938, Andre being born in 1946, and Dusty being born in 1945. Of course, Andre is a bit of an outlier given the unique circumstances that contributed to his death.

Wrestling Fan Since 1977 evokes the recently deceased Butch Miller:

Why do you think the Sheepherders changed their gimmick to the Bushwackers?

Because it was easier on their bodies. When they were wrestling as the Sheepherders – and even before that as the Kiwis – Luke Williams and Butch Miller used a hardcore style before the word “hardcore” even really existed. Their matches were bloody, hard hitting, and the sort of thing that you can only do up to a certain age before it begins to take a toll on your body.

When the duo jumped to the WWF in late 1988, they had already been wrestling in various territories for over 20 years, with Miller being 44 years old and Williams being 41 years old. If they were going to continue wrestling for any period of time – particularly wrestling a schedule that involved as many dates as a full-time WWF gig did – they were going to have to dial it back a bit. And dial it back they did.

You also have to consider the fact that, at the time, the WWF was a far more family friendly product, and, though you still had occasional blading in top angles, a bloodthisty tag team wasn’t going to cut it as a midcard act.

James knows that clothes make the man:

Where do wrestlers get their costumes created?

It depends. At various points, WCW, WWE, and AEW have all employed in-house seamstresses and tailors who were made available to prepare wrestlers’ gear and likely made the majority of those outfits given that they were easily accessible to the grapplers. Perhaps the most prolific of these individuals is Sandra Gray, who at various points worked for all three of the promotions that I mentioned above and even became a minor character on the Total Divas reality show, one of the only highlights of that miserable piece of dreck. Former Ring of Honor wrestler Kid Mikaze, who coincidentally is also the husband of Sasha Banks, has served in a similar capacity for WWE.

Outside of costumers employed by the promotions themselves, wrestlers are typically free to go wherever and to whomever they want to get their gear. Former ECW wrestler EZ Money had his own company that made gear for many years after he started off designing his own looks. Vendors like Highspots offer both pre-made and custom gear to independent wrestlers, while No Gimmick Gear out of New York has outfitted stars like Kris Statlander.

There are also some wrestlers who are noted for working with particular designers almost exclusively. Rob Van Dam’s airbrushed looks were provided by a guy named Joe Holland (who later did the same work for Ryback), and Ric Flair’s iconic robes were originally sewn by Olivia Walker, the wife of Mr. Wrestling II.

Tyler from Winnipeg is entering to the old Wrestlemania theme:

What letter grade does Linda McMahon get as a performer?

D.

Her delivery was remarkably wooden, and she took one of the worst Stone Cold Stunners in the history of the move. However, I don’t really mean that as a knock on Linda, because she was never really MEANT to be a performer (nor did she apparently want to be) and got forced into it because of who she married.

If you want to know why I’m giving her a “D” and not an “F,” it’s because I do have respect for her willingness to take a tombstone on the Monday Night Raw stage from a newly unmasked Kane in 2003. I just wish that spot was used to set up a feud between Kane and literally anybody other than Shane McMahon.

Brandon V. wants me to go to work for Buzzfeed:

I was thinking about Edge and Christian recently, and pondered whehter they were the greatest tag-team champion wrestlers that would go on to each become World Champions

So, my question for you is: Who do you feel are the top 10 tag-teams champions who would go on to each become World Champion in major companies?

Here’s the thing. You’ve asked me for a top ten list, but both members of a tag team going on to win world championships is actually a pretty rare accomplishment. (I am assuming we are throwing out teams in which a member was previously a world champion, then a tag champion, and then a world champion again.) In fact, if we limit things to what this column normally considers this to be “major” promotions, this has only happened THIRTEEN times in history, and, as you will see below, we even have to put asterisks on some of those thirteen.

So, rather than giving a top ten, I’m just going to rank the thirteen teams in which the members have accomplished this feat, since it’s only going to involve three more entries on the list.

Away we go:

13. Beer Money: Beer Money were multiple-time TNA Tag Team Champions. The reason that they come in at the bottom of the list is that, though Money had a couple of decent reigns as TNA World Champion, his partner Beer only held the World Title for eight days, which was really just a transitional reign to get the belt from Kurt Angle to Money.

12. The Hardy Boys: Much like Beer Money, the Hardys rank low on the list because of the lackluster nature of one member’s World Title reigns. While Jeff Hardy held the most important championships in the largest promotion in the world on multiple occasions, his brother Matt . . . didn’t. Matt’s credentials as a “world champion” come in TNA in late 2015 and early 2016, after the peak of the promotion and when its main title’s status as a world title became questionable.

11. Yuji Nagata & Manabu Nakanishi: The duo of Nagata and Nakanishi held the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Titles for almost a year between August 1999 and July 2000. Nagata went on to hold singles gold as the IWGP Heavyweight Champion on two occasions in addition to holding All Japan Pro Wrestling’s Triple Crown at the time of this writing. Despite Nagata’s success, they rank low on the list because Nakanishi’s IWPG Heavyweight Title run lasted only about a month, featured no successful title defenses, and felt like it was given to him as a “lifetime achievement award” as opposed to a true title reign.

10. Cactus Jack & Mikey Whipwreck: I’m guessing there are a lot of people who didn’t think about this duo qualifying for the list, but they do. Originally, Cactus Jack and Terry Funk were supposed to challenge for the ECW Tag Team Titles on August 27, 1994, but Whipwreck was a last minute substitution for Funk, leading to this unlikely duo defeating Public Enemy for the titles. Then, while the two men still held the Tag Titles, Whipwreck upset the Sandman to become the ECW World Champion. Several years later, in a scene the vast majority of our readers remember, Cactus Jack, then known as Mankind, unseated the Rock for the first of three WWF Championship reigns.

9. Shawn Michaels & Diesel: Thusfar on the list, we’ve seen tag teams who had fairly good tag championship runs only for one of them to be a somewhat lackluster world champion, but now we’ve got the opposite. Michaels and Nash both had significant world title reigns, but their run as tag champs was pretty forgettable, as they won them on a house show in late August 1998 and had vacated them before the end of November.

8. Edge & Rey Misterio Jr.: Edge was part of the inspiration for this question, and we’ll see him higher up on the list with Christian Cage, but he was also part of a second team that meets the criteria given in the question. As part of the Smackdown Six in late 2002, Edge and Rey Misterio helped legitimize the then-brand new Smackdown Tag Team Titles, which oddly still exist as the Raw Tag Team Titles. Coincidentally, both men became world champions for the first time in 2006, with Edge cashing in the inaugural Money in the Bank briefcase and Rey winning a championship match at that year’s Wrestlemania.

7. Stan Hansen & Terry Gordy: To steal a line from another promotion, it’s hard to tell whether these two wrestlers were good friends or better enemies. The two rough-and-tumble southerners were two-time AJPW World Tag Team Champions and winners of the 1988 World’s Strongest Tag League tournament. Subsequently, they not only both held the Triple Crown – they also feuded over it. Gordy defeated Jumbo Tsuruta for the belt in June 1990 and then dropped it to Hansen who dropped it back to Gordy. Unfortunately, Gordy’s high level career was cut short due to substance and health issues, but Hansen would go on to become a four-time Triple Crown Champ overall.

6. Big E. Langston & Kofi Kingston: The New Day has unquestionably established itself as one of the most successful teams in WWE history, albeit as a three-man unit as opposed to a regular two-man team. I almost didn’t include them because they are thought of mostly as a trio and not a tag team and one of the members of that trio, Xavier Woods, has never been a world champion. However, at least one of their title runs began specifically with Big E and Kingston winning the championship, and they operated without Woods for a time because of an injury. Thus, they made the cut.

5. Keiji Muto & Masahiro Chono: Heading back to Japan, we now see two of the “Three Musketeers” of NJPW, the trio of men who were the company’s heavy hitters throughout the 1990s. As soon as Muto returned from his time in the United States, he and Chono teamed up and won the IWGP Tag Team Titles for the first of two reigns. Subsequently, Muto became a four-time IWGP Champion as well as traveling outside New Japan in his later career, winning both the All Japan Triple Crown and NOAH’s GHC Championship. Though Chono was a legitimate top guy in New Japan for decades, he won surprisingly few world titles, holding the IWGP Title once and the NWA Title once, albeit after the NWA and WCW severed ties, damaging that belt’s importance.

4. Edge & Christian Cage: Yeah, Brandon was wondering if they were number one, and I suspect several of those reading would have said they top the list as a knee jerk reaction, but, upon researching, I slotted them at number four. Why? Because, compared to other teams further up, Christian’s runs as a world champion were actually pretty weak. He had a couple of relatively lengthy NWA World Title reigns when that belt was controlled by TNA, but it was also at a time when TNA was obviously a b-level promotion. Similarly, he was a two-time World Heavyweight Champion in WWE, but the first reign lasted only two days and he was booked as an ultra-weak champion in the second, back-dooring into the title on a DQ win in a match with a special stipulation. He did get a TNA Title run more recently, though now with the company as a d-level promotion instead of b-level. Simply put, there are other teams that produced two world champions that were more prolific.

3. Hiroyoshi Tenzan & Satoshi Kojima: Between 1999 and 2002, Tencozy were considered by many to be the best tag team in the world, and that is not an exaggeration. Competing for New Japan, they held the IWGP Tag Team Titles twice during that period for a combined 507 days and seven successful defenses. The team split in 2002 when Kojima jumped from New Japan to All Japan along with Keiji Muto. While they were apart, they both became multiple-time world champions in their respective promotions, with Tenzan becoming a four-time IWPG Heavyweight Champion and Kojima becoming a two-time Triple Crown Champion. In fact, the two men even feuded with each other while in separate promotions, with Tenzan dropping the IWGP Title to Kojima while Kojima was in AJPW as
Triple Crown Champ.

2. The Shield: Like the New Day, I debated including these guys on the list because they were a trio as opposed to a traditional tag team, but they did hold standard tag team titles in multiple combinations and, perhaps most impressively, all three members went on to capture world championships in WWE, with Roman Reigns in particular becoming one of the most prolific champions in the history of the company (and holding most of the lineal titles featured in this column). Dean Ambrose/Jon Moxley also gets the group bonus points by holding a world title in a second promotion as well, albeit one that is not as prominent as WWE.

1. Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada: Yes, here they are – two out of the Four Pillars of Heaven, back before the term “pillars” got prostituted to describe a group of guys who, though perfectly acceptable wrestlers, aren’t half as talented or as over. Misawa and Kawada became the All Japan World Tag Team Champions on July 24, 1991, defeating the previously mentioned Terry Gordy and his partner at the time, “Dr. Death” Steve Williams. Slightly over one year later, Misawa began the first of what would ultimately be five Triple Crown Title reigns, followed by his creation of Pro Wrestling NOAH, where he was GHC Heavyweight Champion on three occasions. Meanwhile, Kawada became a Triple Crown Champion for the first time in 1994, going on to hold the title five times himself, a number helped by the fact that he was the only major Japanese AJPW star who hung around after the NOAH exodus. Simply put, these are two of he best in-ring performers in the history of professional wrestling and two of its best world champions, and they all began as one tag team.

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.