Ask 411 Wrestling: Does Flair Think Hogan is Overrated?

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.

If you have one of those queries searing a whole 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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Night Wolf the Wise has a question about a non-Becky Lynch man:

I was watching Ric Flair’s Hall of Fame Speech from 2008. In his speech he mentions that Stone Cold is the biggest star of all time, and he was tired of saying Hulk Hogan was the biggest star of all time. Did Ric Flair have personal beef with Hogan at that time causing him to take a shot at Hogan in front of everyone or was it because Austin truly did surpass Hogan as the biggest star of all time?

I believe that it’s the latter.

I’m sure that there were times during his career that Flair was somewhat frustrated with Hogan, but I am not aware of any particular issue between the two men that has led to great animosity generally or animosity specifically at the time of this comment. After all, the two had worked together comfortably in both WCW and the WWF for years prior to this time, and they would go on to work together again very shortly after this comment was made, first during the Hulkster’s 2009 Australian tour and then again in TNA.

(It seems like I reference that Australian tour with a bizarrely high frequency in this column.)

Granted, at the time of Flair’s Hall of Fame induction, Hulk Hogan was on the outs with WWE, which probably made it easier politically for Flair to make this comment. Nobody appears to have written or talked about what was going on in the Nature Boy’s mind at the time, but my best guess is that the remark was a reflection of his true feelings that he was allowed to make because he was complimenting a guy who was affiliated with WWE at the expense of somebody who was not.

Jon has all this energy calling him back where he comes from:

Right now on the various WWE rosters there are six wrestlers who are in real life from Cleveland, Ohio: Miz, Dolph Ziggler, Raymond Rowe, Johnny Gargano, Dana Brooke, and EC3.

In wrestling history, can you think of a time where one town had so many people on one active roster simultaneously?

Some of this depends on what you mean by “being from the same town.” Even within the example of Cleveland that you have listed, three of the six wrestlers named are not from Cleveland proper – they’re from suburbs. Miz is actually from Parma, Dana Brooke is actually from Seven Hills, and Ethan Carter is actually from Willoughby. (Coincidentally, “Willoughby” is also the name of a great episode of The Twilight Zone, perhaps one of the greatest. Man, some days I wish I was writing a Twilight Zone column instead of this one.)

Thus, I’m assuming that what we’re really talking about here is not the town proper but rather the metropolitan area. If that’s the case, then there are many active rosters throughout history that have had just as many wrestlers from the same metro area as metro Cleveland currently does, if not more.

For one example, let’s look to the WWF roster in 2000, which featured six wrestlers from Toronto, Ontario or surrounding communities: Tiger Ali Singh, Just Joe (a.k.a. Joe E. Legend), Trish Stratus, Test, Val Venis, and Shawn “Meat” Stasiak (though Stasiak was released very early in 2000 and jumped to WCW).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b1oYi1XEyw

Several people might count Edge and Christian in that Toronto crew as well, but they’re actually from Orangeville and Kitchener, respectively, both of which are over an hour’s drive away from the big city. If you want to throw them into the mix, that would bring the total up to eight WWF wrestlers from Toronto(ish) in 2000.

Another sextet of wrestlers from the same city on the same roster at the same time comes to us from WCW in 1999, when the company simultaneously employed Mikey Whipwreck, Chris Kanyon, Big Vito, Tony Mamaluke, Jeff Farmer (a.k.a. nWo Sting), and the Disco Inferno, all of whom hail from various boroughs of New York City. Farmer worked all of the year in New Japan Pro Wrestling as part of WCW’s working relationship with the company, but he was still portraying his knockoff Sting character, so I’m counting it.

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

New York and its suburbs also had quite a few wrestlers on the ECW roster in 1998. There were at least seven of them: Mikey Whipwreck, Tazz, Little Guido, Bubba Ray Dudley, Chris Chetti, Elektra, and Nicole Bass. You could get to eight if you want to count D-Von Dudley, who is from nearby New Rochelle, New York, and you could get to nine if you want to count 911, who made a one-off return to the promotion at their UltraClash event that year.

Perhaps the real winner is the current New Japan Pro Wrestling roster, which, if I’ve counted correctly, contains TEN wrestlers who are all from Tokyo. Those gentlemen are: Tetsuya Naito, KUSHIDA, Hiromu Takahashi, BUSHI, Satoshi Kojima, Toru Yano, Gedo, Jado, Katsuya Kitamura (though the future of his career is in doubt), and Shota Umino.

I’m sure that there have been plenty more examples over the years, but I think that these are enough for now. If you’ve thought of any that I missed, feel free to list them down in the comments or shoot me an email.

Tyler from Winnipeg has a question. I wonder how many Ask 411 questioners from Winnipeg there are:

Who “stole the show” as Eddie Guerrero loved to, on the RAW episode immediately after his passing?

That’s a difficult question to answer, because the Eddie Guerrero tribute episode of Raw really wasn’t a great card from an in-ring perspective. (I don’t mean that as a criticism, because that’s really not what the show was about.) Most of the matches were less than five minutes long, and the only one of them that stood out somewhat was the one that actually was given a decent amount of time:

Shawn Michaels vs. Rey Misterio, Jr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H5YjkOqz9o

Shawn and Rey didn’t have an absolute classic, but it was a fun, competently wrestled match from two guys who we haven’t seen in the ring together all that often. Of the two men, I would say that Misterio looked better on the evening in question, though in some ways that’s to be expected, because he was the one who was working more on the face side of things, which allowed him to show off his flashy offense.

So, even though there is not really a clear-cut answer to this question, I’m going with Rey Misterio, Jr.

Long-time questioner Connor, who may or may not be from Winnipeg, is firing up the old VHS machine:

Why do so many matches on the old WWF Coliseum Video tapes end in count outs or disqualifications?

The reason is that the matches on those tapes, most of which come from the early 1980s through the early 1990s, are from a time during which the WWF valued the finishes to its matches far more than they do today.

Back in that era, pro wrestling was still booked much more as a sport than it is in 2018. Yes, there were some storylines and some blood feuds, but, by and large, you were buying tickets to events and/or pay per views in order to see winners and losers in the ring. You wanted to see who the better competitor was. The product wasn’t necessarily about telling outlandish stories or “putting smiles on people’s faces,” so to speak.

Though the WWF certainly wanted to make money off of its Coliseum Videos, they were an ancillary product. The main things that the company was trying to sell were tickets to its live shows and pay per view buys, and they were being bought primarily so that fans could see clean finishes to the advertised matches. It simply didn’t make sense to give away those valuable clean finishes on a product that was not a primary revenue stream. Doing so would have diluted the value of the mainline product.

Emperor Genghis Khan wants to talk Big Bad Jon:

I just finished reading Road Warrior Animal’s book. In it he speculates that if WCW had never switched airing days they would still be around. What do you think would have happened? He also talks about being teamed with Heidenreich but that not lasting because of Heidenreich having as many issues as Hawk did. Wikipedia says Heidenreich asked for time off after Katrina to be with his family. Were there any known issues surrounding Heidenreich’s departure from the WWE?

I understand where Animal is coming from with the contention that WCW would still be alive and kicking if they had not made the decision to compete head-to-head with Monday Night Raw. There are certainly things that the company did in their blind quest to increase Nitro’s ratings that hurt the overall quality of the product and thereby contributed to the downward spiral that the promotion was ultimately unable to pull out of.

However, I think that the company collapsing was still going to happen by this point in history regardless of whether they engaged in the Monday Night War.

Think of it this way: How many wrestling promotions in the United States managed to exist for more than thirty years?

Aside from the WWWF/WWF/WWE, the answer is “pretty much none of them.” ECW didn’t do it. Jim Crocket Promotions didn’t do it. Mid-South didn’t do it. The AWA only barely did it. The NWA or Memphis may claim that they did it, but the reality of the situation is that the classic and modern version of the promotions have nothing in common with each other.

Every major company in this country aside from Vince’s folded before it hit the three decade mark, sometimes because of declines in business and sometimes because of outside factors totally out of their control. Even if WCW didn’t die by its own incompetence in 2001, the odds are still unlikely that it would survive all the way into 2018, because there are any number of things that could have gone wrong with them between then and now that would have put them out of business, most notably their potential loss of television on the whim of an executive.

There are just too many factors weighing against a professional wrestling promotion lasting for as long as WWE has – they’re a freak aberration.

As far as Heidenreich is concerned, I was able to dig up a shoot interview clip in which he discusses teaming with Animal as well as the circumstances that lead to his release from WWE:

Essentially, Heidenreich corroborates some of what Animal implied in his book, noting that he had drug and alcohol problems during his final days in WWE and that he was regularly not in favor with the office due to his showing up late for production meetings and swearing on television at times it was not allowed.

Interestingly, when the Figure Four Weekly newsletter reported that Heidenreich had been cut in their January 23, 2006 issue, they went of their way to state that it was due to a “personal issue that wasn’t believed to be drug-related.” In the video posted above, Heidenreich also references having marital difficulties during this time, so there is a possibility that the release may have had something to do with those matters.

And that will do it for this week. I’ll be back in seven days, and, in the meantime, you can feel free to drop questions for the column off at [email protected].