Ask 411 Wrestling: How Many Nature Boys Have Been in Wrestling?

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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 hole 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 is renewing old rivalries:

I read that the Rock and Stone Cold wrestled against each other 10 times. Stone Cold has 7 victories over the Rock. Rock only has 1 win over Stone Cold. The other 2 are no contest. Has any other wrestler in wrestling history won only 1 match in that rivalry? Keep in mind when I say rivalry, I mean they wrestled multiple times like Rock and Austin did. Also tag team matches, fatal 4 ways, etc don’t count. Only one on ones.

With those numbers and with the Rock only beating Austin once, that tells me you’re only counting televised matches, because if you add in house shows and dark matches, the Rock has more victories over Steve Austin than just the one.

If we are only accounting for TV bouts, then I was able to locate one definite example of a feud in which a wrestler only won one of the matches.

Bret Hart versus Owen Hart.

If you look at the televised record between the brothers, Owen’s victory at Wrestlemania X is the only one that he ever picked up the win, though he did also have a non-televised victory in the quarterfinals of the 1996 Kuwaiti Cup tournament.

I am sure that if you reviewed every feud in the modern history of wrestling you could find several more examples, but that is one that came to me offhand.

We’ve given Tyler from Winnipeg the book:

Three part question. Did you read Hardcore Holly’s book? Becky’s? Your top 3 wrestling books?

No.

No.

Mick Foley’s first two books and Chris Jericho’s first book.

Those aren’t exactly unique answers, but sometimes the consensus picks are the best picks.

Big Al has a new body:

While watching Wrestlemania the other day, one of my in-laws mentioned how John Cena definitely took steroids. However I don’t ever remember hearing about him getting involved in those. That got me thinking, while it’s impossible to know with 100% certainty, who are the most successful wrestlers that we can say most likely did NOT use PED’s? When I say successful, I am thinking multiple time world champions or a years-long push. Just WWF(E) and WCW to narrow it down.

Lance Storm. Given the prevalence of PEDs in wrestling for decades, Storm is about the only person who ever operated in the WWF or WCW that I am 99% confident never did anything. That’s not to say there haven’t been others who were clean, but I just don’t know who they are, and my default assumption is that a wrestler from the 1980s on has at least dabbled in something at some point unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary.

Have you heard the one about Craig?

Has there ever been a main event on a weekly live TV show in which one of the competitors gets seriously injured and unable to finish the match? I remember Triple H got injured at the end of a tag match but let’s say there is a singles match in which a wrestlers are given 15 minutes to wrestle and one wrestler gets injured a few minutes into it and unable to continue. How would the show fill in the rest of the time slot with no wrestling?

I’m not aware of that situation having ever occurred, but the answer to the second half of the question is that there are any number of ways that you could fill out the remaining TV time, depending on the context – perhaps most importantly how much time is remaining.

The first thing you can do, which works if the remaining television time is relatively short, is just pad it out with replays of the injury and footage of the injured wrestler being removed from the ring, and perhaps an interview with the other wrestler who was in the match about what exactly happened.

The second thing to do, which would be an option if you have more time left in the show, would be to just have somebody else on the card cut an impromptu promo or have a couple of other guys on the card wrestle an impromptu match. Wrestling doesn’t have to be planned all that much in advance. True pros can get in there and improvise a promo or call a match in the ring. Granted, those skills may be falling by the wayside given how new wrestlers are getting trained these days, but grapplers with sufficient seasoning should still be able to do it.

GRT is menacingly stroking his briefcase:

Has any title reign started by a Money in the Bank cash in ever been ended by a Money in the Bank cash in? Or is Tiffany Stratton the only current time this could occur?

No, this has never happened before.

If MNMNB‘s friends jumped off a cliff, so would he:

Just learned there was someone named Roger “Nature Boy” Kirby.

How many wrestlers can you find that used the Nature Boy name?

Well, let’s count them:

1. Buddy Rogers: This is the original Nature Boy. I think I’ve told this story in the column before, but the name originates with a popular song that Nat King Cole first recorded in 1948. It has been covered many times since then.

2. Al Oeming: This fellow is an interesting yet sometimes forgotten footnote in wrestling history. He served in the Canadian Navy in World War II and, when he came home from the war, he was broken into wrestling by his childhood friend Stu Hart. This means he would have adopted the nickname “The Nature Boy” around the same time Buddy Rogers did, though it’s not clear to me who used it first. Eventually, Al got into promoting and co-founded Stampede Wrestling with Hart. He also became a noted zoologist and conservationist, wit the CBC making a docuseries about that part of his life in 1980.

3. Tommy Phelps: Phelps was another contemporary of Rogers, wrestling at the same time he did, though Rogers definitely had the gimmick first. After wrestling, Phelps became an evangelist and released a spoken word record about his conversion from grappler to man of god.

4. Chief Lone Eagle: Not to be confused with the little person wrestler who was also called Chief Lone Eagle, this guy wrestled for promoter Jack Pfeffer in Chicago and Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s. Though Lone Eagle was his most commonly used ring name, for some of his bouts he was dubbed the “Indian Nature Boy.”

5. Roger Kirby: The man who inspired this question. Kirby began wrestling in the 1960s and was dubbed “The Nature Boy” due to his physical resemblance to Buddy Rogers, who he was actually friendly with. Kirby wrestled for almost every major promotion during the territorial era of wrestling, and when his career was winding down in the 1980s, he had matches for the WWF, the AWA, and All Japan Pro Wrestling.

6. Ric Flair: When you talk to 90% of people who recognize the “Nature Boy” name these days, they’ll no doubt tie it first and foremost to Ric Flair.

7. JJ Dillon: It didn’t last long, but when the future manager of Ric Flair was wrestling In and around Hallifax, Nova Scotia between 1973 and 1975, he was known as Nature Boy Dillon.

8. Adrian Street: American fans will remember Street using the nickname “Exotic,” but when he started wrestling in his native England, he used the “Nature Boy” moniker in large part because he had been a fan of Buddy Rogers, who his flamboyant character was based upon.

9. Nature Boy: This is a true oddity. In David McLane’s all women’s promotion GLOW, one of the wrestlers who only had a handful of matches was called Jungle Woman, doing a Tarzan-esque gimmick. She had a male valet who wore a loincloth and was lead to the ring on a leash. He was called “Nature Boy,” with no other name given. In reality, Nature Boy was portrayed by Tony Cimber, and this is an example of somebody behind the scenes being given an on camera role. Tony Cimber is listed as an associate director in GLOW’s credits, and his brother Matt Cimber is listed as a director and a producer. In more trivia, the Cimber brothers are children of Hollywood legend Jayne Mansfield, which makes them half-brothers of Law and Order star Mariska Hargitay. So, David McLane is one degree of separation away from Mariska Hargitay.

10. Ricky Fuji: This one is also going to be a bit of a story. Fuji is a long-time Japanese indy wrestler, starting in 1990 and continuing through today. His most notworthy run was with FMW in the mid-to-late 1990s. He was a huge Rock n’ Roll Express fan and patterned a lot of his style on them. Another Japanese indy wrestler, Men’s Teioh (who had a cup of tea in the WWF as part of Kaientai), was known early in his career as Terry Boy because of his extreme Terry Funk fandom. For a couple of tag matches in 2011, Teioh reverted to his Terry Boy persona, while wrestler Great Kojika joined him as Dory Boy (based on Dory Funk), and Fuji rounded out the trio as Nature Boy (based on Ric Flair). It wasn’t his full-time gimmick or anything, but he did use the name.

11. Lance Idol: This journeyman wrestler debuted in 1978 and his career ended when he died of a heart attack in 1991. He had a ton of ring names during his career. He never used “Nature Boy” with the name Lance Idol to my knowledge, but he wrestled as Nature Boy Austin for a time. Interestingly, he was also Steve Austin for a time – before he would’ve known about the wrestler who ultimately became Stone Cold – so he has shared names with two of wrestling’s greatest.

12. Buddy Landel: Probably the third most notable Nature Boy on this list behind Rogers and Flair, most fans reading this will know that he overlapped with Slick Ric in the gimmick and feuded with him over the rights to the name for a time – including while he was managed by JJ Dillon, another Nature Boy from this list.

13. Tito Senza: Another 1970s and 1980s journeyman. I’ve listed him as Tito Senza because that was his most widely known ring name – including the name he did some WWF enhancement work under – but he was never “Nature Boy” Tito Senza. Instead, his alternate ring name was Nature Boy Nelson, which he used from the mid-70s through the early 80s in Nova Scotia.

14. Verne Siebert: This is another example of a journeyman wrestler having many names. Siebert is his most recognizable one, but he was also Nature Boy Sweetan when he wrestled in the late 80s in . . . Nova Scotia? Why was this gimmick so popular in eastern Canada? (Yeah, yeah, I’m the guy that answers the questions . . . I shouldn’t be asking them . . .)

15. Paul Lee: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Paul Lee did what was essentially a Ric Flair tribute act on southern independents, and he was respected enough that he was brought in as an enhancement wrestler on shows for Jim Crockett Promotions, WCW, and, later on, Smoky Mountain Wrestling. He’s also had several matches in the 2020s, including one in 2023 against Joey Janela.

16. Charles Robinson: Robinson, the referee who refuses to age, was involved in an angle in late 1990s WCW in which he was a Ric Flair fanboy and was dubbed “The Little Nature Boy” or “Little Naitch” for short. Though he’s a referee and not a wrestler, the Little Naitch run did see him have a couple of matches, including an infamous bout in which Randy Savage caved his chest in with a flying elbow.

17. Rik Ratchet: A New Jersey indy fixture from 1994 through 2022, Ratchet didn’t do much of interest that I could find, but his final match was a singles bout against Jerry Lawler, which is a great note to go out on.

18. Kevin White: Trained by Bill Dundee, Mr. White was referred to as the “New Nature Boy” and made numerous appearances on the Tennessee independents from the early 2000s through 2015.

19. Barry Ace: Based out of Massachusetts, Barry Ace is a 20+ year indy veteran who also has quite a few small film roles to his credit. Though he currently calls himself “The Mill City Samurai,” at an earlier phase of his career he was the “New Age Nature Boy.” He’s still active, and you can see his website here.

20. Scoot Andrews: Scoot was a northeastern indy wrestler who competed from 1994 through 2022 with his greatest exposure coming in early Ring of Honor during its Feinstein era. He was actually known as the “Black Nature Boy” because, well, he was Black. It probably says something that we had to specify he was a “Black” Nature Boy when the entire origin of the Nature Boy gimmick was with a song recorded and popularized by a Black performer.

21. Gary Gold: This fellow is a Massachusetts-based independent wrestler who began wrestling in 1981 and continued through 2017. In an interesting side note, if you poke around on YouTube, you can find several episodes of a public access talk show about professional wrestling that he hosted during the 2020s.

22. Dylan Eaton: His career was pretty short in the grand scheme of things, lasting only three years in the 2000s, but Dylan Eaton came into the sport with quite the pedigree. He was the grandson of Bill Dundee and the son of Bobby Eaton, who was married to Dundee’s daughter. Interestingly, despite being related to two other wrestling legends, Dylan was a “Nature Boy” in tribute to Flair for a time as opposed to being a “Superstar” or “Beautiful.”

23. Ricky Landell: Trained by Steve Corino and debuting in the early 2000s, Rick Landell’s early career largely consisted of following Corino around wherever he was going and acting almost as a “young boy” in the Japanese tradition. When Ricky was allowed to start showing some personality of his own, he did take up the “Nature Boy” mantle for a time.

24. Chic Canyon: No, not Chris Kanyon. Active in the late 2000s through the early 2010s on the indy circuit in Kentucky and deep southern Illinois, Canyon referred to himself as the “Strong Style Nature Boy.”

25. Johnny Dynamo: Still wrestling in Michigan today after a career that has lasted over 20 years, Mr. Dynamo took up the mantle of the “New Nature Boy.”

26. Reid Flair: We all remember the tragic tale of Ric Flair’s younger son, who had a sold amateur career and seemed likely to follow in his father’s footsteps, even touring with All Japan Pro Wrestling in 2013. During his unfortunately brief career, he was called “The Third Nature Boy,” with the first two presumably being Rogers and his father . . . though many more were obviously disregarded.

27. Kyle Brooks: This Canadian independent wrestler is still active, mostly around Ontario, after having debuted in 2019. Though he used the Nature Boy for a period of time, more recently he has adopted the moniker “Brother Earth” and started doing an environmentalist gimmick. Go buy his t-shirt if you’re so inclined.

28 & 29. The Nature Boyz: This entry is a little bit different, as it’s a tag team. In 2022 and 2023, trainees Jonny Lyons and Dylan Fliehr were put together as a tag team called “The Nature Boyz” in Booker T’s Reality of Wrestling promotion.

And there you have it. I was able to count 29 Nature Boys.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are also two “Nature Girls” that I became aware of in my research. One his Charlotte Flair, for obvious reasons, though it’s not a moniker that really stuck with her on the main roster of WWE.

The other is a more interesting case. Adela Antone was a lady wrestler in promoter Billy Wolfe’s troupe for less than a year between 1951 and 1952, where she used the nickname “Nature Girl.” That’s not the interesting part, though. The interesting part is that, according to a 1995 newspaper clipping unearthed by When It Was Cool, Antone was once asked to be involved in a murder plot. A man named Harry Washburn was accused of killing a woman named Helen Weaver with a car bomb. According to Antone, Washburn also once offered her $10,000.00 to kill Harry Weaver, the husband of Helen Weaver.

I don’t believe that had anything to do with her being a Nature Girl, though.

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.