Ask 411 Wrestling: Did Hulk Hogan Ever Sell His Wrestlemania III Trunks?

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 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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We’re doing something a bit different with this week’s questions. I’m one of those jerks who, when he is told not to do something, just wants to do it ten more times. Thus, when a commenter on a recent column complained about the fact that we often answer queries from Tyler from Winnipeg, it resulted in me doing this: A full column of nothing but Tyler’s questions!

So, put on your Jets hockey jersey, because this column is going to be a veritable stroll down the Esplanade Riel with our favorite Pegger.

Did the Hulk Hogan yellow trunks, match worn at WM3, ever sold to a private collector? If so, how much?

Possibly. There is a Reddit thread from four years ago that claimed the trunks in question were for sale on eBay, but there’s nothing in the thread indicating how the trunks being sold were verified as those from Mania III, and it appears that the eBay link is long since dead. If the Reddit comments are to be believed, the bidding for this piece of wrestling history was up to $30,000.00 at one point in time.

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be much more out there on this subject.

Which wrestlers perform the Sharpshooter/Scorpion Death Lock the best?

Honestly, I feel like the Scorpion is one of those moves that looks a lot better as a result of the effort of the person taking the move as opposed to the person applying the move. After Bret Hart left the WWF and the hold started being used a lot more by guys like the Rock, it seems that somebody decided the proper thing for a person locked in a sharpshooter to do was to hold themselves up off the mat on their forearms. To an extent I understand why they did this, because it makes it easier for the camera to get a shot of their face while they sell, but it makes the move look so much less painful, because you’re just laying there with your legs slightly elevated. However, when Bret was using the hold, wrestlers taking it would almost invariably go down on to their chests/stomachs, which made it easier to believe that they were being bent at an uncomfortable angle (i.e. folded over themselves like the body of a scorpion – which is where the hold gets its name for anybody who didn’t know).

The move also looks significantly better the more flexible the person taking it is, because more flexibility = more ability to fold oneself in half. A Sharpshooter applied to Shawn Michaels always looked so much better than a Sharpshooter/Scorpion applied to Kevin Nash, for example.

As a result, some of my all-time favorite versions of this hold have actually been applied by Natalya, believe it or not. Because her opponents are usually smaller and less muscle-bound than those faced by men who have used the hold, she can really put some torque on it – including a couple of particularly painful variations against people like Melina and AJ Lee, who she was able to fold until the soles of their feet were pressing against their own heads.

I also have to get some credit to Ronnie Garvin, who did a version of the move where he rocked back and forth, as though he was applying more pressure each team he leaned back. It was a unique take on the move that I don’t recall anybody doing before or since.

And of course you have to give credit to Riki Choshu, who invented the move, calling it the Sasori-Gatame, translating to “Scorpion Hold.”

This is a weird one but who or what does MiCasa mean in wrestling?

MiCasa was the pen name of Mike Samuda, who was one of the first pro wrestling columnists to hit it big with his own website back in the early-to-mid-1990s. In the pre-internet world, people who wanted “insider” wrestling news typically got it from either calling a hotline number, paying for the call per minute, or by subscribing to a print newsletter like Wrestling Observer, which had been in business since the 1980s, or the Pro Wrestling Torch, which came along a bit later. MiCasa essentially gathered information from hotlines and newsletters and posted it on the web with his own commentary, gaining a sizable following, including some fans who would regularly take signs with his URL on them to WWF and WCW television tapings.

Also popular around the same time for the same reasons: Sushi-X.

What is Vince McMahon’s best match where he wrestled?

If you’re going by Dave Meltzer’s star ratings, it’s his Wrestlemania XXII no holds barred match against Shawn Michaels, which clocks in at 3.5 snowflakes.

He’s also got four matches under his belt which earned 3.25 stars, namely: vs. Bobby Lashley (One Night Stand 2007), w/ Shane McMahon & Big Show vs. Triple H & Shawn Michaels (Unforgiven 2006), w/ Shane McMahon vs. Triple H & Shawn Michaels (Summerslam 2006), and w/ Shane McMahon vs. Shawn Michaels (Backlash 2006).

We’ll see how Pat McAfee does. I’m already a big fan of his antivirus software.

What fell apart with Mickey Rourke vs. Chris Jericho at Wrestlemania having an actual match?

According to an interview that Rourke himself gave to the Guardian which ran on April 6, 2009 – the day after Wrestlemania XXV – the issue came down to insurance. At the time of Mania, Mickey was filming Iron Man 2, in which he played Whiplash, the lead heel. Apparently the insurance company that was providing coverage for Rourke during the filming did not like the prospect of him being injured in the ring and refused to allow the bout against Jericho.

Is Roman Reigns the head of the table moving forward? Or is it Drew McIntyre?

Given that Drew McIntyre just had a “surprise” return from injury at the Royal Rumble and the almost universal reaction seems to have been, “Wait, Drew McIntyre was injured?”, I have to say that he’s not lighting the world on fire right now and Roman is the true head of the table.

Can you please link a twenty minute match or so for KENTA, I’ve picked up you are a big fan; how great is he? I know CM Punk used his GTS.

KENTA was a great professional wrestler – perhaps one of the best in the world – from roughly 2003 through the end of 2012, when he was the most significant junior heavyweight in Pro Wrestling NOAH. However, he slowed down greatly when he jumped to WWE as Hideo Itami, in part because the style was not consistent with what he had worked in the past and in part because of repeated injuries. Since being released from the E in 2019, he has returned to Japan and now competes for NJPW. He is not nearly as consistent a performer in New Japan as he was in NOAH and has been accused of working to the level of his opponent instead of going all out in each and every one of his matches.

And here’s the match you asked for:

Was Rob Van Dam dangerous to his opponents in the ring?

I would defer to anybody who has actually wrestled him, but based on everything that I’ve heard over the years, I’m going to say no. He has historically had a reputation for potatoing people, i.e. punching or kicking them harder than he actually should, but that’s never resulted in anything more than a black eye or a split lip here and there. I wouldn’t call that “unsafe” within the confines of professional wrestling, because, as Jim Ross is fond of saying, this ain’t ballet.

Can you please tell me why Eddie Gilbert didn’t achieve more recognition for his work?

He didn’t have the size to be a main event star in a major promotion during the time that he was wrestling (the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s). When it came to smaller territories during that period, he gained a reputation as being unreliable, as he often walked out of the companies he was working for. Combine that with the fact that he died at the age of 33, and that’s not exactly a recipe for being remembered decades after your career came to an end.

I’m well aware of “the casket bump” HBK took that kept him out of the WWE for at least five years. Was it back surgery that kept out HBK out for that long ALONE or where there other reasons on top of his back why he was absent?

The back injury legitimately was the main reason that he stayed out of the ring all those years, but it did look at one point like we were going to see his return earlier than we actually did. In 2001, Jim Ross was regularly writing a “Ross Report” for WWF.com which reported some office-approved backstage news to fans. Ross Reports in January 2001 were very open about the fact that J.R. was negotiating a new contract with the Heartbreak Kid because his deal with the promotion was set to expire in June of that year. (Yes, from March 1998 through January 2001, Michaels was under contract and getting paid to do next to nothing.) It was further indicated by Ross that a deal was successfully reached and that there was a hope Shawn would return to the ring that calendar year.

According to issue #302 of the Figure Four Weekly newsletter, there was a plan to have Michaels return to WWF television on the last Raw before Wrestlemania XVII in 2001, but the angle had to be cut for time because that was the program in which it was revealed that Shane McMahon purchased WCW out from under the nose of his father. F4W went on to report that the Michaels segment was then moved to the following episode of Smackdown so that it could have aired before Mania, but HBK reportedly showed up in no condition to perform and was sent home. As a result, we didn’t see him back until over a year later.

Who is Bob Due?

I’m guessing that you mean Bob Dhue. There’s nobody associated with wrestling that I know of who is named Bob Due . . . though Bob Dhue’s name was consistently misspelled as “Bob Due” when it was referenced in Triple H’s 2004 bodybuilding book/mini-autobiography Making the Game.

In any event, Dhue was a WCW executive in the early 1990s and was president of the company for a period of time. The earliest reference that I was able to find to him in the Wrestling Observer was in the April 13, 1992 issue in which it was mentioned that Kip Frey, who had the title of executive vice president and was essentially running the day-to-day operations of the company, would now be reporting to Dhue as opposed to a prior executive, Jack Petrik. Dhue was gone by April 20, 1995, as the Observer on that date said he had been let go by Eric Bischoff, who in the intervening years had leapfrogged over him in the corporate structure.

Dhue doesn’t have any storied history in professional wrestling. It’s not as though he was a former wrestler or territorial promoter who worked his way up the ladder to become an employee of the second largest promotion in the United States. According to a 2013 interview with his daughter Laurie Dhue, who at the time was an anchor for the Glenn Beck-founded conservative “news” outlet The Blaze, her father was much better known throughout his career for being the president of the Omni Coliseum, an arena in Atlanta, Georgia that hosted many, many professional wrestling events over the years, in addition to being the home to the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the NHL’s short-lived Atlanta Flames. Though I’ve never heard anybody directly say this, I suspect that connections from his time running the Omni helped him land his spot with WCW.

For what it’s worth, Dhue is mentioned in HHH’s book because he credits Dhue with getting him his job in WCW. Trips met WCW promoter Chip Burnham at a convention and gave him his resume, Burnham passed the resume on to Dhue, and Dhue told Eric Bischoff – who had just started working underneath him – to contact the young wrestler about a job.

Did Ahmed Johnson get as far in the WWE as he could or did he not get the bang for his buck over his tenure?

I think he topped out right about where he was going to top out. Ahmed did have a certain charisma about him but was a fairly limited performer both in terms of his in-ring skills and his promos. On top of that, he was injury prone, spending a fair amount of his time under contract to the company sitting on the sidelines. Had it not been for the injury issues, I could maybe have seen him getting a WWF Title reign, since the roster was thin at the time and he was at least as good as the Ultimate Warrior, who had been pushed to a similar position not long before. However, unless he somehow improved significantly from where he was during his Intercontinental Title reign, he was probably never going to be anything more than a flash in the pan.

Side note: The WWF/WWE tends to promote Johnson as the first Black man to win a singles title in the company. He’s not. Bobo Brazil held a United States Championship recognized by the WWWF in the 1960s.

Was Mike Tenay’s greatest quick audio call “He kicked out from the Hogan legdrop!” If not what’s Mike Tenay’s best quick audio call?

Honestly, I don’t know that there are a lot of super-memorable Mike Tenay soundbites in the same way that Jim Ross has had so many lines that have been preserved over the years or that Gordon Solie delivered iconic phrases that are still used today.

I will always laugh at the time TNA’s production crew accidentally caught Tenay and Don West on camera reading scripted lines, though:

Did you ever purchase a wrestling t-shirt at a live wrestling event? If so, which one was your most treasured purchase; looking back?

I’ve purchased a lot of wrestling t-shirts at events over the years. The one that probably stands out the most to me was on October 13, 2007, when I was in Berwyn, Illinois for the taping of SHIMMER Volume 15. One of the encounters on the card was “Dark Angel” Sarah Stock (also from Winnipeg, much like the guy who asked this question) versus Daizee Haze. Though I don’t think the bout was quite as good when I’ve gone back and watched it on DVD, there was something about being there in the moment that made the performance really stand out to me. As soon as I could after the final bell rang, I got over to the merchandise stand and picked up a Daizee Haze shirt and a couple of DVDs that she was selling.

I still have them all floating around here in my collection someplace, though it’s been several years since they saw the light of day.

Was Hollywood Hulk Hogan too confident heading into his Nitro match versus Lex Luger? The NWO bravado might have been his downfall in my opinion.

I think his downfall was the fact that the booking sheet said Luger was going over.

Have you ever seen a screen grab or a picture showing a 5:00 o’clock shadow on Vince McMahon? Is he always super clean shaven?

He is always super clean shaven. If you listen to interviews or podcasts with guys who have worked closely with McMahon over the years, including Bruce Prichard and Jim Cornette, they all say that he has a habit of constantly shaving with an electric razor, multiple times per day.

More of a personal question here, do you enjoy watching Chris Benoit’s matches. I do, he was so good in the ring.

Not anymore. I can’t see the guy and not be preoccupied with the fact that he murdered his wife and his child.

I’m no business expert but with the Peacock and Fox deals; isn’t there some ruffled feathers? It’s seems strange to me but I’m no expert.

I don’t know that I’ve heard of anybody being upset over the WWE having television on Fox. (Except perhaps for Viacom executives who were outbid for Smackdown.) However, as far as professional wrestlers are concerned, there are at least a few who have gone on record as saying that they are not fans of the business model that WWE has adopted since the launch of the WWE Network, which in the United States has now morphed into WWE’s content being hosted on Peacock.

Back when traditional pay per view was a bigger slice of WWE’s business pie and when those shows and other features were released on DVD, wrestlers would receive PPV bonuses and royalties for footage of them being used on home video. However, all of that went away with the Network/Peacock deals. In fact, as recently as last year, CM Punk said that he would never appear on Steve Austin’s Broken Skull Sessions in its current form because he would not receive any royalties from it.

I’m pretty sure Vince McMahon’s Dad is in the WWE HOF but I think it was after his death. Does Vince go in while he’s still kickin’?

Yes, the elder Vince McMahon was inducted into his son’s Hall of Fame posthumously. However, there really wasn’t much of a choice. McMahon Sr. died in 1984, and there was no WWF Hall of Fame until 1993, when Andre the Giant was inducted shortly after his own passing.

Though anything is possible, I have a hard time believing that the now-existent Vince McMahon will live to see his own induction . . . and he probably wants it that way. Word on the street from a variety of shoot interviews is that those who do go into the HOF are told not to thank or acknowledge McMahon in their acceptance speeches. If he does not want that sort of recognition as part of the ceremony, I doubt that he will ever agree to be inducted, either. (Of course, I wrote this several days before it was announced that Vince himself would be inducting the Undertaker into the Hall. Go figure.)

The only way that I could see this happening would be if McMahon handed off control of WWE to somebody other than himself prior to his passing and that individual somehow arranged for a surprise induction.

When it comes to underrated celebrity one offs, guys like Ben Stiller or Steve-O in wrestling; is there someone you would like to mention as fun for everyone?

One of my favorites that I think a lot of modern professional wrestling fans forget about is the time that Muhammad Ali mixed it up with Gorilla Monsoon, which you can see below:

The thing that makes this interaction stand out to me is that Ali respected pro wrestling and Monsoon enough that he was willing to actually let Gorilla get the better of the situation, whereas nowadays in wrestling celebrities all too often go over the athletes that they’re put in the squared circle against, which is problematic because it makes wrestling look fake – since anybody can do it – and it hurts the wrestlers’ credibility as they move forward and attempt to have programs with regular members of the roster once the celeb is gone.

That will do it for this week’s installment of the column. 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.