Ask 411 Wrestling: Is Danhausen The Most Ridiculous Wrestling Gimmick That Has Worked?

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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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Tyler from Winnipeg neither floats nor stings:

Excuse my spelling, but what was Muhammad Ali’s relationship with pro wrestling?

First off, despite the apology, you spelled the man’s name correctly.

Cassius Clay, who would eventually change his name to Muhammad Ali, was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1942. When he was a child and young man in the 1940s and 1950s, he was a professional wrestling fan. As a boxer, he was known for his bombastic, arrogant interviews building up his matches, and when asked where he learned to talk like that, he credited watching Gorgeous George when he was growing up. In addition to George being an attraction in the early days of national television, he also wrestled Lou Thesz for the NWA World Heavyweight Title on November 27, 1954 in Louisville, which tracks with Ali’s early life and fandom.

In 1976, it was agreed that Ali, at that point the most popular boxer and perhaps the most popular athlete in the world, would have a match against Japanese pro wrestling star Antonio Inoki.

Why?

Money. Inoki and his backers were looking for something that would significantly increase his profile, so they were able to assemble enough money that Ali was paid $1.8 million for the fight, which one inflation calculator tells me would be the equivalent of $10.5 million in 2026.

The match was set for June 26, 1976 in Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan, though fans could buy tickets to see it at arenas worldwide through the technology of closed circuit television.

In the weeks leading up to his encounter with Inoki, Ali spent quite a bit of time in the world of pro wrestling to help hype the bout. On June 1, the boxing star attended a WWWF event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was ringside for a bout between Gorilla Monsoon and Baron Mikel Scicluna. After Scicluna was dumped over the top rope in front of Ali, the boxer leapt to his feet and started calling out Monsoon, ultimately getting into the ring with him. The Gorilla grabbed Muhammad and pulled him into an airplane spin, ultimately leaving him laying. The angle demonstrated the danger a pro wrestler could present for Ali as he headed into the bout with Inoki.

Subsequently, on June 1, 1976, there was a boxer versus wrestler match in Chicago, Illinois with Verne Gagne as the referee as Ali took on AWA mainstay “Sodbuster” Kenny Jay, who was seconded by Dick the Bruiser. “Classy” Freddie Blassie was in Ali’s corner, as Blassie was portrayed as his wrestling manager headed into the Inoki match, since Blassie had a long history of wrestling as a heel in Japan and could help generate heat for the boxer among Japanese fans. In any event, the Ali/Jay match was a total work, with Ali knocking out the wrestler in roughly five minutes.

On June 12, 1976 in Chicago, another boxer versus wrestler exhibition took place, this time with Ali facing Buddy Wolfe. Blassie and Bruiser were the corner men again, and Verne Gagne reprised his role as referee. Wolfe lasted longer with Ali than Jay did, though ultimately the (again, worked) exhibition was stopped for blood, as Wolfe bladed. This was followed by a schmozz with Wolfe attacking Ali after the bell. Once that was sorted out, Ali was challenged to a future match by AWA World Champion Nick Bockwinkel, though obviously that never happened.

Ultimately, Inoki/Ali took place on June 26. It was originally supposed to have been a worked match, with the boxer taking a dive for the wrestler in a dramatic fashion that would allow Ali to save some face. However, much backstage jockeying and intrigue, which you can read about in much more detail in the 2016 book Ali vs. Inoki by Josh Gross, ultimately resulted in the match being a shoot, albeit one that had some very unusual and convoluted rules.

While Ali tried to box Inoki, Inoki stayed on his back for most of the match and threw leg kicks. As a result, Inoki did far more legitimate physical damage to Ali than Ali did to Inoki, but officially the contest was called a draw after fifteen rounds. American fans, who didn’t really understand what Inoki was doing, thought the match was boring and Inoki was a coward. Japanese fans, depending on their vantage point, either saw their country’s hero significantly weaken the international star or at least saw it as Inoki holding his own.

Business-wise, Inoki/Ali is viewed as a bit of a disappointment, though it is often credited with having a massive cultural impact that helped create mixed marital arts.

On March 31, 1985, Ali returned to the wrestling world for the inaugural Wrestlemania, where he was announced as the referee for the main event of Hulk Hogan and Mr. T against Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorff. The initial plan was for Ali to actually ref the match, but he was already feeling the effects of Parkinson’s disease and not physically up to the task, meaning that Pat Patterson stepped in as ref while Ali was a ringside enforcer, though he did get into the ring at one point, helping to separate the competitors after they got into a wild brawl that also began to involve seconds Bob Orton and Jimmy Snuka.

Roughly two months later, on June 1, 1985, Mid-South Wrestling got a taste of Muhammad Ali. Mid-South was trying to push a wrestler called the Snowman as a new, Black babyface to replicate the success they had years earlier with the Junkyard Dog, and they figured that billing Snowman as having a relationship with Ali would get him on the fast track to success. There were some Ali/Snowman promos and then, in the most famous part of the angle, Muhammad was ringside with Snowman at the New Orleans Superdome as he faced Jake “The Snake” Roberts. Ali did connect with a punch on Roberts at one point, but Roberts didn’t sell it big, reportedly because he was concerned about damaging his credibility.

On October 23, 1994, WCW’s Halloween Havoc pay per view was headlined by a World Title match between champion Hulk Hogan and challenger Ric Flair. Muhammad Ali was brought in with the idea that he would present the championship belt to the winner at the end of the night. Ali sat ringside and watched the show. He did present the belt to Hogan following the main event as promised but, again, due to physical limitations, Hulk had to come to Ali’s ringside seat for the moment rather than Ali entering the ring. In a fun coincidence, Nick Bockwinkel, who challenged Ali to a world title match almost 20 years earlier, was standing there for the presentation, as he was WCW’s on-screen commissioner a the time.

It’s also worth noting that, in a more heartwarming moment from Halloween Havoc, Vader got into Muhammad Ali’s face during his entrance. Vader, at the time a heel who would yell “Who’s the man?” while walking down to the ring, did just that while staring down Ali. However, in a tribute that broke kayfabe, on this night Vader finished his questioning by saying to Ali, “Who’s the man? You’re the man.”

Ali would be associated with both Antonio Inoki and WCW again in 1995, when Inoki, at the time a Japanese politician, had the idea of promoting two massive pro wrestling cards in North Korea to try to ease tensions between that country and the international community. Called the Pyongyang International Sports and Culture Festival for Peace, Inoki recruited stars from both NJPW and WCW to attend the event, in addition to having Ali there was the event’s “special guest.” He had no real role on the shows aside from being present. The second night of the Festival, headlined by Inoki and Ric Flair, was aired as a WCW pay per view in the U.S. under the name Collision in Korea. The whole affair also became a fascinating episode of Dark Side of the Ring years later.

That’s it for Ali’s pro wrestling appearances as far as I know. He has popped up in some other wrestling media over the years. In the March 1998 issue of WCW Magazine, there was a cover story about him meeting Diamond Dallas Page. He appears as a playable character in the Japanese wrestling video game Virtual Pro Wrestling, though for legal reasons he’s never referred to by name. When Virtual Pro Wrestling was brought to the U.S. as WCW vs. nWo: World Tour, the Ali character was retained, though he was given the name Joe Bruiser. More recently, he has shown up in mobile games WWE Champions and WWE Supercard, in addition to being a playable character in a full-fledged wrestling game thanks to WWE 2K24.

And, of course, Ali was posthumously inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame’s celebrity wing in 2024.

Night Wolf the Wise displays fidelity to his character:

What would be your top 10 most ridiculous gimmicks that a wrestler made work?

Every time this question gets asked, the a-number one answer is The Undertaker, and I agree he’s the best example. If you were to write a two or three sentence summary of Taker’s character and have no prior familiarity with his actual body of work, you’d think we were describing something on the level of Mantaur or Isaac Yankem, DDS, not one of the most loved and respected wrestlers of the last thirty-plus years.

I also think that we’re seeing another iteration of a ridiculous gimmick working despite the odds in WWE right this very minute. I’m talking about Danhausen. Think about it for a second. What exactly is Danhausen, anyway? Why does he walk, talk, dress, and act like he does? Is he a demon of some kind? Is he a wrestler trying to play the role of a demon? Is he a super genius playing mind games to throw his opponents off base? Is he a late night horror host? What’s his thing with loose teeth? None of this makes any sense, none of it has been explained, and yet he became one of the most popular wrestlers in the company overnight, though we’ll see if the act has legs.

Let’s go old school for a minute and talk about the Zebra Kid. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, former NCAA Heavyweight Champion from Ohio State George Bollas got into pro wrestling. However, he was missing something in the personality department, so he put on a striped mask and called himself the Zebra Kid. Why was he the Zebra Kid? Because he had big stretch marks on his body that apparently reminded the wrong people of a zebra’s stripes. He turned this into a successful career that spanned several territories, all from a gimmick that started off as, “Hey, let’s laugh at this guy’s body!”

Doink the Clown also comes to mind here. Wrestling had seen a lot of bizarre gimmicks by the time Doink debuted, but something about a literal clown still seemed like a bridge too far. Yet, the original iteration portrayed by Matt Borne as a miserable, creepy bastard had a lot of entertaining moments and got over decently well.

What about a product placement gimmick that actually got over somewhat? It happened in the late 2000s in AAA, when the Eveready battery company, which has a cat as a mascot, paid AAA money to dress one of its luchadors up as Gato Eveready or “The Eveready Cat.” The wrestler in question ran with the gimmick for three years and, when the sponsorship deal expired, he was so well-established that he continued to wrestle as El Gato for a while longer. (Eventually, he switched gimmicks altogether and became Drago, who was featured in Lucha Underground.)

Going back to the U.S., I would put Kamala into this category. I’ve said before this character is highly, highly problematic given the stereotypes it reinforces, but it did work insomuch as it turned Jim Harris into a credible monster heel who terrorized babyfaces all over the country and even got some copycats like Uganda. Even putting aside the racism, it is a ludicrous notion to think that there was an uneducated “savage” existing in the 1980s who could be brought to the U.S. to wrestle but seemingly never learned anything about how to better fit into the culture despite being in America for decades.

I’m now heading to a personal favorite of mine from back in the tape trading days of the 1990s: Gran Naniwa. For those who don’t know him, Naniwa was part of the Michinoku Pro roster in that Japanese indy’s glory days, and his whole deal was that he was a crab. He wrestled in a crab mask, he wore giant pinchers as part of his entrance, and he had a crab walk that he did in his matches, even using it to walk the ropes. One of the reasons it worked, though, is that Naniwa wrestled primarily like a guy who was trying to win an athletic contest, and his comedy bits were just added flourishes.

Goldust probably belongs on this list. The gimmick at first blush was designed to play on wrestling fans’ deep-seated homophobia in the mid-1990s. Had it just been that, though, it probably would have burned out pretty quickly. Dustin Rhodes gave the character more depth and dimension, particularly after a couple of years when it was mentioned that Goldust was part of his effort to get out from underneath the shadow of his father.

On the indy front, I’m also going to mention Delirious, though it’s with a bit of a caveat. There are plenty of promotions where Delirious would have fit in and worked, but the surprising thing to me is that Delirious worked specifically in Ring of Honor, where at the time fans for the most part liked their wrestling super-serious and deride efforts to deviate from their strict parameters for what should be happening in the squared circle. The brilliance of Delirious, though, was he knew how to perfectly balance his off kilter character with “serious” pro wrestling.

Let’s close it out with The Hurricane. In 2001 when Shane Helms debuted the Hurricane character, we were just a couple of years removed from the gritty, hard hitting Attitude Era, and it was surprising to see a goofball wannabe superhero character get over. If you want further proof that the gimmick wasn’t a guaranteed winner, take a look at what happened when WWE tried to do the exact same thing with Nikki Cross during the pandemic.

Ron has a sock on his head:

My question has to do with masked wrestlers. I was a NWA, AWA, & WCW fan from childhood with a full on kayfabe. Did watch WWF. I started with the Mid-Atlantic area wrestling. I remember the Great Bolos in the 60’s; the 70’s with the Destroyer and Super-Destroyer; etc. Masked wrestlers were mainly heels. Growing up, I remember the excitement when a goal of the face was to try and pull the mask off. It was mostly a failed attempt or disqualification. Do you have any records of when the masked wrestler was actually exposed during/after the match?

There have been tons and tons of wrestler unmaskings over the years, particularly in the world of lucha libre, but given how Ron’s question is phrased, I’m going to focus this answer mainly on wrestlers losing their hoods during the territorial era in the good ole’ U.S.A. and Canada. Also, this won’t be an exhaustive list, just some key unmaskings from over the years. Feel free to add your own memories in the comments.

First off, there was a long history of masked wrestlers competing in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Wrestling territory. Rather than running down each one of them who was unmasked, I’ll just say that I found a great list on mapleleafwrestling.com which names every wrestler who was unmasked in the territory between 1936 and 1984, in addition to who unmasked them and what their true identity wound up being.

Records show that, on July 6, 1945, National Wrestling Association World Champion Wild Bill Longson took on masked wrestler the Green Hornet in Georgia, with Longson not only winning the match but also taking Hornet’s mask. The bug-based wrestler was revealed as David Mann. Later the same year in Georgia, masked heel the Black Demon showed up, though he was eventually beaten and unmasked by Al Massey, with the Demon’s true identity being Marvin Jones.

In the 1950s in the Montreal territory, also called International Wrestling, promoter Eddie Quinn placed a variety of wrestlers under hoods and billed them as the Masked Marvel. In 1959 match at the Montreal Forum, Johnny Rougeau (the uncle of the WWF’s Fabulous Rougeau Brothers) was able to unmask the Marvel, revealing him to be Dominic DeNucci, whose career I did a deep dive on back in December.

There were also a ton of masked wrestlers running around Georgia in October of 1967, including Oki Yama, El Lobo, and Avenger #2. Oki and the Avenger first had a mask versus mask match, which the Avenger lost en route to being outed as Ramon Torres. Yama then lost his mask to Mr. Wrestling (Tim Woods) to let everyone know he was really Butcher Vachon, and then Ramon Torres got a bit of revenge for his unmasking by defeating and de-hooding El Lobo, who was Stan Vachon.

Jumping to 1974, Dewey Robertson – later known as the Missing Link – was wrestling in Toronto under a mask as the guardian until he crossed the original Sheik on a card held on April 21. The Sheik not just beat him but also took his hood.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Angelo Poffo ran the outlaw territory International Championship Wrestling out of Lexington, Kentucky, and Poffo also wrestled there under a mask as “The Miser,” playing off his reputation of being a tightwad. In April 1979, the Miser faced somebody using the name of Mr. Wrestling in a mask versus mask match in Georgetown, Kentucky. However, it provided not to be one of the famous Mr. Wrestlings, as this version was unmasked as Don Starr.

Going from the south to the north and particularly the Minnesota-based American Wrestling Association, the Crusher was embroiled with a feud against the masked team of the Super Destroyers in the early part of 1980. As part of that rivalry, Crusher got the mask off of Super Destroyer Mark III, who turned out to be French Canadian wrestler Neil Guay, known later in his career as the Hangman. In an interesting twist on the unmasking story, this lead to Crusher and Mark III actually becoming partners, teaming to feud with Nick Bockwinkel and Super Destroyer Mark II (who was a young Sgt. Slaughter).

As part of the longstanding feud between Dusty Rhodes and Kevin Sullivan in the Florida territory, Rhodes was suspended and came back under a mask as the Midnight Rider. Then, Sullivan was also suspended, and he also came back under a mask as Lucifer. Rider and Lucifer had a mask match in a steel cage on September 20, 1983, and the Rider won, revealing Lucifer as Sullivan, something everybody pretty well already knew.

Next door to Florida, we’ve got Alabama, and 1983 and 1984 in that territory saw a feud between the masked Super Olympia and Jacques Rougeau. The two had a mask versus hair match January 23, 1984 in Birmingham, which Rougeau won. This outed Super Olympia as a young Arn Anderson. (And even a young Arn Anderson looked like he was 45 years old.)

On May 21, 1984 in World Class Championship Wrestling, the masked Super Destroyers cheated to win the NWA American Tag Team Titles from the ream of Rock n’ Soul, consisting of Iceman King Parsons and noted piece of shit Buck Zumhofe. As a measure of revenge, Parsons and Zumbhofe attacked the Destroyers after the bell and unmasked them, showing the crowd that they were Bill and Scott Irwin.

That does it for this week. 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.