Ask 411 Wrestling: Is The Undertaker Overrated?

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Ask 411 Wrestling! I am Ryan Byers, and I am here to finish out my three week run filling in for Massive Q. What is world famous jewel thief Mathew Sforcina doing while he’s gone?

Well . . .

Well he sneaks around the world from Kiev to Carolina. He’s a sticky-fingered filcher from Berlin down to Belize. He’ll take you for a ride on a slow boat to China. Tell me where in the world is Mathew Sforcina?

He’ll steal their Seoul in South Korea, make Antarctica cry Uncle. From the Red Sea to Greenland they’ll be singing the blues. Well they never Arkansas him steal the Mekong from the delta. Tell me where in the world is Mathew Sforcina?

He’ll go from Nashville to Norway, Bonaire to Zimbabwe, Chicago to Czechoslovakia and back!

Well he’ll ransack Pakistan and run a scam in Scandinavia. Then he’ll stick ’em up Down Under and go pick-pocket Perth. He put the Mat in Mat-demeanor when he stole the beans from Lima. Tell me where in the world is Mathew Sforcina?

I don’t know the answer to that question now, but I can tell you where Mat will be next week. He’ll be right back here, answering your questions once more. Show him how much you missed him by sending him some new queries here.

BANNER!

Zeldas!

Check out Mat’s Drabble blog, 1/10 of a Picture!

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Feedback Loop

I don’t know what was wrong with me last week, but I made my share of careless errors. We can address all of those in summary fashion: 1) Tiger Jeet Singh is the father, Tiger Ali Singh is the son; 2) the Atlanta Falcons are a football team, while the Atlanta Hawks are a basketball team; and 3) I have NO IDEA how I wound up confusing Kendo Nagasaki and the Great Kabuki after having written about both of them for years.

Also, long-time contributor APinOZ told me that my least favorite wrestling move in history has a real name . . . it’s called the “Possum Stomp,” and apparently it was actually used as a FINISHING HOLD by Tex McKenzie when he worked in Australia during the 1970s.

Then, there were all of the comments about the American Civil War. Let me just address all of those by saying . . . oh, shoot, we’re out of time for this week’s feedback section!

Getting Down To All The Business

James P. checks in with a series of questions, including one that is quite timely:

1) Wellness violation aside, isn’t Roman Reigns going to be more of a new Randy Orton than a new John Cena? He will always be pushed and never lose his spot but I don’t see him selling crazy amounts of merch if his gear never changes or being the star that a decade’s worth of sick children want to see and look to for hope.

This really depends on what you mean by the “new John Cena.” Reigns – assuming that his status doesn’t change as a result of the aforementioned suspension – already IS the new John Cena in the sense that he’s dominant babyface of the company who everything revolves around. (This would also make Reigns the new Hulk Hogan, the new Bruno Sammartino, the new Perdo Morales, and so on.) That sense of “the new John Cena” is decided by the company and nobody else.

If the question is whether Reigns will be as successful as John Cena or whether he will only reach the level of success reached by Randy Orton, that remains to be seen. Certainly, Reigns and Cena’s careers have followed similar trajectories in that they initially got over huge with hardcore fans because of their early gimmicks (Cena as a rapper and Reigns as a member of the Shield) only for those hardcore fans to later reject them because of what was perceived as a neutering of those characters when circumstances changed (Cena turning face and the Shield breaking up). However, the height of Cena’s popularity prior to the fans turning on him seemed to be higher than the heights that Regins reached, and the fall that Reigns has taken since the height of his popularity seems to have been much harder than the fall that Cena took. For example, you used to always be able to say that Cena would, at a minimum, have the women and children in any given crowd on his side, and I can’t say that Reigns has that. Also, there were some cities in the U.S. (mostly in flyover country) where Cena could still count on being solidly supported, and I’m not certain that Reigns really has that, either.

In other words, Roman Reigns is a much lesser star than John Cena. He’s a step below Cena in fans’ minds, and I think that putting him on Orton’s level in terms of popularity is a fair comparison at this point in time. Ultimately, my prediction is that what will determine whether Reigns can take it to that next level (again, assuming he isn’t downgraded by the company on his return from suspension) is the extent to which John Cena remains active in the company. If Cena still has three to five years left in the tank as a top star, it will be difficult for Reigns to ever overtake him, no matter how hard the company tries. However, if Cena is willing to take a backseat or step away from professional wrestling, then the door will be open for Reigns to take his spot and potentially ascend to his level. It all remains to be seen.

2) Does John Cena not get enough credit for living his gimmick as good as a Flair or Undertaker? I mean the guy is always John Cena and you know the minute you see him who he is and what he is and what will happen next.

I think that it is fairly easy for John Cena to live his gimmick because, frankly, I don’t think that there is much of a John Cena gimmick. Granted, the situations that Cena is put into on a week-to-week basis on Raw are scripted, but if you listen to any “shoot” interview or mainstream media appearance that he has done, the personality of the real man is virtually inseperable from the personality of the character. Really, that’s the model that more wrestlers should be allowed to follow. Believe it or not, pro wrestlers are not usually trained actors, and, in most instances, when you require them to perform in a manner that is a gross departure from who they truly are, it comes off as unnatural and forced. The closer we can keep people to “playing themselves” on TV, the more organic feeling a product we will be watching.

3) Is the Undertaker overrated? His early career sort of sucked, everyone else takes the big bumps in his big matches and how hard can it be to look badass if you’re allowed to no sell everyone’s offense? Walking the ropes and a finisher that clearly can’t hurt much really makes you the most repected man ever?

No, the Undertaker is not overrated.

It is true that, in the early days of his WWF run, most of his matches weren’t anything to write home about. There was a lot of standing around, a lot of goofy looking strikes with the point of the hand, and a lot of choking. Oh, so much choking. However, the matches weren’t bad because of lack of ability on Taker’s part. The matches were bad because of the character that he was being asked to play. If you look at his work prior to becoming the Undertaker and if you look at his work past the first couple of years in the WWF, it was obvious that he knew what he was doing and he wasn’t that bad at it. When the Fed headed into 1993 and 1994, he started to put on more athletic performances, though even then he was hampered by less than spectacular opponents such as the Giant Gonzalez or a later-in-life Kamala. However, when he mixed it up with talented big men along the lines of Yokozuna or even Kevin Nash, he delivered perfectly acceptable big man matches, and, by 1996, he started having some outright great bouts with smaller opponents such as Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, and Steve Austin. The big guy battles even got better as well, as Vader was part of the company’s roster by that time. Yes, he had more talented opponents, but Taker was holding up his end of the bargain as well.

With the WWF overall becoming more focused on quality matches in the mid and late 1990s and beyond, you could reliably count on the Undertaker to deliver good to great bouts from 1996 through the end of his run as a full-time performer in roughly 2010. (Granted, there were some dogs in there, too. Kronik and post-2002 Hulk Hogan come to mind.) That’s fourteen years as an a-level in-ring performer, which is the kind of run that most wrestlers would murder for. Combine that with the work that he did playing his gimmick – which is one of the most celebrated characters in pro wrestling history over the last quarter-century – and you have a man who deserves every bit of reverence that he receives, even if time has started to catch up with him in his recent matches.

Brian G. has a question that ties into our upcoming re-brand split:

Here’s something for you to take on that might take some time, and therefore I expect a personal thank you from Sforcina in the Feedback Loop of his return column for me not shooting the query to him.
With the return of a second top belt expected with the brand extension, we will end a nearly three year loop in which the WWE had to generate additional main event caliber singles matches that did not involve a belt.
Can you do a compendium of sorts of the matches that met this criteria during the one-belt era? “Main event” should be decided by you, but should not mean only final match on the card. You can skip Wrestlemania, as there are legends and special attractions on those cards to make it more palatable.
Star ratings, ten word synopses, haikus, whatever format you choose is fine. See if at the end you can identify any trends. One trend I’m interested in is whether stipulations enhanced or hurt the matches, but anything you recognize would be interesting and valid in response.

Last week, I answered a question about why Hulk Hogan did not defend the WCW Title on every pay per view while he was champion in the mid-1990s. The way the reader asked the question made it seem as though he expected the pay per views to not do as well because there was not a championship match featured on them. However, when I looked into the numbers, they didn’t bear that out. The WCW PPVs without Hogan title defenses did just fine, and, in fact, they drew better than the WWF shows of the same era, which almost always had a world title match on the card. This underscores one thing that a few fans don’t seem to understand: A championship match is a nice way to prop up a show, but a show can draw without a major championship match so long as there’s something else that fans want to see, either because of the intensity of the feud, the star power of the performers, or the spectacle of the match.

WWE has proven this many times over, both during the era where they had one “world title” and the era where they had two “world titles.” Thus, rather than limiting my answer to the period in which there was only one world championship, I give to you this summary of the WWE matches that have main evented on pay per view over (or instead of) championship bouts throughout the company’s history. Note that I have a very particular definition of the phrase “main event.” I agree with Brian. It’s not the last match on the show. In my opinion, the main event is the primary match that the show is built around and that fans are tuning into see, regardless of positioning on the card. Though occasionaly a promotion will bill a double or even triple main event, in my opinion true co-main events are exceedingly rare. There is almost always one bout that the promoters are truly trying to make out as the most important.

Making a viable main event without a championship was the basis of two of WWE’s earliest pay per views, namely the Royal Rumble and the Survivor Series, with the latter show being created specifically because the promotion wanted to make money off of a Hulk Hogan/Andre the Giant match in the wake of Wrestlemania III without giving away another singles bout. From its inception in 1988 through 1993, I would consider the Royal Rumble match to have been the true main event of the Royal Rumble card, and, of those shows, the championship was only on the line in 1992. More recently, the 2011 and 2012 Royal Rumble cards featured some championship matches, but they were relatively weak (featuring guys like the Miz and Dolph Ziggler), so the Rumble proper was still a bigger deal than anything else on the show. On the Survivor Series from 1987 through 1990, the elimination matches were far and away the focus of the show, and they would return to the main event slot in 1993 (All-Americans vs. Foreign Fanatics, 2001 (Team WWF vs. The Alliance in the Invasion blow-off), 2005 (Team Raw vs. Team Smackdown during the original brand split), and 2014 (Team Cena vs. The Authority leading to Sting’s debut).

In more recent years, Hell in a Cell has been another popular gimmick that has been used to turn a non-title match into the primary draw of a show. This began with the first-ever HIAC encounter, Shawn Michaels vs. The Undertaker at Bad Blood 1997. The trick was repeated at Bad Blood 2004 (Michaels vs. HHH in the Cell taking precedence over a Chris Benoit/Kane championship bout), Armageddon 2005 (Undertaker vs. Randy Orton in the Cell) Hell in a Cell 2010 (Kane vs. Undertaker in the Cell headlining over an Orton/Sheamus title match), and Hell in a Cell 2015 (Undertaker vs. Brock Lesnar blowing off their feud in a Cell match getting promoted over a Seth Rollins/Kane title bout).

There are a few other gimmick matches that have been used to boost an encounter’s importance over that of a title fight. These include the Buried Alive match (Undertaker vs. Mankind at Buried Alive 1996, at which the WWF Title was bumped to a dark match), ladder match (John Cena vs. Dolph Ziggler at TLC 2010), Money in the Bank (Cena’s ladder match win at MITB 2012 was promoted over the CM Punk/Daniel Bryan WWE Title match on the same show), and the TLC match (Dean Ambrose vs. Bray Wyatt at TLC 2014).

Sometimes you don’t need a gimmick in order to make a main event, though. Having a big enough star who transcends the rest of your roster will usually do the trick, regarldess of whether a belt is on the line. The first few Summerslams were all built around Hulk Hogan headlining in non-title matches, including a tag match with Randy Savage against Ted DiBiase and Andre the Giant in 1988, another tag with Brutus Beefcake against Savage and Zeus in 1989, and a singles match in 1990 against Earthquake that came off of a heavy injury angle. (The Ultimate Warrior vs. Rick Rude for the WWF Title in a cage actually went on last that night, but it was clearly a secondary match in terms of importance.) More recently, the Rock and Brock Lesnar have been effective at carrying PPVs without holding world titles, including Rock’s tag match with John Cena against R-Truth and the Miz at the 2011 Survivor Series, Lesnar facing John Cena at Extreme Rules 2012, Lesnar vs. HHH at Summerslam 2012, Lesnar wrestling HHH again at Extreme Rules 2013, Lesnar against the Undertaker at Summerslam 2015, and Lesnar once more in a triple threat against Dean Ambrose and Roman Reigns at this year’s Fast Lane.

Another tactic for creating a main event when you don’t have a title? Put together a tag team match that is star-studded and advances a major feud. We’ve got examples of that with Shawn Michaels, Ahmed Johnson, & Sid taking on Camp Cornette at In Your House: International Incident of Pancakes, the Hart Foundation facing Steve Austin, The Road Warriors, Goldust, and Ken Shamrock at the legendary Canadian Stampede show, HHH, the New Age Outlaws, and Savio Vega mixing it up with Austin, Owen Hart, Cactus Jack, and Chainsaw Charlie at No Way Out of Texas, the “Inaugural Brawl” that headlined the WWF vs. WCW/ECW Invasion pay per view, John Cena and Batista doing battle with Booker T. and Fit Finlay at Armageddon 2006, D-Generation X squashing the Spirit Squad at Vengeance 2006, the duo of John Cena and Shawn Michaels wrestling the Undertaker and Batista as a prelude to Wrestlemania at No Way Out 2007, the Nexus locking it up with Team WWE at Summerslam 2010, and the Shield downing Evolution in a no DQ elimination match at Payback 2014.

Also, if you’ve got a hot enough feud, you really don’t need to put a championship on the line for a match to work as a main event. Examples of this include Shawn Michaels vs. The Undertaker headlining over a Bret Hart/Patriot title match at Ground Zero, HHH battling Vince McMahon for Stephanie’s honor at Armageddon 1999, Steve Austin seeking revenge against HHH for running him over with a car at the 2000 Survivor Series, John Cena facing Wade Barrett in a chairs match during the height of the Nexus feud at TLC 2010, and Triple H going after CM Punk hot on the heels of the so-called “pipe bomb” promo at Night of Champions 2011, which was oddly a non-title match that headlined on a show that was supposed to be about promoting championships. Of course, it should be noted that this strategy sometimes fails, as we saw when the WWF promoted the Undertaker wrestling the Undertaker as the major draw of Summerslam 1994 over the steel cage WWF Championship match between Bret and Owen Hart on the same card.

Then, of course, there’s the good, old fashioned dream match. WWE hasn’t done too many of those outside of Wrestlemania, but there have been a handful. You’ve got examples such as Hulk Hogan and the Rock rematching from Wrestlemania XVIII at No Way Out 2003, the Rock facing Goldberg in his first major WWE match at Backlash 2003, and Hulk Hogan squaring off against Shawn Michaels at Summerslam 2005.

Finally, we’ve got some odds and ends to address. First off, Summerslam 2008 was a unique show in that it had two non-title matches that were more prominent than the two world title matches that were on the card, as Edge and the Undertaker in a Hell in a Cell match and Batista vs. John Cena in a singles encounter were positioned over a HHH/Great Khali WWE Title match and a JBL/CM Punk World Title match. A real oddity was 1991, where the true main event of the show was not a match at all but rather a wedding of all things, as the primary draw was the kayfabe nuptials of Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth. Even the top match on the show was not for a title, as it featured Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior in a tag team encounter with Sgt. Slaughter, General Adnan, and Col. Mustafa. Last but most certainly not least, we can’t forget the time that the WWF (correctly) determined that CHUCK NORRIS was more important than any wrestling championship and allowed him to be the headliner of the 1994 Survivor Series, when he was the guest enforcer for an Undertaker/Yokozuna casket match.

Phew, that took a while.

Andrew N. wants to keep the puro dream alive:

Hey Ryan. Like what you have been doing filling in for Ask411, especially with the questions regarding puroresu and I got some puroresu questions.

I keep hearing that while Antonio Inoki is the founder of NJPW and was a key reason for their success in the 1980s and 90s, he was a key figure in leading them to be in a dark period in the mid-2000s. What did Inoki do that caused NJPW to go into a downswing?

Also, do you, in your opinion, believe that Hiroshi Tanahashi was the main wrestler that got NJPW out of what seemed to be a rather dark age for the company in the mid-2000s? Also, what year was it that became the divide between NJPW in the dark age and NJPW turning the corner and how was the company set up at that time so that they were able to be in the position to lead them to a state of respectability again?

As to the Inoki question, I feel like I’ve answered this one before at some point doing Ask 411 fill-ins over the years, but I can’t seem to find it, so I’ll answer the question anew and save you from a retread.

You are correct that Inoki was the top star of New Japan for its first ten to fifteen years (the promotion was founded in 1972), and he continued to guide the company to great success behind the scenes throughout most of the 1990s. However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he started making some changes that were ultimately detrimental to the company.

If you know anything about Inoki, you probably know that he has always been fascinated with mixed marital arts, even before there was such a phrase as “mixed marital arts.” When he was a pro wrestling star, Inoki promoted a long series of fights (or “fights”) between himself and combat sports stars from other genres, including kickboxers, judo players, and karate practitioners . . . the most famous of which was his match against the late, great Muhammad Ali. This is an obsession that Inoki has never fully shaken, and, when “worked shoot” style professional wrestling groups and then actual shoot fighting groups became popular in Japan in the 1990s, Inoki immediately rushed to integrate as much MMA as possible into New Japan Professional Wrestling.

This lead to the introduction of Inoki’s newest protege, Naoya Ogawa, in 1997. Ogawa was an Olympic silver medalist in judo at the 1992 games in Barcelona. He was immediately booked into a feud with Shinya Hashimoto, who was the IWGP Heavyweight Champion and one of the promotion’s greatest stars. In its first couple of years, the Ogawa/Hashimoto feud was fairly successful, but then we got to a moment that many people consider to be New Japan’s equivalent of the WCW “Fingerpoke of Doom.” Heading in to the January 4, 1999 Tokyo Dome show – which is traditionally NJPW’s biggest show of the year, now known as WrestleKingdom – Ogawa and Hashimoto were booked for the third singles match in their two year long feud. Though it wasn’t a championship match, it was still one of the most anticpated bouts on the show. Rather than being the epic pro wrestling match most fans anticipated, the battle became a horrific worked shoot, as Ogawa laid in legitimate strikes on Hashimoto and a “brawl” between the wrestlers’ corners ensued, meaning the match never really got started. This sort of angle might be fine for a run-of-the-mill wrestling card, but imagine what the reaction would be if a Wrestlemania main event did not occur because the bookers instead decided to shoot an angle to push the feud’s resolution further down the road. That is equivalent to what happened here, and it soured a lot of fans on the product.

However, that wasn’t the only issue. In addition to Ogawa, there were several MMA stars brought in to be part of the company’s roster, and they were working shoot-style matches that were generally shorter and less dramatic than the bouts that New Japan fans were used to. The least popular decision in this regard may have been the introduction of Bob Sapp into the company. Sapp won the IWGP Heavyweight Title himself in 2004, despite being woefully underprepared as a professional wrestler to hold that championship. Additionally, New Japan professional wrestlers, inlcuding the company’s most promising young stars, were being shipped out to compete in MMA bouts for other promotions, bouts that they were nowhere near qualified to be participating in. The most noteworthy example of this was poor Yuji Nagata who, though he had an amateur wrestling background, was not skilled as a shoot fighter. He was booked into fights with Fedor Emelianenko and Kazushi Sakuraba that he had no business taking, and he lost both of them in roughly a minute, severely damaging his credibility.

On top of that, you also had top stars leaving the promotion, as Keiji Mutoh/The Great Muta took an offer to become the president of All Japan Pro Wrestling in 2002 and took Satoshi Kojima and Kendo Kashin with him,. The aforementioned Shinya Hashimoto departed and formed Pro Wrestling Zero-One in 2001, taking Shinjiro Ohtani with him. Also, Riki Choshu, who had been a popular booker for the promotion, departed around this time.

So . . . popular wrestlers are leaving, major angles have disappointing payoffs on major shows, popular up-and-coming stars are being humiliated, the in-ring style is drastically changing, and new guys who aren’t nearly as talented as the old guard are taking up time on the cards. That sounds like a sure-fire recipe for the collapse of a promtion if you ask me, and that’s exactly what happened.

Oh yeah, Inoki also brought Chyna in for a run in New Japan in 2002, where she exclusively wrestled men. Yes, that Chyna. No, I have no idea how that is suppsoed to tie into a professional wrestling promotion that is being booked with an MMA influence.

Moving on to the Tanahashi portion of the question, you are absolutely correct that he is the major star that lead to the resurgance of New Japan’s popularity. Don’t get me wrong, when I say “resurgance of New Japan’s popularity,” the company is still today light years beneath where it was in the 1970s through the 1990s. However, it is a stable business and by just about any measure the second most popular professional wrestling company on the face of the planet. Tanahashi has been great almost literally since his debut, but I would say that he really started turning things around for the promotion as a whole in approximately 2012-2013. It feels like that run as started to cool off a bit over the past twelve months or so, but, again, the company has been stabilized.

Fresh off his appearance in the Feedback loop, here, once again, is APinOZ:

Thanks for the Ask 411 column this week. Your answers to some of the New Japan questions got me thinking that in the 1990s there was a lot of blood in the promotion – in fact, isn’t that where we got the “Muto-Scale?” I remember Hiroshi Hase and Rikki Choshu regularly spilling the claret to get over foreign monsters like Vader and Bam Bam Bigelow.

Yes, you are correct, there was a decent amount of blood in NJPW in the 1990s. I didn’t quite focus on that in my answer last week, because I took that question to be more about a ban on the blade in modern day New Japan. The heavier juice of the 90s included the “Muta scale” match that AP mentioned, which I have embedded above. The bout includes a heinous bladejob from Keiji Mutoh, which English-speaking wrestling fans on Usenet saw and turned into a “scale” by which to rank all bladejobs. For those not familiar with how the ranking system works, the bladejob performed by Muta in this match is referred to as “1.0 Muta,” something three-quarters as blood would be “0.75 Muta,” something twenty percent as bloody would be “0.20 Muta,” and so on down the line. Personally, I haven’t watched the matches back-to-back in a while, but part of me wonders if the Muta scale is still relevant now that we’ve seen Eddie Guerrero’s grusome color at WWE Judgment Day 2004.

I have a couple of questions for you, bot springing from recent questions you’ve been asked: Re; New Japan gimmick matches, I have a foggy memory of some bizarre “Island Death Match” involving Antonio Inoki from the late 1980s which involved a ring on some jungle island, no fans and which lasted over two hours. Have I got this right? Who was the opponent and what was the context for such a wacky gimmick match?

Yes, you’re right, New Japan did host an Island Death Match between Antonio Inoki and Masa Saito on October 4, 1987. I missed it in my recap of gimmick matches last week because I was reviewing a database of major cards to compile my list, and, because this was so long, it was a stand-alone program. The idea behind the match was that the island (which was uninhabited) used for the match was the site of a famous samurai duel in the 1600s, so Satio and Inoki were finishing their rivalry with an epic “duel” of sorts on the very same island. The match ran for over two hours, and everybody who has seen it has told me that it was unbearably boring. The oddest part of the story is that NJPW actually decided to bust this wacky idea out again, as Hiroshi Hase and Inoki’s greatest rival, Tiger Jeet Singh, had an Island Death Match of their own in 1991.

Re; WWF-New Japan. Back in 1990, didn’t WWF jointly promote and run a show in the Tokyo Dome along with New Japan AND All Japan, where Hulk Hogan, newly vanquished as WWF champion by Ultimate Warrior, beat Stan Hansen in the main event? How were they able to pull that together, given New Japan and All Japan were bitter rivals, and WWF didn’t have a working relationship with either of them? What was the purpose behind the show and who were the major backstage players in making it happen? As an aside, I heard Terry Gordy pulled out of the main event because he didn’t want to job to Hogan, was that true?

Yes, you’re correct, the WWF, New Japan, and All Japan co-promoted a “Pro Wrestling Summit” on April 13, 1990. From every account of the show’s background that I’ve heard, Vince McMahon reached out to the Japanese promotions about the card, because he was seeking to expand the Fed’s reach in the eastern hemisphere. New Japan and All Japan agreed to do it because there was a chilling of tensions between the two companies at the time, as Antonio Inoki had briefly stepped away to pursue is political career.

The story about Terry Gordy pulling out of the planned main event against Hulk Hogan because he didn’t want to do the job is also true. Stan Hansen, who was a long-time Hogan friend and supporter (see his cameo in No Holds Barred) stepped up at the last minute to save the card.

Aaaand that will do it for me on this run. Thank you all for having been a lovely audience, and be sure to give Mat a warm welcome when he comes back next week.

Peace.