Ask 411 Wrestling: Did Mickie James Make History at the Royal Rumble?

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.

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Adam thinks something looks a bit out of place:

The Mickie James appearance at the Royal Rumble gave me a question. When was the last time a title from a company not owned by WWE appeared on a WWE event? NXT, WWE ECW, and Invasion-era WCW wouldn’t count using those criteria, so the first option that comes to mind would be the ECW invasion in the 90s. Not sure if I missed something in between though.

There is part of my brain that is telling me there has to be something more recent than this, but the only specific item coming to my mind is Tazz’s appearance on the April 20, 2000 episode of Smackdown, during which he appeared as ECW Champion and challenged WWF Champion Triple H in an almost embarrassingly short losing effort.

For those who may not remember the backstory on this one, Mike Awesome had been the ECW Champ and signed with WCW in the middle of his reign. Paul Heyman forced Awesome to honor one last date to drop the championship, and, due to the close relationship between the WWF and ECW, an agreement was reached to have Tazz – at the time a contracted WWF wrestler – appear to take the belt off of the future That 70s Guy.

This means that you had a WWF wrestler beating a WCW wrestler for the ECW Title on an ECW show, followed by that WWF wrestler making appearances on WWF television while being acknowledged as ECW Champion and wearing the ECW Championship belt.

A couple of years before that, you had several NWA Championships on WWF television thanks to the NWA invasion angle, featuring NWA World Heavyweight Champion Dan Severn, NWA North American Champion Jeff Jarrett (later Barry Windham), and NWA Tag Team Champions the Rock n’ Roll Express (later the New Midnight Express).

Connor is striking with force:

Why did Strike Force not get a longer run at the top? I thought they were a great tag team, and why turn Rick Martel? He became boring and lazy as the Model.

Back in 1998, Greg Oliver with SLAM! conducted an interview with Rick Martel in which this subject was addressed. Though Martel had nothing but complimentary things to say about Tito Santana as a tag team partner, apparently after Strike Force and the Can-Am Connection with Tom Zenk, he wanted to have a singles run. He went to Vince McMahon with the idea, but Vinnie Mac wanted to keep the Strike Force going. Martel felt so strongly about being a single that he gave his notice at that moment, and his walking out on Santana at Wrestlemania VII was supposed to be his exit from the company. However, the reaction to the split was so big that, even though he was on the way out the door, McMahon called Martel later on and convinced him to come back to feud with Santana as a heel. (Martel says in the interview that the call was a couple of weeks after Mania, but his memory may be faulty, because records show him never really having any time off from the Fed.)

Ryan H. came up with this question on the fly:

I was just re-watching Kurt Angle’s WWF debut at Survivor Series against Shawn Stasiak, and the infamous moment with the ref telling Angle to get on the stick and address the crowd. That’s a classic moment for me, so I was wondering what some of your favorite wrestling improv moments are?

Almost everything (with notable exceptions like Savage/Steamboat at Wrestlemania III) prior to about 1998 in professional wrestling was improvised, so pick any significant moment from the first 100 or so years of the existence of the sport.

Arthur has to listen to his heart, listen to the beat:

If Vince McMahon were for some reason to become heavily featured on TV again for an extended period of time, do you think there would be some “cracks in his armor” so to speak which would let a few things slip through creatively that he normally might shut down? I know there were a lot of other factors, but it seems that maybe if Vince was just a little distracted, maybe some new opportunities would arise, or maybe he’d quit pulling the brass ring away so talents could grab it.

First off, I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see Vince McMahon “heavily featured” as a television character again. Though he has been doing brief backstage skits with Austin Theory since the golden egg angle back in November (a sentence I can’t believe I just had to write), McMahon has the ability to make himself a featured performer anytime he likes, and he has chosen not to do so for many, many years. I’m not sure why he would suddenly change positions, particularly because he has a history of taking others off camera when he feels that they have gotten too long in the tooth to be presentable – and at 76 years old he is now one of the oldest non-Mae Young individuals to somewhat regularly pop up on WWE television.

Would he allow others to have more input on the creative side of things if he were once again a going concern on TV?

Anything is possible, but I have a hard time believing it. If you listen to anybody who has worked closely with Vince over the years, they’ll tell you that he’s a workaholic of the highest magnitude, doesn’t sleep, and has few to no hobbies outside of his business. Though there are only so many hours in a day that one can work with, if McMahon can find a way to do multiple jobs at once, he will do multiple jobs at once, and if anything he is probably going to prioritize running the company over being a performer as opposed to the other way around.

Dave is wondering what could have been:

What do you consider some of the biggest matches to never happen? By which I don’t matches that we would have liked, but matches that were actually going to happen, that story lines were building towards, but for some reason – injury, wrestlers quitting, etc. – they didn’t?

The two that immediately come to my mind are related to one another. The first is Steve Austin vs. Brock Lesnar, which has been well-documented as a planned first round match during the 2002 King of the Ring tournament, only to have Austin leave the company due to creative disputes related to that bout. (Before anybody asks me for my opinion: Austin was 100% in the right here. Booking that match when it was supposed to have happened made absolutely no sense and would’ve hurt both Austin and Lesnar over the long haul.) Granted, the match would not have been as big in 2002 as it could have been several years later – which was Austin’s whole point – but it would have been fairly significant in retrospect.

Though that match is often held up in “what could have been” scenarios, one thing that often gets forgotten in discussions of it is that WWF television at the time was not building towards a rivalry between Austin and Lensar. The KOTR match was meant to be a one-off. Instead, an angle was being built to lead to a match between Steve Austin and “Latino Heat” Eddie Guerrero, which could have been one for the ages.

Granted, people with a photographic memory for pro wrestling will probably tell me that Guerrero and Austin did wrestle each other on the November 14, 2000 edition of WWF Smackdown, but that was an inconsequential match with almost no build and a run time of three minutes, whereas a match coming off their 2002 feud almost assuredly would’ve been given the time and positioning it deserved.

A questioner whose name has been lost to the ages is getting that hometown pop:

My hometown is Marietta, in Cobb County, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. Yes, this is the same Cobb County mentioned in The Big Boss Man’s theme (though, ironically enough, he himself was not from Cobb County!). Cobb County has produced (or has a significant link to) a number of wrestlers, including:

– Bullet Bob Armstrong and all four of his sons were all apparently born there and likely went to school there.
– Buff Bagwell and Xavier Woods attended the same high school (at different times)
– Cody Rhodes and Lita attended a neighboring high school (again, at different times)
– Jimmy Rave and Jimmy Wang-Yang also attended Cobb County high schools
So, that’s 11 who have childhood links to Marietta (and I may be forgetting someone)

It looks like Robbinsdale, in Hennepin County, Minnesota (suburban Minneapolis) also produced a number of well-known wrestlers, including the Gagnes, the Hennigs, Barry Darsow, Nikita Koloff, Rick Rude, Brady Boone, Bam Neely, and Mean Gene.

Are there any other relatively small towns/suburban areas that have produced an oddly high number of pro wrestlers, or can Marietta and Robbinsdale lay claim to being the most prolific birthplaces/hometowns of wrestlers?

It’s not a birthplace/hometown, but one of the first names that pops into my head when I hear this question is Canyon, Texas, a city that as of the 2010 census had a population of about 13,000 and is a twenty minute drive south from Amarillo. Canyon is the home of West Texas A&M University (not to be confused with the main Texas A&M campus in College Station), a fairly small public university that was previously known as West Texas State.

When West Texas A&M was West Texas State, it produced no fewer than ten different professional wrestlers whose names readers of this column are no doubt familiar with, those being Dory Funk Jr., Terry Funk, Stan Hansen, Dusty Rhodes, Bobby Duncum Sr., Ted DiBiase, Bruiser Brody, Manny Fernandez, Tully Blanchard, and Tito Santana. An eleventh professional wrestler, Kelly Kiniski, was not nearly as prolific as the others, but he had over five years in the industry and was the son of former NWA World Heavyweight Champion Gene Kiniski.

Also, though it’s not as big in terms of numbers, I find it interesting that Orangeville, Ontario, a town of under 30,000 people, has been able to produce more professional wrestlers than what you would expect. Edge and Christian are far away the biggest two, but some people don’t realize that Sinn Bohdi/Kizarny was also one of their childhood friends and that Bohdi’s brother also had a wrestling career for several years, working mostly on Canadian independents under a mask and using the name Kobra Kai. (Side note: Apparently Kobra Kai now also sells professional wrestling-themed NFTs, and there’s something about wrestling and NFTs that seems like they go hand in hand with each other.) A fifth wrestler from Orangeville, who used he ring name Damien Truth, was active on very low-level indies in mid-2000s, though he tragically died at the age of 29 from an unexpected heart attack.

JCL has a series of questions about the things that keep us from seeing our favorite wrestlers’ naughty bits:

1. It’s been said that the WWE holds a great deal of control over pretty much everything regarding the characters the wrestlers portray on TV. In terms of the trunks/tights whatever how much control do they have? For example, I know when Punk fought Cena at Night of Champions in Boston he made a point to have his trunks and boots evoke the uniforms of Boston’s hated rivals, the New York Yankees. Did he clear that or go to someone with a “hey what if we did THIS” idea and they ran with it? Do wrestlers get a stipend for clothing that they spend? Did he just buy them himself from someone he trusts to make them?

I know Punk’s kind of a unique case, but someone like Ryback changed his singlet’s design fairly often, the New Day will come down with different-colored outfits (Kofi did it a lot on his own too), but you’ve also got guys like Rusev who don’t have a lot of variety. Are some superstars just “given” more outfits or can some take the initiative and pay out of pocket for a more distinctly varied look? How’s it work?

Generally speaking, wrestlers have the ability to provide their own gear, though WWE is going to maintain veto power over everything that goes on to their television programs. The company also has tailors and seamstresses on staff so that wrestlers can have costumes made up or repaired while on the road. One of those seamstresses, Sandra Gray, actually became a recurring character on Total Divas for a time and was the best part of the show back when I was watching it. She currently does similar work – minus the reality show – for AEW, and you can follow her on Twitter here. Former ROH wrestler Kid Mikaze, who is now married to Sasha Banks, currently works for the company in a similar capacity.

That being said, there are gimmicks where WWE might hire a designer to come up with the concept for gear when it’s particular to a character they have developed. For example, you can see the WWF concept art for Mankind’s gear in one of Mick Foley’s books.

2) Does WWE still have their entire wardrobe done in-house? Do they ever contract with outside designers? Has it ever been entirely in-house?

No, the entire wardrobe is not done in-house and never has been to my knowledge. As referenced above, wrestlers are free to either use in-house designers or have things done on their own, subject to the company’s final approval.

I am not aware of WWE ever having contracted with an outside designer for wardrobing, but, during the “Blood Runs Cold” storyline involving Glacier, Mortis, and Wrath, WCW actually hired a costume design and special effects company called AFX Studios to design the characters’ entrance and ring gear.

If you look at the galleries on AFX’s website, you can see that they have continued to have relationships with wrestlers and wrestling companies throughout the years, including the design of outfits for Kronik, Crow-era Sting, Seven (Dustin Rhodes’ one-off gimmick), Perry Saturn, and the KISS Demon in WCW, Christopher Daniels and Rellik (in case you didn’t know, that’s “killer” spelled backwards) in TNA, and even Triple H’s Conan the Barbarian-inspired entrance gear from Wrestlemania XXII.

3) For a big Wrestlemania-style show where there will be a lot of mainstream press is there any further input the WWE would have on outfits on that stage as opposed to other big events? If you’re trying to tell a visual story and there are more non-fans watching than normal, I think for their sake it would make more sense to have the attire accentuate the difference a little bit more than usual.

WWE always has final say over what will and will not appear on camera. There will be more scrutiny for a big show, but it’s not as though they have a laissez faire attitude at other times.

Tyler from Winnipeg is hanging from the rafters of the Pontiac Silverdome:

Was their someone who helped Andre & Hogan LAY OUT THE MATCH at Wrestlemania III?

Yes. According to the December 7, 2020 Wrestling Observer Newsletter, which included Dave Meltzer’s obituary for Pat Patterson, Pat himself helped lay out the Hogan/Andre encounter, as well as Hogan/Warrior at Wrestlemania VI.

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.