wrestling / Columns

Ask 411 Wrestling: Did The Undertaker Ever Wrestle Hulk Hogan as a Face?

June 7, 2021 | Posted by Ryan Byers

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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Believe it or not, Tyler from Winnipeg has a question in this column:

Was there ever a match where the Undertaker was a babyface against Hulk Hogan?

Nope.

In the history of professional wrestling, there have only been seven Hulk Hogan versus Undertaker singles matches.

The first two were dark matches that occurred after WWF Superstars tapings on July 29 and November 13, 1991 in Worcester, Massachusetts and New Haven Connecticut, respectively. Hogan was a solid face and Taker a solid heel during that time, as was the case when their next two singles matches occurred. Those were on the 1991 Survivor Series and This Tuesday in Texas pay per views, which are both fairly well-known matches for the chicanery in them that set up the 1992 Royal Rumble.

After that, the two men did not wrestle each other for over a decade. They met again at Judgment Day 2002, when the Dead Man defeated the Immortal One for the WWE Undisputed Championship. Taker’s gimmick was quite different than when the two wrestlers had initially faced off, as he was now in his “biker” persona as opposed to his zombie motif. However, he was still the bad guy to Hogan’s hero. The same was true when they rematched in Undisputed Title matches on Raw-brand house shows on June 28, 2002 in Washington, DC and June 29, 2002 in Madison Square Garden.

In some respects, I wish that the 2002 nWo heel run could have lasted a bit longer, because a face Undertaker defending WWE from Vince McMahon’s invading threat could have made for some interesting moments, since UT wasn’t just going to squash Hogan, Hall, and Nash like he squashed the other group of invaders who showed up in 2001.

DownUnder Dan is iron clad:

When was Owen Hart’s WWF contract set to expire? We know Vince refused to release him post Montreal Screwjob, but how much after May 1999 when he tragically passed away, was he under contract to WWF? It is documented that Owen was leaving the business at the end of this contract, but being only 34 at the time of his passing, he could have made some good money in WCW in 2000, pending if he was off contract by then.

According to the November 24, 1997 edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, which was the second of two issues covering the Montreal Screwjob in-depth, Owen Hart had “a little less than four years left” on his WWF contract at the time of the ’97 Survivor Series. This means that, barring an unexpected development of some sort, the younger Hart brother would have been part of the Fed until after WCW closed. In other words, he never realistically would have reunited with his brother in the ring, unless we managed to avoid not only Owen’s untimely death but also Bret’s career coming to an end at the hands (or more accurately feet) of Bill Goldberg.

Bret is going there. He’s really going there:

What’s your take on the Randy Savage/Stephanie McMahon rumors of having an affair when she a teenager? Do you believe that’s why Randy was never allowed back in the WWE and Vince kept him out of the hall of fame for years?

Honestly, at this point, I have an extremely hard time believing it.

Wrestling, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, was full of conniving, backstabbing people who would shove their own grandmother in front of a bus if it meant getting more over or earning a payday. These rumors have been so persistent for so long that if there were any truth to them, SOMEBODY with inside knowledge would have come out with it as a means of making a quick couple of bucks.

However, that’s just never happened . . . and the longer the rumors persist without it happening, the less I believe them to be true.

Memphis B-Rad wants me to engage in some navel-gazing:

What are the 3 subjects/topics/moments that generate the most questions for your column?

This is an interesting question, because, though some people might not realize this, I’ve been associated with Ask 411 in some way, shape, or form, on and off for the last seventeen years or so. I started off as a regular fill-in for Steve Cook when he was writing the column, including doing a couple of month-ish long runs when he needed to take an extended hiatus. I also worked in a similar capacity for the man, the myth, the legend Massive Q during his epic run. Even when he was writing the column as a whole, he would periodically ask me to weigh in on questions about the Japanese scene, which he was not following at the time.

As a result, I’ve seen the Ask 411 Question list on and off over an extended period of time.

During my early years filling in for Ask 411, there were two topics that far and away generated the most questions for the column, those being the Montreal Screwjob and the Benoit murder-suicide. Though getting so many questions about the latter seemed morbid, it was at least somewhat understandable because at that time it would actually fall into the category of “current events.” (I first filled in on Ask 411 circa 2004 or 2005, and that grisly incident of course occurred in 2007.)

However, things have changed these days. I would say that the current topics which generate the most interest are:

1. The WWE Hall of Fame: I receive a large volume of questions about whether I think somebody should be in the WWE Hall of Fame or asking to me explain why somebody who the writer thinks ought to be in has not yet been inducted.

2. Revisionist History: Perhaps my least favorite type of question to answer is one in which I am asked to speculate on how wrestling history would be different if a particular incident did not happen or had played out differently. I dislike answering these questions because there really is no good way to answer them and I feel like I’m just making things up. (Insert your own joke about the reliability of my fact-based answers here.) Despite my not caring for them, there are quite a few that get asked.

3. The Monday Night War: Wrestling fans really love the mid-to-late 1990s. I think I get quite a bit of questions about this era because it hits a certain sweet spot. A lot of readers of this site were fans at the time, so there is nostalgia at play. Others are younger and trying to catch up on what they have been told was the height of wrestling, particularly once they’ve read the column for a while and realize it was when the author was probably most into things himself.

Kian is coming after us with both barrels blazing:

I’ve been watching Samoa Joe vs. Kurt Angle from TNA Lockdown, Bryan Danielson vs. Low Ki, and Samoa Joe vs. Kenta Kobashi to some extent. I was just curious to know what are some of the best American shoot style/MMA type matches of all time.

First off, a definition of “shoot style” professional wrestling is a little bit hard to pin down. Are we talking about a standard professional wrestling match in which just a few realistic kicks and armbars are used? Or are we talking about a match that tries to emulate MMA or other legitimate fighting as closely as possible, with no deviation?

The difficulty of coming up with the definition is apparent even from the question, as I’d grant you that Danielson and Ki had some fairly shoot style matches, but, even though it’s a really fun bout, I would never call Joe/Kobashi “shoot style,” in part because I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a chop battle break out in an MMA match.

If you want to see the purest of the pure shoot style matches, you need to leave the United States altogether and head to Japan – and I’m not even talking about New Japan, All Japan, or NOAH. You need to delve into alternative promotions that eschew strong style for something even more based in reality, with groups like the UWF, BattlArts, and RINGS all being on the list to check out.

However, that wasn’t the question. The question is what we can provide in therms of American shoot style.

In that regard, it’s hard to go wrong with most of the major matches from Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport, which is a series of special shoot-style shows put on by the New Jersey-based indy group Game Changer Wrestling, often around Wrestlemania weekend. Here’s their bout that pits Barnett himself against Minoru Suzuki:

An indy called Paradigm Pro Wrestling also does UWFi-style matches that can be streamed through their website, and, in an interesting one-off, there’s a match between Bryan Danielson and a little-remembered wrestler named Bobby Quance from the February 22, 2004 Pro Wrestling Guerilla show that turned some heads at the time due to its mat work.

Also, even though it goes outside of the bounds of the question because it’s from Mexico and not the U.S., I have to mention the October 2013 CMLL encounter between Rey Escorpion and Brazo de Plata (a.k.a. Super Porky) in which they try their level best to have a shoot style match. It’s not great pro wrestling, but it’s entertaining as a curiosity.

Paul is shadowboxing:

Do guys get worked out in the ring behind the scenes to see if they mesh, or, as was the case with Hogan & Flair, do all potential feuds run at house shows to see how the audience reacts?

There certainly have been circumstances where wrestlers have run spots with each other in the ring when the squared circle is set up in advance of a show beginning, but I’ve never heard a story of wrestlers being put into the ring in a non-televised context to tell whether they ought to be facing each other on a big show. Granted, there have been a handful of matches – such as Hulk Hogan versus the Ultimate Warrior from Wrestlemania VI – that were rehearsed behind the scenes for quite some time before a card, but that was practicing a match that was already booked as opposed to something being given a test run before being turned into a major program.

Regarding house shows, that is something which has varied over time. It used to be that non-televised shows were the major cards that wrestling promotions made all of their money off of. During that period, it would be unusual to put a match on one of those cards as the test run, because they were the main attraction, not an afterthought. In fact, Hogan and Flair in the WWF came in the latter part of that era. They didn’t wrestle each other on WWF house shows because the company wanted to see how they’d do in an eventual televised match. They wrestled each other on WWF house shows because the WWF wanted to be able to use their star power to make money by selling live event tickets. However, when things changed and major promotions started to make the majority of their cash off of pay per view and later broadcast television, house shows became secondary and wrestlers definitely were paired against each other on those events in order to “practice” against each other for later televised encounters.

Jeremy has gotten high off of sharpie fumes:

What are the best signs you have ever seen?

The most iconic and perhaps important sign in professional wrestling history is a pretty simple one:

Austin 3:16.

It’s been a while, but let’s head over to legendary Ask 411 questioner Night Wolf the Wise:

Who are the top ten monster heels of all time? Also, who are the worst monster heels of all time that never lived up to the hype?

Though some might call this a cop out, I’m going to reach back into the 411 archives on this one and refer you to the September 14, 2015 edition of a column called the Magnificent 7, in which the late, great Larry Csonka ranked his top seven monster heels of all time.

Larry goes into quite a bit of detail about why he selected the men that he did, but the short version of the list is as follows:

7. Mark Henry
6. Yokozuna
5. The Undertaker
4. Kane
3. Big Van Vader
2. Andre the Giant
1. Brock Lesnar

A big part of the reason that I’m linking back to Larry’s work as opposed to creating something one hundred percent original is because, if I were going to put together my own list, it would be virtually identical to Larry’s aside from the fact that I might move the order around a bit. I might be inclined to put Vader over Andre because Vader always struck me as harder to beat when I was growing up, because he had the added agility and athleticism that Andre lacked later in his career when I would have been watching him.

Of course, Night Wolf asked for the top ten monster heels as opposed to the top seven. If I were to add three to that existing list, I would probably go with Abdullah the Butcher, Kamala (particularly for his pre-1990s work), and the original Sheik, though admittedly the Sheik was a different type of “monster” than the other guys on the list.

Honorable mentions have to go to Umaga, who likely could have cracked the top ten with a longer run, and “Earthquake” John Tenta, who likely would have been higher up the list had he come along in an era where he was treated like less of a cartoon character both later in his WWF run and in his WCW run . . . and then again in his second WWF run, when he became Cartman’s biggest fan.

On the other side of the coin, there have also been some terrible monster heels, which NWTW also asked about. My list of the ten worst attempts at creating a monster heel would be as follows, though again the order could vary depending on what day you asked me this question:

1. Giant Gonzalez
2. Zeus
3. The Yeti
4. “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt
5. Vladimir Kozlov
6. John Heidenreich
7. Nailz
8. Giant Silva
9. Prince Kharis (a wrestling mummy from Smoky Mountain Wrestling)
10. The Monster (a Frankeinstein’s monster character from the early 1980s)

Some might note that I’ve omitted the Great Khali from the list, but I have a hard time knocking Khali, in part because he was involved in some hilarious “so bad they’re good” moments and in part because of backstage reports that he’s one of the nicest guys that you could ever hope to meet and does extensive charity work in his home country of India.

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.