Ask 411 Wrestling: Was Crown Jewel’s Tag Match the Oldest in WWE History?

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 whole in your brain, feel free to send it along to me at [email protected]. As you’ll no doubt see from the questions that we’re addressing this week, I have made good on my promise of attempting to more promptly address questions that tie in to current events, so don’t be shy about shooting those over.

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Brad is getting up there:

WWE’s recent DX vs Brothers of Destruction match at Crown Jewel has me wondering: Was that the oldest combined age in a tag team match in the company’s history? We had HHH (49), Kane (51), HBK (53), and UT (53) for a total of 206 years. Sure, there have been individual wrestlers who were older, but all four of these guys are up there. I suppose on some rinky dink indy show there has been two nostalgia acts trying to gingerly put on a tag match, but nothing comes to mind in the WWE. (On a side note, three of those guys had at least one match in WCW.)

Believe it or not, D-Generation X versus the Brothers of Destruction is NOT the tag team match with the highest combined age in WWE history. I’m not sure precisely what the match with the greatest combined age is, in part because that would require insane amounts of research and in part because that wasn’t the question asked.

In fact, I was able to disqualify the recent Crown Jewel main event as the oldest tag match in company history pretty quickly because, as soon as I read it, two names immediately leapt into my mind:

The Fabulous Moolah and Mae Young.

In flipping through that duo’s WWF/WWE matches, I found the results of the September 21, 2004 edition of Smackdown (aired September 23), during which they teamed together to face Torrie Wilson and Dawn Marie. Oh, and this was a match in which all four competitors wore schoolgirl outfits, because early 2000s WWE was pretty damn pervy.

At the time of that bout, Moolah and Mae were both 81 years old, Dawn Marie was 33, and Torrie Wilson was 29, giving us a grand total of 224 years, exceeding Brad’s count on the DX/BOD encounter by 18 years.

In an interesting side note, this is the last career match that Moolah would have before passing away in 2007. Mae Young would return for two more “matches,” one in 2008 and one in 2010, the first being a sixteen woman tag team match and the second being a handicap match against LayCool that took place entirely outside of the ring and was really just the entire women’s babyface locker room of the time beating up McCool and El before Mae pinned El by stepping on her belly.

If anybody is aware of any tag matches with a higher total age, feel free to mention it down in the comments . . . though this one may be difficult to beat.

IMissMarkingOut is looking for the next big thing:

Who is a legitimate threat to defeat Brock for the title now that Roman is sidelined and Braun is buried? Aside from Lashley, currently heel, I’m not sure who goes over. Also, does AJ Styles lose to Lesnar again?

Honestly, the WWE roster is very thin now in terms of top guys. I don’t know that I would say that Braun Strowman has been “buried,” but he does certainly feel like he needs some rehabbing before getting another crack at being the top guy in the promotion.

The only full-time member of the roster who could credibly unseat the beast in my opinion is probably Seth Rollins, as he’s got enough size that he can credibly compete with Brock, and he’s been established as a high-level performer in kayfabe terms due to his previous lengthy reigns with the promotion’s top championship. He might need to get the win in another main event caliber feud before going on to Lesnar in order to get the stench of wrestling Dolph Ziggler off of him, but he seems like the best bet at this point.

Another option that might be viable – schedules permitting – would be to call in a favor from John Cena, using him to beat Lesnar for the championship before transitioning it to somebody else. You have to imagine that Cena will be part of Wrestlemania this coming year, so if you could get him to take the belt off of Brock at the Royal Rumble before putting over an up-and-comer at ‘Mania, you could have a pretty tight little storyline. (In fact, it wouldn’t be that different than the piece of business that the Rock did with CM Punk and then Cena a few years ago.) Some people would bellyache about another Cena title reign, but it would probably beat putting the strap on somebody who isn’t ready for it in a desperate attempt to elevate them, a la Jinder Mahal.

Oh, and this one is a long shot, but I’ll still throw it out there: The rumor is that we’re getting a Batista versus Triple H match at Wrestlemania, but I think WWE is leaving money on the table by not doing Brock versus Batista instead of trotting Trips out there on a major show for the umpteenth time. Perhaps you could have Batista defeat Lesnar for the championship and then vacate it, stating that the fans deserve a champion who will be around full-time, which neither he nor Brock can do anymore. Then you could put the belt up for grabs in a tournament. It’s not the best storyline in the world, but, again, it’s better than a Jinder-esque champion.

As far as AJ is concerned: Yeah, he’s screwed. I don’t see any set of circumstances in which having him defeat Lesnar makes any sense.

Bryan J. is a praksta:

Why is when people talk about Dynamite Kid’s ribs everyone hates them, but when they talk about Owen Hart’s ribs everyone laughs? Is it because he died tragically or was there an actual difference in their shenanigans?

There was an actual difference between what the two wrestlers did as “ribs.” Owen Hart’s pranks were actually pranks, whereas the Dynamite Kid’s so-called ribs often crossed the line into assault or other criminal behavior.

If you do some digging on the internet and read up on some of the Owen Hart rib stories that have been preserved in the annals of history, you’ll read about him pouring bottles of Coke down people’s pants, exposing his opponents’ genitals during house show matches, placing prank phone calls, or hiding other people’s property. Granted, many of those things would not be seen as funny in modern corporate environments and could be considered forms of bullying if the context were different, but if you’re talking about a “boys will be boys” locker room environment in which practical jokes are accepted as a normal part of life, these are all pretty tame, and, depending on their execution, could actually be pretty funny.

Compare this with the examples that we still have of the Dynamite Kid screwing with people behind the scenes. Some of them include DK putting roofies into Outback Jack’s drink, injecting other wrestlers with milk when they asked him to inject them with steroids, and punching Bret Hart in the head while Bret was trying to blade for one of the first times in his career. In other words, this guy was a total asshole, and, depending on the day, I might even want to upgrade that “asshole” rating to “sociopath.”

There are some pretty stark differences between those two patterns of behavior.

Shaun excellently executed this question:

Bret Hart often goes on record as being a safe worker and never injuring anyone. So has he ever actually injured anyone?

I have no recollection of him ever injuring anyone, and, upon doing a bit of research, I can’t find a record of him giving anybody what I would call a serious injury. The closest thing that exists is a story from Bad News Allen (a.k.a. Bad News Brown for WWF fans) about Bret giving him a concussion during a street fight when he hit him in the head with a foreign objection. This allegedly occurred back when both men were in Stampede Wrestling, so it would have been relatively early in Bret’s career, and he could theoretically use the excuse that he hadn’t quite figured out what he was doing yet.

However, this story from Bad News came out years after he had already established in a series of shoot interviews that he and Bret didn’t always get along too well, so you may want to take this story with a grain of salt.

That will have to do it for this week. If you’ve got an opportunity, don’t forget to send your questions to [email protected], and we will see you right back here in seven days!