Ask 411 Wrestling: What Were the Original Plans WrestleMania 14’s Main Event?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 . . . the last surviving weekly column on 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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I am haunted by the Ghost of Kaientai. Indeed:

What were the original plans for Steve Austin at Wrestlemania XIV before the Shawn Michaels vs. Bret Hart rivalry turned sour? I read that Bret vs. Austin was a plan with Austin finally getting his win or the aborted Bret vs Shawn from WM13 suggested before real-life took over.

Looking back over various issues of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter from 1997, it does appear that Bret Hart versus Shawn Michaels for the WWF Championship was the original plan for Wrestlemania XIV, though the real life animosity between the two men caused that match to fall apart even before there was any inkling that Hart might leave the company for WCW.

However, nowhere in any of the reporting did I see any indication of what Steve Austin would be doing if Hart/Michaels went forward as originally intended.

That being said, in the Observer issues covering the Montreal Screwjob – in which the Hitman himself provided a lot of the background – apparently one of the creative plans offered to get him to remain with the company was a Hitman versus Stone Cold WWF Championship match at Mania with Austin winning the title for the first time. That’s well after plans for Hart/Michaels were out the window, though.

Really, though, with the WWF roster being what it was at the time, the options for opponents for Austin were pretty limited. Undertaker and Kane were obviously on a collision course. Rock was off the table because Austin had just finished a program with him. Triple H probably wasn’t high up enough the card yet.

I think that leaves only one likely option: Ken Shamrock. You could easily play off of Shamrock’s reputation as a legitimate tough guy and put it up against Austin’s “toughest SOB” persona, in addition to there being a story to tell from Shamrock having served as the guest referee in the Mania XIII match between Hart and Austin.

The Saintess is headed into uncharted territory:

With Gunther beating Damien Priest at SummerSlam, it got me wondering: When was the last time a first time World Champion (Damien) lost his title to another first time World Champion (Gunther)?

People who have read this column for a while know how I’m going to start off this answer. Say it with me now:

It depends.

Specifically, it depends on what you consider a world championship to be.

If you consider the current iteration of the Impact Wrestling Championship to be a world title (and I don’t, for the record), this didn’t happen all that long ago. On June 9, 2023, first-time champion Alex Shelley defeated first-time champion Steve Maclin to capture the belt.

Other non-WWE promotions really aren’t a factor here. Neither AEW nor NJPW seem to have viable answers to the question, and I don’t know who else you would say at least arguably has a world title outside of WWE at this point.

Looking to WWE, you could argue that this occurred on September 13, 2021, when Big E Langston defeated Bobby Lashley for the WWE Championship. However, for that to qualify, you’d have to say that Lashley’s reigns as Impact Wrestling Champion and ECW Champion (WWE version) aren’t world title reigns. I think that’s a valid position to take, but I know others disagree, so I still felt the need to note it.

If you throw out Langston/Lashely, you’d next have to go to Paradise, Nevada on September 11, 2016, where AJ Styles beat Dean Ambrose to become WWE Champion at Backlash. For this to qualify, you’d have to say only WWE titles count as world titles since Styles was already an Impact Wrestling and IWGP Heavyweight Champion by this point.

To completely eliminate all question marks and asterisks, we have to take the wayback machine all the way to January 8, 2006 and New Year’s Revolution in Albany with Edge cashing in the first-ever Money in the Bank briefcase on John Cena to become WWE Champion. Both men were first-time world champs.

And there you have it. The answer to the question could be 2023, it could be 2006, or it could be one of several points in between.

Russ from Louisville has me dazed:

My topic is an obscure match from WCW Saturday Night that featured Cactus Jack taking on an enhancement talent named Spider Brown. WCW Saturday Night shows of this era typically featured squash matches designed to highlight the star, letting them get all their signature moves in with little resistance from their opponent. Spider Brown wore blue tights and had stringy, shoulder-length gray hair – just the typical random opponent from that time period. Anyways, in this particular match, Cactus was running through his usual offense, clotheslining Spider over the top rope, then exiting the ring from the other side to deliver a running double axe handle on the floor. However, Spider saw him coming, and started gesturing as to put Cactus in a trance. It worked! Cactus stopped dead in his tracks, dropped his fists, and cocked his head to the side, waiting for what was to come next. even the announcers were unsure of what was happening. Unfortunately, once Spider punched Cactus in the face, he snapped out of it and the beatdown was back on, ending in Cactus getting his hand raised in victory. Spider was back the following week, he once again tried his hypnosis trick on his opponent, but it was no-sold and Spider took another loss and the announcers made no mention of it. So my question is … What was the origin of this hypnosis spot? Was it just something Foley did to give Spider some sort of offense? I searched WWE Network but could not find this match, so if your super search ability can find it please share. Any internet search I try usually only results in brown recluse spiders, so if you want to use this question to write a synopsis of Brown’s in-ring career please do so.

An invitation to write up a biography of an obscure d-level wrestler? Oh, you know that’s my jam.

Unfortunately, my research didn’t turn up anything. At all. In addition to just searching the normal sources for “Spider Brown,” I looked at every match Cactus Jack ever had on WCW Saturday Night, and there were no results I could find against an opponent named Spider Brown, nor anything even similar to Spider Brown for that matter.

I also tried to scour the internet for wrestlers who have used trance or hypnosis gimmicks and found individuals like Paul Christy and Kendo Nagasaki, but nobody who would have overlapped with Mick Foley in WCW.

I also learned that there’s a rapper named Travis Scott who started a label called Cactus Jack Records, which came up in my results because he released a song titled “Trance.”

And then there were the brown recluses. So many brown recluses.

So this is a rare open call to the rest of the readership. Does anybody out there have any idea what Russ may be asking about? Any leads?

I suspect that he may be misremembering the Spider Brown name and/or may be remembering the promotion or show this occurred on. Let me know your thoughts.

Tyler from Winnipeg is a known associate of Billy Gunn:

Should Jay White win the AEW Heavyweight Title?

He certainly has the talent to pull off a World Title reign there, which he demonstrated when he was headlining with New Japan. However, for reasons I don’t fully understand, he’s been booked like he’s nothing more than a midcarder in AEW, focused in on their meaningless six man belts when he has the potential to be so much more.

Given that this is a guy that U.S. audiences still don’t know all too well, at this point I think he would need some serious rehabilitation before being placed into the main event scene of the promotion. I would think a good six months of coming out on top of well-booked singles feuds would do the trick, because fortunately even though he’s been booked in the middle of the card he has still managed to look like a threat while he’s there.

Redmond is getting all nostalgic:

Who were your very first favorite wrestlers? The first wrestlers you hated? I started watching in late 1985 at the age of 7, and I instantly fell in love with the British Bulldogs and absolutely despised one Rowdy Roddy Piper (although that would soon change).

I’m a bit younger than you and didn’t start watching wrestling until I was a bit older, so I was first seeing wrestling on TV in the early 1990s. I’ve told a version of this story in the column before, but at the time my household still didn’t have cable and only got four or five channels over the air, so on one boring weekend afternoon I was flipping back and forth between them when I caught a promo by the aforementioned Rowdy Roddy Piper on syndicated WWF television. His charisma is what sucked me in, and I probably wouldn’t be writing this column today if it weren’t for the Hot Rod.

So, he would probably qualify as my true first favorite.

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that my next favorites were the tag team of High Energy, because I had terrible fashion sense when I was a kid and loved their garish jackets and parachute pants. I was also drawn to the fact that their offense was a fair amount more athletic than anybody else who I was seeing at the time. Owen Hart actually continued to be a favorite of mine even after his heel turn a couple of years later, which started the trend of my continuing to be a fan of the wrestler regardless of whether they were good guys or bad guys.

As far as hated wrestlers are concerned, I don’t have near as many memories of disliking anybody. I knew that wrestling wasn’t on the level even before I started watching it, and that made it a bit more difficult to truly hate the bad guys. I do remember being annoyed by Harvey Whippleman, but that was mainly because I didn’t understand what he added to the show as opposed to being irked by his heel antics.

Big Al is a classhole:

I was recently thinking of the most classless angles in WWE history and came up with these 5 in order:

1. Vince McMahon’s feud with Shawn Michaels and God. As a Christian this really bothered me and makes me wonder why Shawn Michaels as a Christian would go along with this.

2. The Lita, Kane, and Gene Snitsky angle where Lita had a miscarriage. I just thought this was complete trash.

3. The Katie Vick and Kane angle. Need I say more.

4. Eric Bischoff raping Linda McMahon. Why would anyone find this entertaining?

5. The killing or injuring of Vince McMahon. Take either one.

My question is what in your opinion is the 5 least classy angles, in order, in WWE history? I did not include the Chris Benoit tribute because the details of the crime were not known at the time.

First off, since the question asks specifically about angles, I’m only including storylines here and not other business decisions that the company has made over the years. I was pretty appalled by Over the Edge continuing after Owen Hart’s death, I’m not a fan of the company being in bed with Saudi Arabia, and we could go on for ages about continuing to push Jimmy Snuka after the Nancy Argento incident, but those aren’t really “angles.” (Nor is the Benoit tribute show for that matter, regardless of who knew what when.)

If we’re only talking about the creative side of things, I’d probably go with . . .

Muhammad Hassan’s Terrorist Attack: This isn’t exactly a hot take, but having Hassan stage an assault on the Undertaker that had all the trappings of a real life terrorist assault was a step too far, particularly given that it aired on the day of a real life attack in the U.K. Plus, it stung doubly bad because Hassan’s character was originally something other than your garden variety racial stereotype, instead being a heel who was upset by being stereotyped. They totally betrayed the original concept.

Eugene: Making fun of historically oppressed groups is never a great idea, and WWE has certainly done a lot of that over the years, whether it’s based on race, sexual orientation, national origin, or any number of other identities. However, there’s something that feels particularly insidious about mocking the intellectually disabled, and you’re not going to convince me that Eugene was anything other than that – especially during his brief heel turn.

Triple H and Race Relations: HHH once work blackface along with the rest of D-Generation X to mock the Nation of Domination, and then years later he did a program in which he told Booker T that “people like him” couldn’t be World Champion. I’m a bit surprised that WWE hasn’t had to have a bit more of a reckoning about this one given modern politics and his current prominent position in the company.

Road Warrior Hawk’s Substance Issues: It would be one thing if you were to run an angle about a wrestler having a drug or alcohol problem. I’d be surprised if it were handled well, but at least you could argue that it was fiction. But when you take that sort of angle and give it to a guy who has legitimately dealt with significant personal demons, that takes things to a different level, particularly when reports were he didn’t care for the idea. (Contrast this with wrestlers who have willingly made their personal struggles part of a story – that is less of an issue.)

The Tim White Suicide Skits: As somebody who has had way too many friends die by suicide, these really did not sit well with me, particularly because they just seemed to exist for the sake of existing as opposed to being in the furtherance of any wrestlers’ story. Fortunately, aside from the original skit, they were confined to WWE.com, so relatively few people saw them.

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.