Ask 411 Wrestling: Why Was The Decision Made for Hulk Hogan To Wear Red and Yellow?

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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Brian G. has been moved down the card:

What’s the longest a former WWE World Champion has continuously worked for the company in an in-ring capacity without getting another title shot? I feel like the Miz is the likely answer and the Great Khali is going to sneak in here, as well as guys like Bruno Sammartino, Iron Shiek, etc.

Welp, this one is going to be time-consuming.

First, let’s establish some ground rules:

1) Brian is asking about “WWE World Champions,” which I’m going to interpret as referring to only three titles: a) the historical WWE Championship that goes back to Buddy Rogers in 1963; b) the World Heavyweight Title that was established in 2002 and unified in to the WWE Championship in 2013; and c) the current WWE Universal Championship.

2) A title shot at any of the three championships named above will be seen as breaking a streak. For example, if somebody was a WWE Champion, dropped it, and got a WWE Universal Title match six months later, we would consider that a six month gap, even if the wrestler still had not challenged for the WWE Championship again.

3) Just to re-emphasize one of Brian’s points, we’re talking about individuals who are “continuously” working for WWE in an in-ring capacity. This means that occasional or part-time wrestlers like Vince McMahon when he won the WWE Title, Bill Goldberg when he was Universal Champion, or the Rock in his final WWE Championship reign will not count. However, I am going to include Brock Lesnar, because, even though his matches have been sporadic over the course of the past several years, he has continuously been employed as an in-ring talent.

4) I will consider a wrestler who is injured and taking time off to be “continuously working for WWE” so long as they are still under contract and did in fact return to the promotion at some point, unless the injury resulted in a sabbatical that was presumed at the time to have been a retirement (e.g. Shawn Michaels from 1998 to 2002).

5) In my opinion, competing in a tournament, battle royale, etc. to fill a vacant championship DOES count as receiving a title shot, so that will break any streaks for not receiving title matches.

Second, let’s take a look at some of the names that Brian speculated about in his question who didn’t actually have along breaks between championship matches at all.

The Miz lost his one and only WWE Championship to John Cena on May 1, 2011, and he actually got a rematch the very next night on Raw. He continued to get championship matches on the house show circuit throughout May and June. The Great Khali also received a rematch for the World Heavyweight Title less than one week after he lost it, while the Iron Sheik was challenging Hulk Hogan for the WWF Title just a couple of weeks after dropping it to him.

Bruno Sammartino, meanwhile, had two runs with the WWWF Championship. When Superstar Billy Graham beat him to end his second reign, he got a rematch roughly two months later. When he lost the title the first time, it was on January 18, 1971, and his stint with the WWWF ended on August 13, 1971, so he spent 207 days in the company without receiving another title shot. That is a fairly long time, particularly for a wrestler at Bruno’s level, but it doesn’t come close to the other folks who we will see on this list.

With all that said, let’s see who the poor saps who couldn’t get championship rematches to save their lives are! There are six individuals in WWWF/WWF/WWE history who have gone more than 300 days without getting another shot at a main title after losing one, and they are:

6. Kevin Owens: The former Kevin Steen lost the WWE Universal Championship to Bill Goldberg on March 5, 2017, and he didn’t receive another match for a mainline championship until a house show in Richmond, Virginia on January 27, 2018. That’s 328 days without a world title bout.

5. Hulk Hogan: Yes, believe it or not, there was a period where the Hulkster was out of the WWF Title hunt during the peak of his career. After he lost the championship to the Ultimate Warrior at Wrestlemania VI on April 1, 1990, he didn’t get another shot at the strap until he defeated Sergeant Slaughter at Wrestlemania VII on March 24, 1991, a span of 357 days.

4. Pedro Morales: Morales had only one run as WWWF Champion, which ended on December 1, 1973 with a loss to Stan “The Man” Stasiak. He never received another championship match during this run with the Fed, which ended with a final match on January 22, 1975 (he would return to the promotion later). That puts Morales at 417 days of employment without a championship match.

3. Roman Reigns: This is an interesting dry spell, because it’s actually still going on. Reigns forfeited the Universal Title on October 22, 2018 due to his leukemia rearing its ugly head, and, since his return, he STILL hasn’t gotten a shot at a world championship. That means, as of the date of this writing (December 31, 2019), he’s been without a crack at a main title for 435 days.

2. Rob Van Dam: RVD was WWE Champion until July 3, 2006, when he handed the title off to Edge. For the remainder of his WWE contract, he primarily chased the ECW Championship and then got embroiled in the New Blood versus ECW Originals feud. His last match with the company before heading to TNA was on December 10, 2007, so he went 526 days without a world title match.

1. Finn Balor: Poor Finn Balor. Somehow, his work convinced the powers that be that he should be the first-ever WWE Universal Champion, but he had to vacate the title due to injury on August 22, 2016, the night after he won it. Once he returned from injury, he wrestled primarily for the Intercontinental Title before getting shunted down to NXT. In the meantime, he did get a world title match against Roman Reigns on the August 20, 2018 episode of Raw, just two days shy of two years without a shot. That’s 728 days in total.

Tyler from Winnipeg can’t stop the Brock:

In your opinion, is Brock Lesnar vs. the Rock at Summerslam 2002, Brock’s best match?

As far as pure in-ring quality is concerned, I’d say that it’s not even close. Brock has had plenty of high-quality in-ring encounters against the likes of John Cena, Seth Rollins, Kurt Angle, and even the Undertaker that surpass his bout with the Rock, with his best match in my opinion probably being his three-way against the aforementioned Cena and Rollins at the 2015 Royal Rumble pay per view.

I will say, however, that Brock’s match against the Rock was likely the single most important match of Lesnar’s career in that it’s the one that did the most for launching him towards superstardom, and it’s definitely worth watching from that standpoint.

Night Wolf the Wise is American Dreamin’ on such a winter’s day:

One of the most famous incident in wrestling is Dusty Rhodes being fired after booking an angle where the Road Warriors tried to blind him on T.V. Why did he go ahead with that angle despite knowing he would be fired for it?

Both Jim Cornette and Jim Ross, who were employed in the territory when this angle was shot, have commented on it in interviews in recent years, and neither one of them seems to know what was going on in Dusty’s head when he booked the angle, which means the rationale behind it may be something that Rhodes took to the grave with him. Ross did mention that, at the time, the policy of TBS (where the angle aired) was that there should not be any blood on television. However, in his interview, Cornette noted that, just a few weeks earlier, there had been an angle in which he had bladed himself, and it did not get any significant blowback from Turner executives.

Given this, I can only think of three possibilities as to why Rhodes went forward with Roadwarrior Animal driving a spike into his eye and drawing a significant amount of blood:

1. Rhodes was fully aware of the no blood policy but decided to blade anyway, thinking that he would be safe either because of his star power or because nobody cared about Cornette getting color not much earlier.

2. Rhodes was fully aware of the no blood policy but decided to blade anyway because he didn’t like the policy and wanted to thumb his nose at it.

3. Rhodes was fully aware of the no blood policy but assumed the violation would be ignored because it had been ignored in the past. However, this angle was particularly memorable and caught Turner suits’ eyes in a way that no prior angle involving blood had.

I suspect that a blend of the three was the most likely, but, regardless of the cause, Big Dust was shortly off to the WWF, where he became a common man, workin’ hard with his hands.

Speaking for Dusty Rhodes, what’s that I story I heard about him almost killing Tully Blanchard. Was that an angle or was Dusty truly pissed at Tully for attacking Magnum T.A. after his accident?

It was 110% an angle, which you can watch, more or less in its entirety, in the video above. The incident occurred on March 26, 1988 and saw Blanchard confront the injured Magnum TA due to continued bitterness over his loss in their legendary “I Quit” match. Barry Windham initially tried to make the save for Magnum but got laid out, which resulted in Big Dust running out from the back and grabbing hold of the baseball bat that Magnum TA was carrying with him as an “equalizer” due to his weakened condition. At some moments, it looks like Dusty is swinging pretty wildly, but he managed to not connect with Tully in any way that seriously injured him (and injuring someone is pretty easy when a grown man unloads with a baseball bat) which is pretty clear evidence that this was a work.

In a recent column I was asked how many pole matches Vince Russo booked during his career, and this lead to pjryan on Twitter asking me the following:

When did the pole match start?

This is a difficult question, because the answer almost assuredly goes back to wrestling’s territorial days, when the “sport” was very fragmented and comprehensive results for all of the promotions spread throughout the country can be difficult to find.

However, the best information that I can find is that the gimmick of putting an item on a pole and having wrestlers scramble for it began with the coal miner’s glove match. Though modern fans are probably most familiar with the glove from Sting and Jake Roberts struggling through a version of the bout at Halloween Havoc 1992 due to a “Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal” stipulation that probably should have been rigged but wasn’t, the infamous glove actually goes back a couple of decades before that.

This 2012 article from Ethos Magazine, a publication of the University of Oregon, credits wrestler Dutch Savage with inventing the coal miner’s glove match in the early 1970s, basing it on his growing up in mining towns in Pennsylvania, where miners would wear heavy leather gloves with metal bands across the knuckles.

Though the magazine article does not mention an exact date for the first coal miner’s glove match, research into other sources brings up the date of March 30, 1972, when Savage defeated Apache Bull Ramos in a coal miner’s glove match held in Salem, Oregon for Don Owen’s Pacific Northwest Wrestling promotion. Savage and Ramos had similar matches throughout the territory on several other occasions in 1972 and 1973, and the coal miner’s glove match became Savage’s signature gimmick bout through at least 1979.

If anyone is aware of anything earlier, I would love to hear about it.

Paul is all geared up:

Regarding the early WWF Hulk Hogan years, if I recall his initial heel run he wore white trunks, red, and sometimes yellow. Then when he returned he wore powder blue trunks to save Backlund I believe. When he beat the Iron Sheik, it was yellow and red. When was the decision made that Hogan would wear exclusively the signature yellow and red? Who would have said, “This is the signature look of the guy we will hope will take this industry mainstream?” How much input would Hogan have had in his own ring attire at this junction of his career?

Coincidentally, the Hulkster himself recently shed light on this in an interview that he did with Fox as part of their promoting Smackdown’s move to the station. Let’s hear what he had to say:

For those of you who may not be in a position to watch the video, the very short version is that Hogan was inspired by Angelo Poffo, who he watched wrestle as a child, to wear yellow trunks. This came after he experimented with a variety of different colors, as Paul alludes to. Hogan also cops to mixing red with the yellow because of, believe it or not, McDonalds.

Of course, with Hogan being Hogan, you have to question his version of history at least somewhat, and there are alternative claims about where the red and yellow came from, with perhaps the most notable one being Hulk’s ex-wife Linda Bollea claiming the red and yellow was her idea in her 2011 autobiography (and I use that term loosely) Wrestling the Hulk: My Life Against the Ropes.

As far as the decision to switch exclusively to red and yellow is concerned, it appears to have been made at some point in 1987. You can still see Hogan wearing other color combos pretty regularly in 1986, and the last video or photographic evidence I could see of him wearing something else during the Rock n’ Wrestling era comes in a May 1987 Texas Death Match against “King” Harley Race, which you can see here.

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].