Ask 411 Wrestling: Who is the Next Rob Van Dam?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals to Ask 411 Wrestling for September 29, 2018.

Unfortunately, we’re going to do have to do a bit of an abbreviated column this week for a variety of reasons, but just know that it’s not you, it’s me.

Hopefully we’ll get back up to full steam next week. If you want to help with that, shoot some questions over to [email protected]. In particular, we could use some questions about the bigger stars of professional wrestling history so that we’ve got something splashy to run as our “headline” question each week.

Hopefully you’ll be able to oblige me, and hopefully I’ll be able to entertain you over the next several digital pages.

Luke wants to take us back to Philadelphia:

In your opinion, who are some current Indy wrestlers that are the closest to Sabu and RVD in terms of ring work?

This was actually somewhat of a difficult question to answer simply because, even though there are a lot of talented independent wrestlers out there these days, the top indy wrestlers no longer work the same style of match that RVD and Sabu used to. When I think about Van Dam and the Sheik’s nephew, I think about a fusion of hardcore wrestling and spectacular high flying that just isn’t practiced as much as it used to be. Instead, all of the most popular indy guys in 2018 seem to be emulating more of a Daniel Bryan or Samoa Joe style, combining strong strikes with technical wizardry.

In trying to come up with an answer to this question, one name did keep popping up time and time again: Darby Allin.

Allin is a former professional skateboarder who has an in-ring style that is refreshing among high flyers. Whereas many aerial wrestlers these days seem to focus on flawless execution of gymnastic spots, Allin flies just as well as any of them but does it in a way that doesn’t come off as choreographed and leaves you with the impression that he is legitimately using his body as a weapon.

If you’d like to see more of Darby in the ring, you can find him regularly working for EVOLVE and MLW.

Dave T. wants to continue a conversation that we started about a certain drill-sergeant-turned-wrestler several weeks ago:

As the biggest Sergeant Slaughter mark on the planet, it always bothered me that the Hogan feud was basically a rehash of Sarge’s feud with the Sheik from 1984, only with Sarge forced to play the heel role. They even had Hogan getting the crowd to speak the Pledge of Allegiance at an MSG house show at one point, as Sarge had famously done seven years earlier with the Sheik. And I always thought Vince came up with the whole angle purposely as a shot at Sarge (a la Dusty with the polka dots) for walking out on him in late ’84. Has anyone ever discussed this before, in a shoot interview or elsewhere?

I don’t believe so. In fact, in the research that I did for the Sergeant Slaughter question we tackled back on August 22, various interviews with Slaughter make it sound as though McMahon pitched the anti-American heel turn to Sarge before he returned to the promotion. If it was really a “shot” at Slaughter, you’d think that Vince would make the guy do it only after he was under contract instead of proposing it to him before he even signed on the dotted line.

Don’t step to What A Maneuver:

I have a DAMN question. I have read that Ron Simmons broke his wrist during his match with Lex Luger in Halloween Havoc ’91. Did anyone ever figure out at what point in the match this injury occurred?

He actually didn’t break his wrist during the match. His wrist was injured BEFORE Halloween Havoc that year and had been in a cast immediately prior to the show. He cut the cast off so that he could wrestle against Luger, and, once it was over, the cast was replaced so that he could continue healing. It was probably easy for the story to get mangled into “Simmons hurt himself at Havoc ’91” if somebody didn’t know that he was injured going into the event and then saw him wearing a cast afterwards.

Though I’ve never actually read this anywhere, I’ve always been curious as to whether Simmons refused to wear his cast on pay per view because there was already an ongoing angle in the company that involved Barry Windham having had his wrist broken by the Dangerous Alliance (which earned Larry Zbyszko the odd nickname of “The Cruncher”).

Mr. B wants to get the “W” out:

In 2002, when WWF became WWE, they made announcements about it and ran ads, they had the “Get the F out” slogan. I know somewhere back around the late 70’s or early 80’s WWWF abbreviated its name and became WWF. Was that name change treated as a big deal? Was it announced on the shows at the time as something major? Any backlash in magazines from fans who didn’t want a new name? I recall some fits thrown online after the 2002 change.

From what I can tell, the transition from the World Wide Wrestling Federation to the World Wrestling Federation didn’t have nearly the same hoopla surrounding it as the transition from the World Wrestling Federation to World Wrestling Entertainment did.

A lot of this probably had to do with the difference between the eras that the transitions took pace in. The World Wide Wrestling Federation dropped its second “W” in the first quarter or so of 1979, and, at that time, wrestling was mostly a live event product with each territory (WWWF included) having maybe an hour to ninety minutes of local or regionally syndicated television. Plus, marketing and branding weren’t nearly as big a deal as companies would make them three decades later, and people were just as likely to refer to the WWWF generically as “wrestling” as they were to refer to the company by name.

As a result, changing the name of the company – particularly when it was just dropping one letter that was almost redundant anyway – wasn’t that big of a deal.

For two of the last three weeks, I have answered questions about Yokozuna, and now Barry is asking me about Cheex, so I guess the Ask411 audience has a thing for tubby guys:

Cheex.

Famous for breaking the ring before the first ever Weekly TNA PPV and then appearing on a Weekly PPV vs a jobber, and then, that’s pretty much it.

Do you have any more information on him?

For those who do not know the story of Cheex, he was a 600 pound wrestler that TNA used on their first ever tapings back when they were exclusively ran weekly pay per view events. He wrestled one and only one match for the promotion, defeating Frank Parker on June 19, 2002 in Huntsville, Alabama, though the match didn’t air until June 26.

Honestly, for the longest time, I assumed that Cheex was a barely trained “wrestler” who TNA brought in as a novelty because he was gigantic, but it turns out that he actually had a pretty long independent wrestling career before he showed up for the Jarretts.

Cheex’s real name was Mike Staples, and he wrestled under the name “Rolling Thunder” on Virginia independents throughout the 1990s. His name shows up in Observer results facing Soul Taker on August 22, 1992 in Hague Virginia (no idea whether this was Charles “Godfather” Wright, who used the name Soultaker early in his career); facing Johnny Blast on February 27, 1993 in Stuarts Draft, Virginia; facing Jack Hammer and Derek Domino in a handicap match on September 17, 1994 in Downington, Pennsylvania; facing Derek Domino and Hamilton in a handicap match on March 3, 1995 in Downington, Pennsylvania; facing Doink the Clown (no idea who was portraying Doink) on June 22, 1995 in Waynesboro, Virginia; facing Battlestar in Roxborough, Pennsylvania on September 30, 1995; and teaming with Dan Cooley against Eclypso and Spoiler (Frank Parker) on October 7, 1995 in Danville, Virginia.

Though he doesn’t start showing up in Observer results until 1992, many sources do list Staples as competing under his real name in one television match for WCW, as he apparently dropped a fall to Arachnaman (a.k.a. Brad Armstrong) in Gainsville, Georgia on November 5, 1991. The match eventually aired on WCW Worldwide. Staples’ other recorded brush with fame came on September 3, 1997 on an indy show in Danville, Virginia, when he and fellow local wrestler Mike Williams got to team with “The Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant against the trio of Eclipse, Freddie Rich, and none other than Greg “The Hammer” Valentine.

After 1997, records of Staples’ wrestling career drop off from what I can see, though he reemerges in an article that appeared in the June 1, 2001 edition of the Roanoke Times newspaper, which claimed that he would be retiring on an indy show in Salem, Virginia, later that week. The article claimed that Staples’ opponent on the show was going to be Vader, but that seems highly unlikely – and the same article claims that Sergeant Slaughter and Boris Zhukov are the same person, so their understanding of wrestling seems pretty limited.

The same article lists Staples’ day job as working for RADAR, a mass transit system for senior citizens in the Roanoke.

Despite allegedly having his retirement match in 2001, Staples is listed as wrestling on a limited basis in 2002, not just in his one-and-only TNA appearance but also on a Tojo Yamato tribute show that took place a few months before in Nashville. His opponent there was Frank Parker, who was also his opponent in some of his early indy matches listed above and in the infamous TNA bout.

Post-TNA, I was able to find no additional information about Staples until the July 21, 2005 edition of the Roanoke Times, which ran a story on Staples as a retired professional wrestler who was trying to lose weight after undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Less than a year later, on February 7, 2006, the same newspaper ran another story about Staples, this time stating that he had fallen into ill health after the surgery and had accumulated upwards of $10,000.00 in medical bills after losing his job at RADAR and his health insurance.

There is no other mainstream media coverage of Staples that I was able to locate, but his profile on cagematch.de lists him as having a series of matches back under the Rolling Thunder moniker in late 2014 and throughout 2015 for the Bruiser Wrestling Federation in Virginia. It surprised me that Staples would be able to return to the ring almost 25 years after his earliest matches and particularly after having the health issues that he did, but then I found this video, which is, in fact, of “Rolling Thunder” having an independent match in 2014:

That’s the last record of Staples that I was able to find, except that the May 2017 obituary of a Roanoke man named Joe Staples states that he is survived by his brother Mike Staples, who resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

So that’s what I know about Cheex.

And it’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about Cheex.

And it’s also the end of the column. We’ll see you in seven.