Ask 411 Wrestling: Who Would the nWo’s Third Man Have Been if Hulk Hogan Refused?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals . . . through Hel Stryer and brimstone, it’s 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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APinOZ takes us back to Bash at the Beach 1996 for the 5,283rd time:

Was there a back-up plan for the third member of the nWo for the Bash at the Beach six man tag if Hulk Hogan had said, “that doesn’t work for me, brother?” Who would have been Hogan’s replacement?

I’m not aware of there ever having been a formal backup plan, but Eric Bischoff has been pretty open on his 83 Weeks podcast about the fact that, before Hogan was locked in to turn heel, Sting was the first guy slotted to be the third man.

If Hogan were to decline, it would be easy enough to just revert to that original plan and have the Stinger join the nWo.

A Different Ryan has no brand loyalty:

Has anyone ever wrestled for WWE/F, WCW, ECW, ROH, TNA, and AEW? I know several have for five of the six, but has anyone ever competed in a match for all six promotions?

I am pretty sure I have answered this question – or at least slight variations on it – in prior installments of this column, but I am not finding those right now, so let me take this question again.

The answer is “yes,” and the first guy I always think of in connection with it is Devon “Crowbar” Storm.

Storm’s biggest run on the national scene was WCW from 1999 through 2001, where he held the Tag Team, Cruiserweight, and Hardcore Championships. He had several matches for both ECW and the WWF before ever appearing in WCW. He was a semi-regular in ECDub in 1996, typically coming up on the losing end against guys like Taz, Mikey Whipwreck, and “Dr. Death” Steve Williams. In the WWF, he was brought in to be part of the company’s light heavyweight division in 1997 and followed that with some enhancement work in 1998 and 1999. After WCW closed, he got a couple of WWF tryouts in dark matches (including one loss to a very young John Cena in 2001), but the company never bit on signing him.

Afterwards, Storm has primarily wrestled on the indies while maintaining a career as a physical therapist in the northeastern U.S., but he has occasionally popped up in the bigger leagues.

He has had exactly one TNA match, appearing in a battle royale in 2013 that was aired on one of those weird taped PPVs they did that got seemingly no promotion and nobody ever watched. He has had six matches in Ring of Honor, with two in the HDNet era, three in the Sinclair Broadcasting era, and one in the Tony Khan era. Speaking of Khan, Crowbar lost to Joey Janela on the October 11, 2021 episode of AEW Dark: Elevation.

Also, have you ever heard of this guy called Christopher Daniels?

I feel like the Fallen Angel’s ROH, TNA, and AEW bona fides are well-established enough that I don’t have to go into them in detail here. He also had five ECW matches in 1999, one of which was on Hardcore TV on October 1 of that year. He wrestled four times for WCW, including his infamous match against Michael Modest on Nitro in 2001, in which he slipped on the ropes and awkwardly fell on his head. He did a ton of enhancement matches for the WWF in the late 1990s through 2001, including donning a hood as one of the Conquistadors when that gimmick was brought back and factored into the feud between the Hardy Boys and Edge & Christian.

And let’s not forget about the Manbeast, Rhyno. His WWE and ECW tenures are well-documented. He briefly held the NWA World Heavyweight Title in TNA. Under the name Terry Richards, he worked half a dozen enhancement matches for WCW in 1995 and 1996, including losses to Jim Duggan, Johnny B. Badd, and the Nasty Boys (where he teamed with Johnny Swinger). He was a fixture for ROH between 2011 and 2014 which included time in the stable SCUM with the likes of Steve Corino, Matt Hardy, and . . . Domino from Deuce and Domino? Yeah, sure, I guess. Most recently, Rhyno was seen on the May 7, 2025 AEW Dynamite losing an ROH Television Title match to Nick Wayne.

That’s everybody I can think of, but I’m open to additions to the list.

Though that answers Ryan’s question, here are a couple of related tidbits:

If you remove AEW for the list and instead go older school and use the AWA, Jerry Lynn has achieved this similar accomplishment. Given his role as an agent in AEW, I’m a bit surprised he never stepped into the ring for them as part of their early days, but I guess when you decide you’re done, you’re done.

Also, here’s another note on Christopher Daniels. He hasn’t just run the board of major promotions in the United States. He’s also had matches for New Japan, All Japan Pro Wrestling NOAH, CMLL, and AAA, so he’s also checked off all the major promotions in Japan and Mexico that were active during the course of his career.

Of the other two guys mentioned above, Rhyno has NJPW and NOAH but no AJPW in Japan and AAA but no CMLL in Mexico. Crowbar’s international experience is much more limited, as he can only claim a New Japan match, and that came on one of their shows held in the United States.

Jase is going meta:

Do you eventually read all questions sent to you, or does it all depend?

I definitely read every question, unless it gets lost in a spam folder or is posted in the comment section after I’ve stopped monitoring it for the week.

Once a question comes in, it’s copied and pasted into a Word document for future inclusion in the column. As of this writing, that doc has 278 questions sitting in it, with the oldest unanswered question going back to 2018 and the most recent ones obviously being asked in the last couple of days.

I have never deleted a question without answering it just because it’s a bad question or one I don’t feel like answering. There are only two reasons that I have ever deleted a question of the the Word document without addressing it, those being: 1) somebody else has asked an identical question or 2) the question related to current events at the time it was asked but I’ve delayed so long in answering that it is no longer relevant.

As you can probably guess, I do not answer questions in the order that they were asked.

The questions that get answered the fastest are the ones that personally interest me. If I read a question and don’t know the answer but am curious to know it, that takes top priority. There are two reasons behind this. First, I figure that if a subject is interesting to me it is likely to be interesting to at least part of the readership. Second, writing one of these columns each and every week takes a fair amount of time, and to the extent that I can do something to make it feel less like “work,” I’m going to do that.

The group of questions that get answered next fastest are those that relate in some way to a major wrestling star. Let’s face it, this website is a business, and we need to generate clicks. As a result, I do always try to headline the column with a question about a wrestler whose name will grab attention, meaning your query about Randy Savage will probably get addressed more quickly than the other guy’s query about Dusty Wolfe.

I would also be lying if I didn’t say that there is some element of questions that are easier for me to answer getting some priority. Again, I pump out a fair volume of content and this is not my job – it’s a hobby. As a result, when my real world commitments intervene, I sometimes look for low hanging fruit that I can address quickly. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to answer super-basic questions like “Who was Hawk’s partner in the Road Warriors?” but if there’s something of some interest to the readers that I know the answer to off the top of my head or that I can verify with ten minutes of research as opposed to three hours, that will help pad out the column in weeks where I have to move quickly while still (hopefully) providing worthwhile content.

On the flip side, there are questions that I don’t prioritize as much.

Some of these are questions that are too similar to other questions I’ve tackled in the recent past. For example, in the very early days of my writing Ask 411 full-time, I answered a question in which I traced a particular lineal championship. It was really popular, and it inspired about twenty other people to send in lineal championship questions. I did a few of those, trying to space them out with periods of months in between, but I got so many that my Word doc still contains about half a dozen lineal championship questions from 2018-2019.

The other category of questions that don’t get priority are those that would basically take the entire column to answer, unless it’s a subject I find particularly interesting. For that reason, people who write and ask me to do top five lists or top ten lists probably aren’t going to be answered quickly. (Though recently I’ve tried to push more of those through while only giving very brief justification as to each entry on the list.) I received one question a couple of years ago that would require so much research and text that it basically would have required me to write a book, so we’ll see when I get to that – but it is still sitting in the Word document.

Of course, I do handle some questions that are pretty research intensive, like the time I listed every wrestler who ever appeared in the PWI 500. With a project like that, I’m typically doing the research in the background when I have time over the course of several months, while simultaneously working on the “normal” weekly column. Those sorts of questions have to really spark my interest in order for me to make the time investment in them.

That was probably more information than you really wanted, but I think it’s helpful to occasionally address questions like this one about how the column works, because I do from time-to-time have people send their question back in wondering why I haven’t gotten to it. A couple of psychos have even taken grave personal offense at my not getting to their question and cussed me out. Hopefully, by being transparent about how I operate, we can cut off future issues like that before they occur.

Igancio knows that’s not my name:

Do you think Kofi and Austin lost a huge opportunity not renaming the team as A Brand New Day?

No, I don’t. In fact, I question whether that name would have cleared legal. You have to keep in mind that when you’re dealing with trademarks, you’re not just supposed to avoid using somebody’s exact trademark. You’re supposed to avoid using anything that might cause confusion with somebody’s trademark. I think there’s a good chance that WWE would consider “A Brand New Day” to be too similar to “New Day” and take action to block the use of that name had it been what the two men decided to go with.

Tyler from Winnipeg provides some color:

Jesse Ventura or Jerry Lawler as the voice for a match?

I don’t think you can go wrong with either one of them, but if I had to pick between the two I would probably land on Ventura, because he worked well with a greater variety of partners whereas Lawler as a commentator was always at his best in his iconic team with Jim Ross and seemed to lose just a little something when paired with others. Thus, if I know Ventura or Lawler is the color guy but I don’t know who’s on play by play, I’ll pick the Body.

Adrian from Donegal always drinks his milk:

I’m going through the Wrestlemanias on Netflix and enjoy seeing Owen Hart anytime he shows up. He and Double J have a tag team title match at Wrestlemania XIX against Test and D-Lo Brown. They win without much fuss and the focus is on the other two guys and various women at ringside. How did one half the tag champs go to being the comedy character the Blue Blazer, in the space of 50 odd days? What a waste of talent.

Two words:

Vince Russo.

The WWF’s entire booking philosophy during that period, particularly on the undercard, very much had a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” vibe. It also failed to take wrestling seriously in a lot of respects.

With those things in mind, it’s no wonder that Owen Hart was basically made into a comic superhero who was obsessed with covering up Debra McMichael’s bare chest.

Jayson wants to know who’s here to see dubbya see dubbya:

Was it true that originally during the WCW Invasion of the WWF storyline, Raw was going to be changed to Monday Nitro, and Smackdown would be the WWF show, but USA Network vetoed the whole thing because they didn’t want to be associated with the “loser” WCW name?

You’re about half right.

According to the July 2, 2001 Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the original plan was for WCW to get its own television show with the WWF retaining both Raw and Smackdown, but when the only thing that the WWF’s television partner TNN would offer for WCW was a late night Saturday timeslot, Vince McMahon said thanks but no thanks because he knew airing at that time would make the new brand look second rate.

Instead, the WWF brass concocted an angle in which Vince and Linda McMahon would “divorce” and Raw and Smackdown would be divided between them, with Linda receiving Raw and then transferring it to WCW “owner” Shane McMahon who would rechristen it as a WCW program. The Observer says the title of the show was to be WCW Raw, but I have seen other reports over the years indicting that it would become Nitro. Smackdown would remain a “WWF” show under this plan.

Of course, none of that actually happened, but I’m not ware of any credible reporting that it was because of the network. (And the network was, in fact, TNN and not USA at the time.) Instead, according to the July 16 Observer the issue was more with fan reactions to WCW wrestlers appearing on WWF events. I’m sure everybody reading this is familiar with the infamous Booker T/Buff Bagwell match on Raw which was roundly rejected by the live audience in Tacoma. However, that was not an isolated incident. WCW stars were garnering indifference if not outright jeers from WWF fans not just on TV but also on house shows. The whole reaction was so overwhelmingly negative that McMahon decided that this group could not stand on its own as a brand, and that’s what lead to the scrapping of WCW Raw and the interjection of ECW into the Invasion angle.

Man, starting with an nWo question and ending with an Invasion question. I was one Montreal Screwjob away from playing all of Ask 411’s greatest hits.

That does it for this week. 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.