Ask 411 Wrestling: Who Would Be WWE Champion if Bret Hart Weren’t Screwed in Montreal?

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 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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Tell Wrestling Fan Since 1977 to close the window, because it’s getting drafty in here:

If there were the wrestling version of an NFL draft with WWE, AEW, NJPW, and TNA talent available, who would your top ten draft picks be?

Mine would be: 1) Roman Reigns, 2) Brock Lesnar, 3) Cody Rhodes, 4) Kazuchika Okada, 5) Bryan Danielson, 6) Seth Rollins, 7) John Moxley, 8) MJF, 9) Chris Jericho, and 10) Bobby Lashley.

Just picking ten names without anybody else competing for them sort of destroys the idea of this being a draft, because part of the strategy behind a draft is acquiring top talent to meet your needs while other “teams” are trying to do the same thing using the same pool of players, but I’ll answer the question regardless:

1) Roman Reigns, 2) Kazuchika Okada, 3) Brock Lesnar, 4) Shingo Takagi, 5) Bryan Danielson, 6) MJF, 7) CM Punk, 8) Paul Heyman, 9) Finn Balor, and 10) Sami Zayn.

WFS77’s list was perfectly cromulent, and mine is similar in a lot of respects, but there are some changes that probably boil down to personal preference as much as anything. Rollins and Moxley are replaced by Balor and Zayn on my list because I’ve always preferred their work and think they’re more versatile, plus I’ve gone with Punk over Jericho as I believe that, though neither man is a spring chicken, you can get a few more good years out of Punk. I’ve also added Paul Heyman simply because his talking on its own is just as valuable as what most wrestlers bring to the table when you combine the upside of both their in-ring performance and their talking.

James believes in a thing called love. Just listen to the rhythm of his heart:

Are there any notable wrestling couples that have been married for the longest consecutive time to the same spouse?

Vince and Linda McMahon spring to mind immediately. They’ve been married for 57 years.

Todd just doesn’t see it:

What exactly was the point of the Wresltemania III mixed team match between Hillbilly Jim, Haiti Kid, and Little Beaver and King Kong Bundy, Little Tokyo, and Lord Littlebrook?

Like most matches involving little people in the 1980s and earlier, it was a special attraction. Little people were typically brought in not because they were a regular part of the roster or because they had ongoing feuds with each other but instead because it was a way of giving the crowd something different, either getting people to buy tickets out of curiosity or breaking up the card by presenting a different type of in-ring action.

It’s the same way women’s wrestling was used in most places prior to Wendi Richter becoming a major star in her own right.

Comparing it to modern wrestling where it seems like every match on a PLE card has to have a major feud behind it, the bout seems odd . . . but it was just standard operating procedure in the 1980s and earlier.

Bret is stanning a legend:

With the recent passing of Superstar Billy Graham it got me thinking when they brought him back in 1988 they kept showing his hip replacement surgery, and, if I remember right, he was originally part of Hulk Hogan’s team at Survivor Series. Was he planning on coming back then, or was the surgery he had was too much for him to come back?

I think you’ve got your years confused and are actually thinking about 1987 instead of 1988. Graham made a comeback to the WWF in 1986 and was scheduled to be part of the Hulkster’s Survivor Series team in ’87 along with Bam Bam Bigelow, Ken Patera, and Paul Orndorff. However, significant injuries including problems with his hip that lead to surgery derailed the Superstar’s career. There was an angle shot with the One Man Gang to write him out of the Survivor Series match, and Graham never wrestled again after early November of that year.

For the remainder of his WWF run, he tried his hand at color commentary and acted as the manager of Don Muraco, who replaced him at Survivor Series.

Tyler from Winnipeg knows every woman’s crazy ’bout a sharp dressed man:

Off the top of your head, which 3 wrestlers had eyeball grabbing wrestling attire?

Since you said, “off the top of your head,” I did not put any deep thought into this or do any research, and I legitimately just wrote down the first three names that I thought of upon reading this question.

The first of those was “Macho Man” Randy Savage. Specifically, I was thinking about him early in his WWF run, before he adopted the shirt and the cowboy hats, which were still colorful but seemed much more run of the mill than what he had on when he first showed up in the promotion.

The second was Jeff Jarrett, and I was focusing in on his appearances in the WWF’s New Generation era. When I was watching wrestling at that time, I thought there was something so ridiculously great about the gear he wore with the vertical stripes of fabric running up his abdomen, which I referred to as the “bird cage” look. I had no idea who thought of it, why they thought of it, or what it was supposed to accomplish, but I couldn’t stop laughing about it.

Finally, and I swear I’m not making this up, the third name that popped into my mind after I tried to make it completely blank was Men on a Mission. It’s just hard to miss two gigantic men running around in purple and gold onesies, you know?

Doug asks a question related to the Montreal Screwjob that, in a rarity, didn’t have me immediately reaching for the delete button:

I’ve enjoyed reading your detailed histories of title lineages, both official and unofficial, and how they all eventually end up at Roman Reigns. I have a concept that I don’t think you’ve addressed in these histories. It deals with a non-traditional endings of a title match:

The Montreal Screwjob.

An argument has been made that since Bret Hart was never pinned, nor did he submit, that he should still be considered the WWF champion after this match. Were that the case, who would hold that lineal title?

For anybody who may not be familiar, from time-to-time over my five-year run regularly writing this column, I have been asked by readers to track lineal championship histories, a concept that wrestling fans borrowed from boxing. The idea is that you start with a championship, real or imagined, at a certain point in time. From that point forward, the title only changes hands in one-on-one matches when the champion is pinned, submitted, or loses a stipulation match in the means prescribed by the stip (e.g. getting lit on fire in an an Inferno Match).

Some people find these to be interesting thought exercises with fascinating twists and turns as to where the “titles” go over the years. Others find them to be incredibly tedious.

Hopefully if you’re reading this, you’re in the former camp, because we’re going to take Doug up on answering his question. Let’s go!

For those who may have difficult remembering, Bret Hart was the WWF Champion as of the Survivor Series pay per view on November 9, 1997. We are now acting as though we are in a world in which he did not lose the title on that show, taking it to World Championship Wrestling with him.

Hart had a sizable undefeated streak when he first came to WCW, not losing until May 26, 1998, when he drops the lineal WWF Championship to Sting. Interestingly, this match is at a house show, specifically at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Two days later at another house show, this time in Knoxville, Tennessee, Lex Luger defeats his long-time friend Sting to win the lineal WWF Championship that eluded him when he was actually in the WWF.

In our first televised change of the lineal title, Curt Hennig, another WWF alum who never won the big one, beats Luger on the July 20, 1998 episode of Monday Nitro from Salt Lake City.

Well, that didn’t take long. The lineal WWF Championship merges with the WCW World Heavyweight Championship, as WCW Champ Goldberg goes over Hennig on a house show at Bryant Park on New York City on July 26, 1998.

As just about everybody reading this knows, Goldberg doesn’t lose until Starrcade 1998 in Washington, D.C., when he drops both the WCW Title and the lineal WWF Title to Kevin Nash.

In another infamous moment, Nash loses to Hulk Hogan in the FINGERPOKE OF DOOM, which for the record takes place in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome on January 4, 1999.

Typically Hulk Hogan doesn’t lose that much, but he actually does it fairly quickly this time, with Ric Flair upending him at the Uncensored 1999 pay per view from Louisville, Kentucky. This is a first blood match inside a steel cage, so there is no pinfall or submission, but our rule for lineal championships has been that they can change by winning a gimmick match per its stated rules, so this does count.

The Nature Boy loses the WCW Championship to Diamond Dallas Page at the following month’s Spring Stampede pay per view, but he doesn’t lose the lineal WWF Title because the Spring Stampede match is a four-way as opposed to a one-on-one encounter. However, the very next night, Flair drops a fall to Sting on Nitro in Yakama, Washington, making the Stinger our first two-time lineal WWF Champion.

Sting briefly reunifies the WCW and lineal WWF Titles on the April 26, 1999 episode of Nitro when he defeats DDP in a mid-show match. However, by the end of the episode, the two titles were de-unified again, as Sting loses the WCW Title back to Page in a four-way match also involving Bill Goldberg and Kevin Nash. However, Sting remains the lineal WWF Champion since the lineal title cannot change hands in a four-way.

At the 1999 Great American Bash pay per view in Baltimore, Rick Steiner upsets the Stinger in a falls count anywhere match to win the lineal WWF Championship despite never having been a world champion at any other point in his career. This match involves the infamous Wrestlecrap moment in which Steiner unleashed attack dogs on Sting.

WCW holds a taping for its Saturday Night show on July 6, 1999 in Columbus, Georgia. Though Saturday Night by this point is largely a c-show, they give the crowd a fairly significant dark match to send them home happy, as Buff Bagwell picks up a win against the Dog Faced Gremlin.

Bagwell remains undefeated for over three months in what may have been one of the better runs of his career, though on the September 13, 1999 episode of Nitro his streak is snapped by Alex Wright in his Berlyn persona, making him the first lineal WWF Champion on our list who never actually wrestled a match for the WWF or WWE.

And here’s where things get really odd. Despite a strong initial push, when we get to the 1999 Halloween Havoc pay per view in Las Vegas, Nevada, Berlyn is pinned by, of all people, Brad Armstrong. I guess the Armstrong curse doesn’t exist in lineal title histories.

At this point, Armstrong adopts the Buzzkill gimmick and he does not wrestle for quite a long stretch. When he he gets back into the ring in December, he wins one match against Chavo Guerrero Jr. and then, on the December 20, 1999 episode of Monday Nitro, Buzzkill loses an intergender match to Madusa, making a woman the lineal WWF Champion.

Those of you who know what was going on in Madusa’s career at this time are probably dreading what happens next. Yes, that’s right, Oklahoma, also known as WCW writer Ed Ferrara, defeats Madusa in a match for the WCW Cruiserweight Championship, which she had picked up from Evan Karagis along the way. So, a non-athlete is now the lineal WWF Champion.

And things go from weird to weirder. Oklahoma never loses the Cruiserweight Title in the ring, which means he remains the lineal WWF Champion until the WCW goes out of business. However, the end of WCW is not the end of Ferrara entering the ring. On September 1, 2001, Ferrara has a match in Cornelia, Georgia on the second anniversary show of he independent promotion NWA Wildside, where he loses to Lazz. Who is Lazz, you ask? He was an indy guy of the era who got some limited buzz off of doing a gay gimmick with a finisher called “The Britney Spear.”

On another NWA Wildside show in Cornelia on October 20, 2001, Lazz loses to Jeremy Lopez, another indy wrestler of the era who came up alongside guys like AJ Styles but never quite caught on to the same extent that others did. But, hey, he can say he was named a WWF Champion by an internet wrestling column almost twenty years after his career ended.

Speaking of indy guys who were getting their starts with Jeremy Lopez in NWA Wildside, the late great Jimmy Rave pins Lopez on June 15, 2002, again for NWA Wildside, again in Cornelia, Georgia.

Rave makes it roughly a month as the lineal WWF Champion, losing to Tony Mamaluke on July 13, 2002 in Hollywood, Florida for a promotion called Hardkore Championship Wrestling, which is the most early 2000s name for a wrestling company ever.

After our one-off appearance in HCW, we go back to NWA Wildside and Cornelia, Georgia, where Mamaluke loses to current Ring of Honor commentator Caprice Coleman on September 7, 2002.

Coleman takes about eleven months off of wrestling between September 2002 and August 2003, at least based on matches we have records of. When he returns to the ring, he racks up a few wins before eventually dropping a fall on September 20, 2003 at another Wildside show in Cornelia, with the victor being Rainman. No, not Dustin Hoffman. This Rainman would later gain more notoriety in indy wrestling under the name Kory Chavis.

Rainman spends the next several months wrestling primarily in tag team matches, so he holds on to the lineal WWF Title until March 13, 2004, when he appears on Ring of Honor Do or Die II in Elizabeth, New Jersey, losing to Caprice Coleman, as Coleman wins our fake championship for the second time.

In case you were worried that we had seen the last of NWA Wildside, we haven’t. Another indy star of the era who only had a brush with national fame, Jason Cross, the master of the shooting star legdrop, beats Coleman on March 27, 2004 for Wildside in Cornelia.

Here’s a twist. For the last little while, the lineal title has been handed off from early 2000s indy wrestler to early 2000s indy wrestler. Now it heads to somebody completely different. On May 18, 2004 in Columbus, Georgia, Cross loses to a man just calling himself The Wrestler. Who is The Wrestler? He is Ted Oates – a.k.a. Ted Allen – perhaps best known as the Nightmare, who had a career going back to the early 1970s.

Six months later, back in Columbus for GCW on October 14, 2004, The Wrestler drops a fall to Vordell Walker, the latest in our string of independent wrestlers who almost became something in the 2000s but never quite did.

Walker heads from Georgia to Florida, specifically an indy group from NWA Florida, where he loses to Buck Quartermain on November 20, 2004. If you’re not familiar with Quatermain, he was a long-time Florida wrestler going back to the early 1990s who over the years did enhancement work for the WWF, WCW, and even TNA.

On December 10, 2004, Quartermain appears on another NWA Florida show in the City of Brandon, FL, this time losing to your new lineal WWF Champion, “Black Nature Boy” Scoot Andrews, another name from the “What could have been?” files.

Here’s an interesting one. Andrews starts to wrestle for Florida-based Full Impact Pro, and, on their show “New Dawn Rising” on February 11, 2005 in Lakeland, FL, Scoot loses to newcomer Antonio Banks. Some time later, Banks would join WWE, where he was rechristened as Montel Vontavious Porter or MVP.

I thought that maybe MVP would take the lineal WWF Title with him into WWE developmental and that we’d see the championship move up the ranks of the world’s largest promotion from there, but that’s not what happens. Instead, Antonio Banks wins an opportunity to challenge for the FIP Heavyweight Title, and he receives that shot on Ring of Honor’s Do Or Die IV on February 19, 2005 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Homicide is the champion at the time, and he retains his FIP belt in addition to picking up the lineal WWF Title.

At the time of the Banks match, Homicide is also involved in a Best of Five series in ROH against Bryan Danielson, who wins one of the matches in that series on day three of the ROH Third Anniversary Celebration in Chicago Ridge, Illinois. This is also a falls count anywhere match.

I was prepared to see the lineal WWF Title jump back and forth between Danielson and Homicide during their Best of Five, but that’s not what happens. Instead, before those two men can rematch, the American Dragon heads over to Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, where on April 1, 2005 in LA, he loses to James “Jamie Noble” Gibson as part of that year’s All Star Weekend.

Here’s a name I bet you didn’t expect to see at the beginning of this lineal title history: Dragon Soldier B. For those of you who don’t recall, in 2005 ROH collaborated with New Japan Pro Wrestling to host an American version of NJPW’s Best of the Super Juniors tournament. One of the entrants in that tournament is New Japan’s Kendo Kashin, who inexplicably changed his gimmick to Dragon Soldier B for U.S. audiences. Kashin becomes the lineal WWF Champion by beating Gibson in the semifinals of that tournament on April 2, 2005 in Asbury, New Jersey.

Dragon Soldier/Kendo Kashin wins the American BOSJ and, as a result, takes the lineal WWF Title back to Japan with him. On April 24, 2005, he loses in the semifinals of another tournament, the New Japan Cup, getting eliminated by Manabu Nakanishi in Osaka. Nakanishi, who WCW fans may remember wrestling there for a time as Kurasawa, now holds fake WWF gold.

Nakanishi does not win the 2005 New Japan Cup. Instead, on the same night he defeats Kashin, he loses in the finals to a young up and comer by the name of Hiroshi Tanahashi.
Tanahashi remains undefeated in singles action until August 6, 2005, when he enters another tournament – this time the G1 Climax – losing in that round robin affair to Kazuyuki Fujita in a match also held in Osaka.

Fujita goes on a bit of a tear in that year’s G1, not losing again until the finals, when he falls to perpetual Climax winner Masahiro Chono in Tokyo’s Sumo Hall.

Chono wrestles almost exclusively in tag team matches for several months and, when he finally does lose a singles bout again, it is in the 2006 New Japan Cup tournament, as he bows out in the first round to Hiroshi Tanhashi, who is now the third two-time lineal WWF Champion, following Sting and Caprice Coleman. Now there’s a stable we need to get together in AEW.

Yuji Nagata is the next man to score a victory over Tanahashi, which comes in the semi-finals of the NJPW Cup on April 29, 2006 in Tottori, Japan, which I feel like is a town you don’t hear about hosting wrestling much anymore.

That’s not the final of the New Japan Cup, though. In the final, Yuji Nagata falls to Giant Bernard on April 30 in Amagasaki. For those not in the know, Bernard is the NJPW moniker of the man who American fans know as Albert, A-Train, Tensai, and more recently as Performance Center trainer Matt Bloom.

As the winner of the New Japan Cup, Giant Bernard earns a shot at the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, which at the time is held by none other than Brock Lesnar. NJPW fans know that Bernard’s name is not anywhere in the IWGP Title history, meaning Brock wins the match, which occurs on May 3, 2006 in Fukuoka.

Much like MVP before him, I thought that Brock might be the one to take the lineal WWF Championship back to WWE, but that’s not what happens. Instead, before his return to the E, he has one more match, losing to Kurt Angle on June 29, 2007 for Antonio Inoki’s Inoki Genome Federation at Sumo Hall in Tokyo.

At this point in his career, Angle is primarily wrestling for TNA, and, due to an odd series of events, he winds up holding all of their championships simultaneously, so the lineal WWF Title is unified with every TNA title for a period of time. That unification comes to an end at TNA’s No Surrender pay per view in 2007, when Angle drops the X Division Title and, by extension, the lineal WWF Title to Jay Lethal.

Lethal’s reign as the lineal WWF Champ is short-lived, though, because the night after the PPV, September 10, 2007, he loses to Christopher Daniels at a TNA Imapct taping at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. For what it’s worth, the X Division Championship is not on the line here.

Jay Lethal gets his win back on October 14, 2007 at TNA’s Bound for Glory pay per view, when he defeats Daniels to retain the X Division Championship in a match that the Fallen Angle was no doubt awarded for defeating the champ in a non-title match (in a rare instance of mid-2000s TNA booking making sense).

The lineal WWF Championship continues to follow the lineage of the X Division Championship, as both distinctions go to Johnny Devine when he beats Lethal at the TNA Impact tapings on January 21, 2008 in, you know it, Universal Studios.

Devine loses the X Division Title back to Lethal in February, but it’s part of a weird six man tag match, so the lineal WWF Title does not change hands. Devine doesn’t suffer another singles loss until March 2, 2008 and it happens outside of TNA, as he goes down at the hands of Michael Avery at a show for the Edmonton-based indy promotion Prairie Wrestling Alliance. If you don’t know who Michael Avery is, don’t worry. I don’t either.

On April 26, 2008, Avery wrestles on a show that is part of one of the many attempts over the years to revive the Hart family’s Stampede Wrestling in Calgary. While there, he loses a match to Ravenous Randy, a local Calgary wrestler trained by Bruce and Ross Hart. Also on the line in the match is Randy’s Stampede North American Heavyweight Title.

Ravenous Randy travels to British Columbia, where, on May 23, 2008, he wrestles for longstanding indy group ECCW or Extreme Canadian Championship Wrestling and is defeated by Moondog Manson, an indy wrestler who has been in the game since 1997.

Unfortunately for Moondog Manson, he breaks one of the cardinal rules of pro wrestling for people who want to retain a championship: Don’t wrestle the guy who owns the company. On April 24, 2009, he has a match against ECCW part-owner Scotty Mac, also in British Columbia, and Scotty becomes the lineal WWF Champion.

The lineal WWF Title remains in ECCW, as Scotty’s next loss is at the hands of Tony Baroni at a show for the promotion on July 18, 2009. Baroni is another name on this list that, quite frankly, I don’t have too much familiarity with.

Baroni travels out of Canada and in to the United States but remains in the Pacific Northwest, wrestling for an Oregon promotion called Don’t Own Anyone Pro Wrestling or DOA. On DOA’s September 13, 2009 show, Baroni loses to Ricky Gibson. When I first saw that name, I was thinking of the brother of the Rock n’ Roll Express’s Robert Gibson, who wrestled mainly in the south in the 1970s and 1980s. However, that’s not who we’re talking about. There’s apparently another Ricky Gibson and, surprise surprise, he is the owner of DOA Pro Wrestling.

On an October 18, 2009 DOA Pro show, Gibson loses to Dr. Kliever in Oregon City, Oregon. What can I tell you about Kliever? Not much. He appears to be just another Pacific Northwest independent performer.

There are apparently a lot more independent wrestling promotions in Oregon than I ever realized, because now Kliever is wrestling for a group called West Coast Wrestling Connection on February 21, 2010 in Springfield, Oregon, home of Simpsons creator Matt Groening. While there, he loses to Exile, a wrestler trained by Sonjay Dutt and originally from Richmond, Virginia.

Exile bounces back and forth between a couple of those Oregon indy groups, but his next loss comes when he is back in in Portland for WCWC on June 26, 2010, dropping a fall to a gentleman named Ryan Taylor in a match that is also for Taylor’s WCWC Championship. Yes, the prestigious WCWC Title and the lineal WWF Title are now rolled up into one another.

Taylor heads down from Oregon to California, losing a match to current WWE executive Adam Pearce in Simi Valley for Millennium Pro Wrestling on July 31, 2010. Pearce’s NWA World Heavyweight Championship is on the line as well, unifying the NWA and lineal WWF Titles.

Perhaps Adam Pearce’s greatest rival during his time as NWA Champion is Colt Cabana, and Cabana hands Pearce his next singles pinfall loss. Interestingly, it is on a show not in the U.S. but rather in Tlalnepantla, Mexico for a company called the Independent Wrestling League. This comes on September 4, 2010, and Pearce’s NWA Title is not on the line, though it is a first round match in a tournament to crown a new IWL World Champion.

Cabana brings the lineal WWF Title back to the northeast, as his next loss comes on October 2, 2010 in Philadelphia for an ROH on HDNet television taping. While there, he fails to capture the ROH Television Tile from Eddie Edwards, also losing our fake title in the process.

On November 6, 2010, Matt Taven defeats Eddie Edwards in Washingtonville, New York at Northeast Wrestling’s Autumn Ambush show. Edwards’ ROH Television Title is not on the line, but Taven is defending the NEW Heavyweight Title here.

I would’ve predicted Taven dropping our lineal WWF Championship back in Ring of Honor, but he actually does it at a show for NWA On Fire, which is probably my favorite name for an independent promotion. This occurs on November 19, 2010 in Augusta, Maine, and the loss comes at the hands of Bobby Robinson with his NWA On Fire Heavyweight Title also on the line.

Robinson undergoes a name change from Bobby to Luke, and, on September 30, 2011, he steps into the ring with a true legend of professional wrestling, as he loses to Jerry “The King” Lawler in Waterbury, Connecticut for Northeast Wrestling. This takes the lineal WWF Title back to somebody who has actually wrestled for the WWF for the first time in a very long time.

Much like with MVP and Lesnar earlier, I thought the King might be the person to bring the lineal WWF Title back to WWE, but that’s not the case. Instead, his next loss comes on another Northeast Wrestling event on March 24, 2012, also in Waterbury, Connecticut, and your new lineal WWF Champion is Tommy Dreamer.

Here’s another unusual turn of events. I don’t think of Tommy Dreamer as a guy with a lot of connection to the Japanese wrestling scene but, in 2012, his fellow ECW alumnus Yoshihiro Tajiri is running an indy group in Japan called Wrestling New Classic, and Tajiri brings in Dreamer for a couple of shows. While there, Dreamer takes an L against AKIRA, the wrestler formerly known as Akira Nogami in New Japan. This occurs on November 28, 2012 in Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall, and it is in the semi-finals of the tournament to crown the first WNC Champion.

Also, though it’s not directly relevant to our lineal title history, in case you’re curious, AKIRA did go on to become the first WNC Champion, defeating Tajiri in the tournament finals.

AKIRA loses both the WNC Title and the lineal WWF Title to Osamu Nishimura on a Wrestling New Classic show on April 25, 2013 at Korakuen Hall. At the time, Nishimura is a veteran wrestler with over twenty years’ experience, including runs in both New Japan and All Japan.

We continue to follow the WNC Championship lineage, as Tajiri wins that belt and the lineal WWF Title over Nishimura on WNC’s August 8, 2013 card, though this one sees the promotion travel outside of Tokyo and Korakuen Hall to the Kumamoto Circulation Information Hall in Kumamoto, Japan. We need more “Circulation Information Halls” in the United States.

Starbuck, a wrestler born in Canada of Finnish ancestry who has nothing to do with the coffee chain but may have something to do with the character in Moby Dick, defeats Tajiri for the WNC and lineal WWF Titles at Shinjuku FACE, another great venue name, in Tokyo on February 27, 2014.

After changing hands in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Japan, we now see the lineal WWF Title exchanged in Finland, with Starbuck taking the championship to his ancestral home, where he loses it, along with the WNC Title, to Bernard Vandamme, a Belgian wrestler who has been involved in the industry since 1993. The match takes place at Helsinki’s Presidential Hotel on March 8, 2014.

From Finland we go to Germany, specifically Hamburg, where on November 22, 2014, Vandamme falls short in a challenge for the wXw Shotgun Title against champion John Klinger, also known as Bad Bones. The WNC Championship is not on the line here, so we say goodbye to that title lineage.

Less than a week later on November 28, 2014, Klinger is wrestling under his Bad Bones persona for European Professional Wrestling in Worpswede, Germany, where he loses to another German star, Karsten Beck.

The names just keep getting more obscure, as Crazy Sexy Mike – yes, that’s actually what the guy wrestles as (maybe he was a big fan of TLC) – beats Beck on January 10, 2015 in Marburg, Germany for a promotion called German Stampede Wrestling, which has no connection to the Canadian Stampede to my knowledge. Mike also takes the GSW World Heavyweight Title off of Beck in this encounter.

Man, I thought Oregon had a lot of indy wrestling promotions, but Germany apparently has its fair share as well. Now we head to Power of Wrestling in Hildesheim, Germany, where Crazy Sexy Mike is pinned by Ivan Kiev on April 11, 2015.

Adding another German indy group to our list, we now find ourselves at the German Wrestling Federation’s May 23, 2015 show in Nienburg, where Ivan Kiev loses in a semi-final match of a tournament to crown the new GWF Champion. His opponent is Rambo. There have been a lot of Rambos in wrestling over the years, but this one appears to be a fellow originally from the Dominican Republic who began a pro wrestling career in Germany in the mid-2000s.

The finals of that tournament take place in Berlin on June 13, 2015, and, wouldn’t you know it, the winner is our friend Crazy Sexy Mike, now a two-time lineal WWF Champion alongside Sting, Caprice Coleman, and Hiroshi Tanahashi. That stable just gets more and more eclectic. For what it’s worth, Mike beats Rambo in what I assume is a first blood match, though GWF for some reason decided to bill it as a “Counts Only by Bleeding” match. Maybe that works better in German.

Though the GWF Championship is not on the line, Ali Aslan defeats Crazy Sexy Mike on October 3, 2015 on a GWF show also in Berlin. This is a teacher versus student match, as apparently Mike trained Aslan to wrestle.

We don’t have a lot of match results for Ali Aslan between 2015 and present day, but fortunately for the lineage of our fake WWF Championship one of those matches does involve a pinfall loss, though we have to fast forward all the way to November 9, 2019. On that day, Aslan loses to another Crazy Sexy Mike trainee, Cem Kaplan, on a GWF card in Berlin.

For the first time in a while, the lineal WWF Title finds itself around the waist of a wrestler from North America, as Joe E. Legend picks up a win over Cem Kaplan on December 28, 2019 for a promotion called Unlimited Wrestling on their show in Wernigerode, Germany. If you don’t remember Joe E. Legend, he was “Just Joe” in the WWF during the Attitude Era and also had a run as simply “Legend” during the weekly PPV era of TNA.

Though Joe hails from Toronto, he doesn’t bring the lineal WWF Title back to North America. Instead, his next loss is on another Unlimited Wrestling show, this one on July 24, 2021 in Thale, Germany at the hands of an Austrian wrestler called Mexxberg. I know nothing about this Mexxberg guy, but from looking at some photos online, I’m a bit surprised that his physique alone hasn’t put him on WWE’s radar.

We can now add Austria to the list of countries in which the lineal WWF Title has changed hands, with Chris Colen obtaining a victory over Mexxberg on September 11, 2021 in the city of Ternitz for Pro Wrestling Austria. Colen is a wrestler known as the “Austrian Wolverine,” which . . . oof, buddy, too soon. Too soon.

Colen’s original trianer, Michael Kovac beats him for the lineal WWF Title on March 19, 2022 in the Austrian city of Eisenstadt for a promotion called Rings of Europe. Kovac is another Austrian wrestler who has been a staple of the European wrestling scene since the mid-1990s, including going toe-to-toe with guys like Fit Finlay in the latter days of Otto Wanz’s Catch Wrestling Association.

On May 20, 2022, Chris Colen gets his win and lineal WWF Title back from Kovac, beating him in the Neusiedl, Austria on a show promoted by the European Wrestling Association.

Two days later, May 22, 2022, Colen heads from Austria to Germany, where he is defeated by a man with a great ring name, Pascal Spalter on a German Wrestling Federation card in Berlin. Spalter is a Berlin native and another protege of Crazy Sexy Mike. Who knew when we first encountered him that Crazy Sexy Mike would be so prolific?

On June 11, 2022, Pascal Spalter falters on a show in Hannover for the generically named European Wrestling Promotion, losing to Marius Al-Ani. Who is that? I don’t know.

The very next month, July 2, 2022 to be precise, on another European Wrestling Promotion card, Al-Ani is defeated by Johnny Rancid in Hannover. Based on the English word in his name, I thought Rancid might be an American or UK wrestler sneaking in to Germany, but it turns out he’s just another German indy guy.

For the first time in a while, we go back to wXw, where Metehan beats Johnny Rancid on October 22, 2022 in Dresden to become the lineal WWF Champion. If you’re not familiar with the name Metehan, you might have caught this wrestler when he was part of WWE’s NXT UK brand, where he wrestled under the name Teoman, not to be confused with Teo, the little person wrestler who showed up in the early days of TNA. However, he’s become the lineal WWF Champion after wrapping up with NXT UK, so this is another missed opportunity to get the lineal title back under the WWE umbrella.

We now creep into the current calendar year, when our old friend Pascal Spalter becomes a two-time lineal WWF Champion by defeating Metehan on January 8, 2023 in Berlin, as we are back with the German Wrestling Federation. This is also a successful defense of the GWF World Title by Spalter.

If you thought Crazy Sexy Mike was an interesting name for a lineal WWF Champion, I hope you’re ready for Fast Time Moodo. Fast Time pins Pascal on February 4, 2023 in Dresden, Germany on a show promoted by the indy group Eastside Revolution Wrestling. Apparently, Moodo’s name is derived from Tong-Il Moo Do, a form of marital arts of which he is a practitioner.

Exactly two weeks later on February 18, Fast Time Moodo is slowed down by Michael Schenkenberg who wins the lineal WWF Title on a card in Kiel, Germany promoted by Maximum Wrestling.

Schenkenberg takes us to yet another country we have not visited on our lineal WWF Title tour, as he accepts a booking for Danish Pro Wrestling in Blokhus, Denmark April 29, 2023. In that booking, Schenkenberg loses to Ragnar the Viking, a wrestler who hails from Norway.

. . . and that’s actually where our tracing of the post-Montreal lineal WWF Championship comes to an end. Though I admit there’s a chance I could be missing something because results from Europe don’t seem to come in as regularly as results from North America, Japan, or even Mexico, based on what I have been able to find, Ragnar has not even wrestled another match since April 29, let alone lost one.

So, there you have it. The rare ask 411 Wrestling lineal championship that doesn’t wind up with Roman Reigns. This would be an interesting one to check back in on in the future.

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.