Ask 411 Wrestling: Why Did Evolution Turn on Randy Orton After Summerslam 2004?

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Grant feels stabbed in the back:

Why did Evolution turn on Randy Orton the night after his then biggest win off his career against Chris Benoit at Summerslam 2004? The whole angle seemed rushed.

According to the August 25, 2004 edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the angle felt rushed because it was rushed.

Originally, rather than moving into a Randy Orton vs. Triple H program immediately following Summerslam, the plan was for Orton to do a championship rematch with Chris Benoit on pay per view while Triple H came out of his Summerslam singles match with Eugene and into a tag team program with Ric Flair and William Regal joining them as partners.

We would have eventually seen Triple H vs. Orton and an Evolution turn as part of the build towards Wrestlemania, but the whole thing was advanced many months to Unforgiven because a bad rating for the Monday Night Raw before Summerslam combined with a negative audience reaction to Eugene on the pay per view gave everyone the impression that character was over and done with as far as a main event act is concerned, meaning something else had to be done for HHH . . . and what was done was reinserting him into the championship picture.

I don’t often theme questions for this column, but let’s follow up with a related question from Mike of Da F’n Jungle:

This has been bugging me for awhile. Back in 2004, after Evolution turned on Randy Orton and Orton subsequently went on his face run, there was an episode of Raw that climaxed with Orton hitting the RKO on HHH. I remember it because the crowd had a slow clap building this up in unison until Orton hit the RKO. I think there was some other face wrestlers in the ring as well maybe? Does this sound familiar? I can’t seem to find a clip of it and I remember it being a pretty epic visual with the crowd just rabid for HHH to get got!

I’m pretty confident that what you’re talking about is the October 25, 2004 episode of Monday Night Raw, which was building towards that year’s Survivor Series pay per view.

On that evening, Orton was booked in a singles match against Ric Flair, and Flair got the victory off of interference by Triple H. As the Evolution members tried to leave with their tainted victory, they were cut off by the trio of Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, and Maven, who would be teaming with Orton in a Survivor Series elimination match against the heels. Trips and the Nature Boy tried to flee through the crowd, but they were thwarted by additional members of the babyface locker room: Shelton Benjamin, Rhyno, Tajiri, Eugene, Hurricane, and Rosey.

This left Flair and HHH in the ring with their Survivor Series opponents, with Flair eating an RKO and rolling out of the ring, after which Triple H got the rolling Germans from Benoit, the Lionsault from Jericho, and finally the RKO from Orton.

Oh, and Maven punched him somewhere in there, too. Go Maven.

Memphis B-Rad is leaving the memories alone:

Can you think of any tag teams who have had a proper “retirement” match?

This is a difficult one.

I cannot think of a situation in which two (or more) members of a tag team have wrestled a match together and it was a sendoff for both members. If you think about it, it makes sense that these matches would be exceedingly rare. The modern concept of a big retirement match really did not gain traction in American wrestling until the past several years, and, for quite some time now in the U.S., tag team wrestling has been seen as something you do early in your career before moving on in order to become a singles star. This means very few wrestlers will retire as part of a tag team. If you go back to the territory days when guys were teammates for life, announcing your retirement was fairly rare because you never wanted to cut off the possibility of that one last big paycheck.

Probably the closest thing that I can think of to a “tag team retirement match” happened on April 21, 2019 in Moline, Illinois at the awesomely named Tax Slayer Arena when the Shield team of Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose, and Roman Reigns defeated Bobby Lashley, Baron Corbin, and Drew McIntyre. Though originally scheduled to be an untelevised house show, the last three matches of the card – including the Shield’s main event – were ultimately broadcast on the WWE Network with the show being called “The Shield’s Final Chapter.”

This was not a retirement match for Rollins, Ambrose, or Reigns. In fact, all three are still quite active today. However, it was a retirement of sorts for the Shield as a unit and a gimmick, since it was anticipated to be their last match as a team for the foreseeable future. In fact, despite remaining in WWE together, Rollins and Reigns have not formed a tag team since that match . . . at least not in any manner that WWE has acknowledged on television. Braun Strowman did replace Dean Ambrose on house show loops immediately after Ambrose’s departure from the company, giving us a couple of weeks of a Reigns/Rollins/Strowman trio. Reigns and Rollins did also have one traditional tag match as partners, which happened in a dark match after the conclusion of a Monday Night Raw taping on May 20, 2019.

Tyler from Winnipeg is getting an injection:

Did Jay Lethal ever do any WWE work?

Not that I’m aware of. There’s certainly no record I could find of him wrestling a match for the company – even a dark/tryout match – and I don’t believe that he has ever done anything with them behind the scenes, either.

That being said, he has trained at least one wrestler that went on to have a WWE career, that being AJ Lee, who learned the ropes from Lethal while the two were dating.

AG Awesome has an easy name to chant at wrestling shows, if you time the claps right:

I’ve been watching pro wrestling consistently since 1994. It seems there are very few guys and gals left from that era who still wrestle. Could you please list anyone from the ECW, WCW, and WWF rosters (from that year only) who still actively compete? You can limit it to say at least one match in the last year (all of 2022 and 2023).

First off, for the WWF and WCW rosters, I used classic wrestling website Sole’s Vintage Wrestling as my source, so if you think I missed any names, blame Solie. Solie’s didn’t have the 1994 ECW roster compiled, so I used information gathered from The History of WWE to construct that.

Second off, with all due respect to Mr. Awesome, I have no idea where he got the idea that there aren’t that many wrestlers from 1994 who aren’t active anymore. There are TONS of them, particularly if you lower the bar to only having one match in the last two years. Of course, given how I tend to write this column, you know I’m going to catalog them all. Here goes . . .

Four names that everybody should have expected to see on this list are Sting, Jeff Jarrett, Dustin Rhodes, and Billy Gunn, because not only are they still wrestling in 2023, but they’re also regular characters on an internationally broadcast wrestling show thanks to AEW.

Ricky Steamboat was recently on AEW television and teased a match at age 70. He didn’t follow through on that, but he makes the cutoff for AG’s list because he did wrestle his final match last year, teaming with FTR in a six man tag.

Similarly, though not on as widely viewed a show, Pierre “PCO” Oullete remains a player in pro wrestling as a full-time member of TNA’s roster to the extent TNA can be said to have a full-time roster.

Thanks in large part to his status as a legend in Puerto Rico, Savio Vega (who was actually Kwang in 1994) is still an active professional wrestler, mostly but not exclusively on his home island. He’s also popped up in the Dominican Republic and in the U.S. in recent months.

Booker T., still best known as one half of Harlem Heat in 1994, wrestled one match each in 2022 and 2023. This year, he was part of the Royal Rumble match in WWE, and last year he was part of a ten-man tag team match in Reality of Wrestling, the independent promotion that is associated with his wrestling school in Texas.

Frequent opponent of Booker Scott Steiner shows up on independents from time-to-time, most recently in April of this year.

One of Steiner’s opponents in 2022 was, to the surprise of nobody reading this, Jerry Lawler. Yes, this man who we all once watched die on national television is still wrestling matches, or at least he was until suffering a stroke earlier this year. I fully expect him to be back in the ring at least once more before he passes.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Ric Flair who in 2022 wrestled his supposed last match ever in a setup very similar to Ricky Steamboat’s, teaming with son-in-law Andrade El Idolo against Jay Lethal and fellow 1994 wrestler Jeff Jarrett.

After almost nine years away from the ring, Barry Horowitz stepped back in between the ropes in 2022, wrestling Joey Janela in a twenty-five minute match. Earlier this year, he appeared on an episode of TNA Imapct, defeating Johnny Swinger.

Speaking of enhancement talent, though he’s best remembered as the Brooklyn Brawler, Steve Lombardi spent most of 1994 wrestling as the baseball-themed MVP/Abe “Knuckleball” Schwartz. After staying out of the ring for most of the COVID-19 pandemic, he returned to the ring twice in 2022, with one of his opponents being . . .

Bushwacker Luke. Luke Williams is 76 years old. He is remarkably active in the ring for a man of his age, as I’ve counted at least nine matches for him in 2022 and at least three in 2023.

The Native American Tatanka has made sporadic appearances these past couple of years, with the most notable being a match against Matt “Zack Ryder” Cardona on a September 3, 2022 show in Schaumburg, Illinois.

This one surprised me a bit. Henry Godwinn just barely qualifies for this list, as he had one match in 2022, though it was under his pre-WWE moniker of Shanghai Pierce. Also appearing in one and only one match between 2022 and 2023, Duke “The Dumpster” Droese just barely ekes his way on to this list. Completing this bizarre triumvirate is ECW’s Jason, who didn’t wrestle for nine years as near as I can tell but did have a match out of nowhere on an indy card in New Jersey in August of this year.

Though he was known as Aldo Montoya in 1994, most of us know him as Justin Credible, and he didn’t wrestle at all in 2022 but has had at least three matches this year, with one of them being a tag match involving “Pitbull #1” Gary Wolfe . . . who I could have sworn was dead. Not only is Gary Wolfe not dead, but he’s also wrestling pretty consistently on the indies, jumping back and forth between shows in Florida and shows in New Jersey.

He’s not a regular, but Sean “1-2-3 Kid” Waltman does qualify for this list per AG’s criteria because he showed up on two cards for Game Changer Wrestling last year.

One of the baddest men in pro wrestling history, The Barbarian (who in 1994 was “Seonne” of the Headshrinkers) still competes in a fair number of indy matches each year, mostly teaming not with his Headshrinker partner Fatu but rather with his even older Powers of Pain partner, the Warlord . . . who was NOT part of the WWF roster in 1994, so don’t expect to see him elsewhere in this column.

Perhaps the baddest man in pro wrestling history and the Barbarian’s tag team partner, Haku, graced the ring with his presence twice in 2022. One of those bouts actually reunited him with the Barbarian as the Faces of Fear, as they defeated a couple of local wrestlers in Belleville, Illinois.

Speaking of tag teams, the Headbangers, Mosh and Thrasher, are still going in 2023. They weren’t yet the Headbangers in 1994, but they did wrestle in ECW as The Spiders, which was a masked gimmick that they used throughout the independents around that time.

Jinsei Shinzaki, better known to WWF viewers as Hakushi is still very much an active professional wrestler in Japan, having several matches per month in 2023. Perhaps his most notable match this year was on January 22, when he was one of Keiji Muto’s opponents in his final match as the Great Muta. That bout saw Muta team with AEW’s Darby Allen and Sting to defeat Shizaki (as Hakushi), AKIRA, and Naomichi Marufuji.

Perhaps the only person more active on this list than Shinzaki is Tommy Dreamer, who not only appears with regularity in TNA but also still maintains a pretty active schedule of independent bookings.

Like Shinzaki and Dreamer, Devon Storm, who competed under that name in ECW in 1994 but went on to greater fame as Crowbar in WCW several years later, is still a pretty regular in-ring performer. He mostly wrestles on indy shows on the east coast but has also popped up on TNA and NJPW Strong shows in the last couple of years.

He has yet to wrestle this year, but Buff Bagwell had three matches in 2022. The last one of those matches was in Alaska, which I’m going to guess Buff did just for the sake of getting a free vacation out of the deal. Can’t say that I blame him.

Bagwell’s former tag team championship partner 2 Cold Scorpio had a handful of matches in spring 2023, most notably over Wrestlemania weekend on Game Changer Wrestling’s “For the Culture” show, featuring some of the sport’s best Black independent wrestlers.

Not featured on For the Culture (though maybe he should have been) was Mr. Hughes, though he did wrestle several matches in 2022 and has had a couple in 2023, with many of them taking place in the Chillicothe, Ohio area, which is where I am going to assume he resides.

Wrestling just one match in 2022 and one match in 2023 (so far), hardcore icon The Sandman creeps on to the list toting his cane, beer, and cigarette. Another cornerstone of ECW, Shane Douglas wrestles much more frequently, averaging one to two matches per month to this point in 2023. Also active from the Land of the Extreme is Little Guido – known as Damien Stone in 1994 – who this year has been seen in MLW with a new version of his FBI tag team.

Very early in his career, Japanese wrestler Osamu Nishimura had a series of matches in ECW as part of a learning excursion in the U.S., where he faced names like Shane Douglas, Chris Benoit, and Sabu. He remains active in his home country to this day.

Last but not least, let’s talk about Al Snow. Perhaps best known today for his behind the scenes involvement with Ohio Valley Wrestling, Snow does still occasionally get into the ring, including in a tag team with a guy named Kal Herro called “The Newest Rockers.” Hey, at least he’s got a sense of humor about his past.

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.