Ask 411 Wrestling: Why Wasn’t Ted DiBiase a WWF Champion?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to the latest edition of Ask 411 Wrestling.

I’d like to kick this week’s column off with a housekeeping note. Several times since my takeover, I have alluded to the fact that we have backlog of almost 100 questions for Ask 411, which reach back to Mathew Sforcina’s most recent run as the column’s author. Early on in my tenure here, I made it my goal to work through this backlog as much as I could.

However, I’ve come to a realization. If you look at the questions in the backlog, there are good reasons that many of them are there. Several of them are questions that would take a ridiculous amount of time or effort to answer and several of them are questions that, frankly, don’t have broad appeal and would probably only interest the person who asked them.

I say that not to insult the folks who asked these questions but to let everybody know that, from this point forward, I am going to place more emphasis on answering questions that have been sent in recently as opposed to going through the old stuff. I’m not going to delete the backlog and there may be times where I dive back into it to get some extra material (and there are a few of those questions that I legitimately want to write about), but I think that the new questions will have more appeal because many of them are tied into current events and because people are more likely to read a column if they have higher odds of seeing an answer to something that they’ve recently asked.

With all that being said, if you’d like to submit one of those new questions that will go close to the top of the priority list, send it on in to [email protected]. We’ll do our best to get right back to you.

Now that we’ve addressed that issue, let’s get into the questions that you all came for.

Everybody has a price for Dr. Clyde:

Long time reader, love the Ask 411. Favorite part of the page. Anyhoo, they gave Andre title recognition after “beating” Hogan in The Main Event.

Is there any reason why they won’t do the same for DiBiase? I do think he deserves it. Back then, I’d had a fit and say no, but now I do think he’s entitled. Why has it never happened?

The storyline at the time was definitely that DiBiase’s championship “reign” didn’t count because he attempted to purchase the title as opposed to winning it in the ring. Of course, he did wear the championship belt and wrestled a few matches with it before it was officially taken away from him by WWF president Jack Tunney, but the kayfabe line at the time was not that he was a champion who got stripped of the title. It was that he was NEVER champion.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the WWF couldn’t go back and retroactively say that he was a titleholder after all. There is precedent for companies re-inserting forgotten or unofficial championship reigns back into their official canon. For example, in April and May of 1998, Chris Benoit won the WCW Television Title twice on house shows, with each reign lasting only a day or two before he dropped the belt back to Booker T., the guy who he beat for it. When those title changes first occurred, WCW pretended that they never happened, but, in the later days of the promotion, the reigns were recognized and put back into WCW’s official title histories.

In fact, even Andre the Giant’s WWF Title reign was not widely acknowledged when it first occurred. The company never officially said that his title reign didn’t count in the same way that they said DiBiase’s didn’t count, but they also didn’t heavily push him as a former champion and there are at least some official publications from the late 1980s and early 1990s which list all of the former WWF Champions but omit Andre’s name. It wasn’t until the Giant passed away and was named the first inductee into the WWF Hall of Fame in 1993 that he got heavily promoted as a former WWF Champion.

So, why hasn’t the company done the same for DiBiase? I don’t know that they’ve given a true answer to this question, but the most likely explanation is that they’ve not had any incentive to do so. When Andre passed away, many in the promotion’s upper echelon were deeply saddened, and they wanted to add to his mythos by stating that he had reached the pinnacle of the business, i.e. holding its most prominent championship. DiBiase hasn’t faced a similar tragedy and has kept a pretty low profile in his post-retirement years, so nobody has had the same incentive to add him back into these particular annals of history.

Michael K. has a trio of unrelated questions:

There’s been several times where a wrestler has “stolen” a finishing move from either his opponent or mentor, when previously, they’ve never used the move as a finisher before. I’m not talking for one match either, but used over an extended period of time: Tito Santana using the figure four after being laid out by Greg Valentine and Dusty Rhodes using the “weaverlock” (which was just a basic sleeper) and Brutus Beefacke using the sleeper as homage to Roddy Piper come to mind. Your thoughts on this? Do you find it hokey that these guys all of a sudden became masters of a move overnight or do you find it cool for storyline sake?

For the most part, it doesn’t bother me that much. I’ve always been able to rationalize it in my mind by thinking that the wrestler who has adopted the move has been working on it in off-camera training, getting to the point that he is proficient at it. In fact, back in the good old days when major wrestling promotions acted like wrestling was an actual sport, you from time-to-time would have announcers talking about wrestlers working on new moves behind the scenes.

The one time that this sort of thing does bother me is when the adopting wrestler’s version of the move looks terrible compared to the original but the promotion still sells it as devastating anyway. Perhaps the best example of this in recent memory is the Miz’s figure four leglock, which he picked up back when he was briefly Ric Flair’s protégé. He does it well enough now, but in the early days it was pretty rough.

Also, though it’s been a long while since I’ve seen him do it, I remember HATING Jay Lethal’s top rope elbow drop from his days as Black Machismo. He “hit” several of those that looked far more like a variation on a splash than a true elbow. Some of CM Punk’s top rope elbows were pretty atrocious too, come to think of it.

I recently watched some Undertaker DVD where he wrestled Mabel who was carried to the ring (I pitied the poor saps that carried him) and one of the carriers (I’m 99% convinced) was Jeff Hardy. I also saw a YouTube clip where Braun Strowman and Elias were Rosebuds for Adam Rose. I’m sure there are hundreds of other times this has happened. Can you think of perhaps some other, lesser known, times this happened? Not like CM Punk being on the side of John Cena’s car cause that’s common knowledge but other less known ones?

You’re right, this does happen all the time – really far too often to put together an exhaustive list without driving myself insane. Here are a few of my favorites, though, particularly some hidden gems.

First off, I was able to find footage of the Hardy Boys carrying King Mabel to the ring, as Michael alluded to in his question. You get a good, tight shot on Jeff’s straining face about halfway through:

Interestingly enough, Matt and Jeff had another appearance as extras that tied them closely to King Mabel, as you can see them as doormen in ridiculous purple and gold costumes opening up the entryway during the 1995 King of the Ring pay per view.

If you pull up Wrestlemania VI on the Network and watch the entrance of Rhythm and Blues closely, you might recognize the driver of the team’s pink Cadillac as none other than Diamond Dallas Page. DDP, who was only a couple of years into his career in wrestling at the time, was the owner of the vehicle, and he let the WWF use it free of charge for the show as long as he got to drive it on camera.

Though I was not able to find any footage of it, if you watch the build to the Undertaker and Ric Flair’s match at Wrestlemania XVIII, there was an angle on an episode of Smackdown in which Taker dodged a punch on the floor from Flair, which resulted in the Nature Boy decking a fan. That fan was none other than Paul London in a not-so-subtle disguise. Fortunately for London, he didn’t have a big creepy smile plastered on his face throughout the angle.

Hey, who’s the referee in this Randy Savage vs. George Steele match from 1986? Why, it’s none other than Dean Malenko!

As I alluded to above, we could go on with this forever, so feel free to shout out any of your favorites in the comments down below.

Ultimately what was the point of Taker-Cena being a squash at this past Wrestlemania? Was it to soothe Taker’s ego after he looked so pathetic the last few Manias? Not like Cena is afraid to put a guy over, but this seemed pointless.

According to Dave Meltzer in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the rationale behind the booking was that the company ran the angle that they did but never officially announced the match because they wanted fans to know that Taker/Cena would be on the show in some form but did not want them to expect it to be one of the key matches on the card. They didn’t want it to be seen as one of the key matches on the card because they were well aware that the Undertaker was not capable of having the classic matches that he has had against other main event level performers on Wrestlemania. Essentially, it was their way of saying, “Hey, these guys will be on the card and will do something together, but don’t expect it to be amazing.”

We gave Michael K. three questions, so we should probably give the same treatment to Night Wolf the Wise:

1. WWE used to do a thing called: Weekly Interview with Michael Cole. It started I think in 2013 and ran for quite some time before being canceled. What was the purpose of them doing this show. Did they ever give a reason why it was canceled?

WWE refreshes its exclusive online content on a pretty regular basis. It’s rare that they have a web series that lasts more than two or three years. This series, which ended unceremoniously on October 5, 2016 with an interview with the Usos, was likely just a victim of the latest content shakeup. If there is an explanation other than that, I’m not aware of it.

2. What is the most violent match in the history of wrestling?

It’s difficult to answer this question because “violence” is subjective and comes in a variety of different flavors. Is punching or slamming somebody as hard as you can more violent than carving somebody up so they bleed like a stuck pig? Are you talking about professional wrestling violence, or are you talking about matches that go south and turn into something more legitimate?

You could ask ten different people this question and probably get ten different answers, but in my book there’s not much more violent than LEGITIMATELY TRYING TO KILL YOUR OPPONENT, which was what New Jack says that he was doing to Vic Grimes in a February 2002 scaffold match promoted by ECW wannabe XPW:

Before I remembered the Vic Grimes incident, I was getting ready to mention another New Jack match in responding to this question, which was an April 2003 bout in which he legitimately beat up the then-69-year-old wrestler Gypsy Joe, which Jack claims was retaliation for Joe stiffing him early in the match and then repeatedly using a particularly vile racial epithet:

So, yeah. Apologies to anybody who was expecting me to name a TNA match or something.

3. In the old days of wrestling, fans would become so invested in the matches that they would attack the wrestlers who were the heels. Freddie Blaise once stated he was stabbed 12 times. When did wrestling start becoming more regulated, meaning fans didn’t try to kill the heels?

It would be a steady progression from the late 1980s through the early 1990s, when conventional wisdom started to weigh far more in favor of professional wrestling being a work. It really wasn’t a matter of wrestling being more “regulated,” just a matter of fans realizing that the heels weren’t really doing anything all that dastardly.

Connor sent this question in through his official American spokesman, James E. Cornette:

Why was Yokozuna kicked out of the main event scene so quickly in 1994?

I wouldn’t say that he was thrown out of the main event scene in 1994. He was the WWF Champion through Wrestlemania that year, when he dropped it to Bret Hart. There were a few months in the middle of the year when he didn’t have much to do, but that’s because Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart and the Undertaker vs. the Undertaker had the main events on lockdown. When those programs wrapped up, Yoko was right back to feuding the Undertaker, which is just about as close to you could get to the main event at that time without being in a WWF Tile match.

Things did start to go downhill for the big man in 1995 and especially 1996, and that was in large part due to his weight. The WWF obviously wanted him to be large, but when he ballooned to well over the size that he was during his championship reigns, they got on him to start losing weight and weren’t going to put him in a key position until he got back into better shape. Unfortunately, he never met those goals, and his hyper-obesity eventually caused his release from the company and then his death several years later.

With that, we’ll close up the Ask 411 mailbag one more time. If you’ve got questions for a future edition of the column, check in with us at [email protected].