wrestling / Columns

Ask 411 Wrestling: What Are the Young Bucks’ Best ROH 2017 Matches?

December 23, 2017 | Posted by Mathew Sforcina
Tag Team Young Bucks Nick Jackson Matt Jackson - Honor Rising Image Credit: NJPW

Hello, welcome to Ask 411 Wrestling. I am your host Mathew Sforcina, and I might as well get this out of the way now, and do the MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT now.

Ahem.

Next week’s Ask 411 Wrestling will be my final one.

Again.

For a variety of personal and professional reasons, I feel that this is the time to step away, on the sort of anniversary of my beginning this journey as a two week fill in over the Xmas break 9 or so years ago. Add in the few years I did of the Evolution Schematic and Fink’s Payload and everything, I’ve been writing for 411mania for nearly a dozen years, give or take a few breaks here and there. The site and the bossmen have been nothing but wonderful and accommodating to me, and this is not a decision I take lightly. I’ve already done the ”ain’t I great?” style overblown departure, so this one will be a lot simplier, I’ll do next week’s column then ride off into the sunset. As for the future of Ask 411? Short term, friend of the column and all round good egg Jed Shaffer will be taking over for a short while, long term, I’ve got no idea. We’ll have to see. If you got a question you’d prefer Jed to answer, send it to [email protected] or, if you’d prefer to have a question in the last ever edition of Ask 411 by me, send it through to [email protected]

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Lots of great WM cards there. And a Jinder Mahal joke I’m kinda kicking myself I didn’t think of.

The Trivia Crown

Who are we? We’re a tag team, one who can say they’ve beaten the guy above. Our first team name revolved around traps, which is odd, considering how we work. We’re old school, in the sense that we’re equally as home holding 6 man gold as we are normal tag titles. We’re also not old school, in that we’ve wrestled and lost to a woman at least once. We’ve been made of stone, we’ve been chronological, and we’ve had a move name you shouldn’t use in mixed company. A tag team coming to Australia in the new year, we are who?

Matt Boogie has the answer but not the specifics, not all of them anyway, so I’ll do it this week.

Who are we? We’re a tag team, one who can say they’ve beaten the guy above (CHIKARA King of Trios ’12 Day 1). Our first team name revolved around traps, which is odd, considering how we work (Los Gallineros, ‘The Coop’ since there were chickens, but they’re high flyers) We’re old school, in the sense that we’re equally as home holding 6 man gold as we are normal tag titles (ROH/NEVER 6 man belts, lots of normal tag belts). We’re also not old school, in that we’ve wrestled and lost to a woman at least once (lost the PWG Tag belts at PWG Eleven to World’s Cutest Tag Team). We’ve been made of stone (Mount Rushmore 2.0), we’ve been chronological (Generation Me), and we’ve had a move name you shouldn’t use in mixed company (More Bang For Your Fuck). A tag team coming to Australia in the new year (Yep), we are who? The Young Bucks.

Who am I? I’m batting 0.500 against the above. A hall of famer, I’ve be credited with causing a heavyweight champion to give up a title due to injury, a title I myself had in the past given up due to injury. I used to use a natural disaster to finish matches, now I use a reference. I also used to be a natural event that is very destructive, but these days I’m a creator. I’ve beaten an unbeatable woman for a type of gold, I’ve wrestled at Starrcade but not Wrestlemania, I am who?

Getting Down To All The Business

Nightwolf starts us off with a simple one.

I need your help remembering something. The day after Survivor Series 98, there’s a segment with the Corporation in the ring. Stone Cold comes down to confront them. He talks something about getting a title rematch. Vince tells him no. Stone Cold then tells them he has a legally binding contract. Moments later they go to the titan tron and show a judge. The Judge then tells the Corporation that Stone Cold will get his title shot that night? Any idea who the guy on the tron is? Also, I forget the angle was leading to that promo.

You obviously didn’t watch Celebrity Deathmatch on MTV. The guy on the Tron was Judge Mills Lane, famous for being a boxing ref, his infamous match being the one where Mike Tyson got peckish and bit on Holyfield’s ear. He was also the ref on Celebrity Deathmatch, and, more importantly for the purposes of this question, he had a syndicated court show, ‘Judge Mills Lane’ from 98 to 01, one of a few shows launched to try and cash in on the Judge Judy bandwagon.

So, Judge Lane exists, and has launched his TV show in mid to late 1998. So, over in WWF at the time…

The Deadly Games tournament was perhaps the finest night of the McMahon boys. They played everyone like a fiddle, they screwed over Austin, they screwed over Mankind, and they got the Corporate Champion they wanted, The Rock. Everything is awesome!

Now, to step back a moment, Austin got fired the month prior at Judgment Day: In Your House, when he refused to count the pinfall for either Kane or Undertaker in the match for the vacated WWF title after the two men double covered him the month before that. But then in the lead up to Survivor Series, Shane rehired Austin, with a big fat contract, one of the clauses being that he got a title shot down the line. Then Shane turned on Austin at Survivor Series as part of the awesome night. The following night…

This does sort of clear up an issue with the McMahon master plan here, in that the McMahons obviously didn’t intend to honor the deal Shane signed. The McMahons didn’t want Austin out of the WWF, they just didn’t want him as champ, if he was midcard or something, that would be fine. So, Vince fires him, Shane hires him back, and in order to lull Austin into believing Shane was on the up and up, Shane had to give him a good deal. The McMahons clearly never intended to honor that deal, but Austin went and got legal advice, and the contract Shane gave Austin was a little too good.

So then Austin got his match, but didn’t win the title, so darn it, he’ll just have to win the Rumble, but to do that he has to beat Undertaker, and so on the story goes.

Matthew Nicholas Buck the 3rd asks a question I’m not really qualified to answer.
I want to show my friends a few young buck matches over the holidays – what would you say their 3 best matches from RoH 2017 were?

I don’t watch ROH that much, and I’m not a Young Bucks fan, so I’m really not the guy to ask. However, according to Meltzer, the best three ROH matches the Bucks had were the three way at Best In The World, the win over the Hardyz at Supercard of Honor, and the three way street fight at Winner Takes All.

That said, you could just do the three Hardy/Bucks matches, Manhatten Mayhem VI, Winner Takes All, Supercard. Nice little trilogy there. Up to you. Maybe a reader has a better match I don’t know about. Again, not keeping too many tabs on ROH, and not a Bucks fan. Readers?

David continues onto Social Media, a platform the Bucks are well known on.

Hey Matthew, another question for you: I noticed that both HHH and Vince McMahon each follow only 25 accounts. Now after the obvious crossover accounts like Stephanie McMahon, Conor’s Cure and the offical WWE accounts, I noticed a few weird things about who Vince follows. With only 25 spots, many of which are business related, Vince still leaves a few spots to follow some of his performers… Vince follows John Cena, The Miz, Sheamus, no big surprises… but then I was a bit surprised he doesn’t follow Steve Austin, or The Rock… and then very surprised to see he follows, taking up two spots, not HBK, not Linda McMahon, but CM Punk and AJ Lee. With Twitter and online presence being what it is in the current WWE landscape, what is going on here? Thanks for your insights!

There is a limit to what I can discern from this distance, I can’t get inside Vince’s head, and I’m not sure I’d want to, far too messy, what with all the blood and grey matter and all that. However, what I suspect is happening here, is that Vince doesn’t really ‘do’ Twitter, in the sense that while he does tweet on occasion, I suspect he’s not actually using it to follow people, in the sense of reading it every day. He only joined back in 2013, and if you look at the follow list at that point, it’s actually a solid enough selection, in the sense that if he’s just starting off, he’ll follow Cena and Punk and AJ, and Miz is his media star, and Ryder is the online guy… The fact that he’s still following the WWE Insider account, which hasn’t tweeted in three years, would indicate to me that he’s not using it in that way, and thus hasn’t updated it since when he signed up. He just logs in and tweets his things and then logs out. I mean, he has one sole like to his credit, so I doubt he’s much of a Tweeter.

It’s a snapshot of 2013 WWE following, pretty much.

Stuart asks about an angle I had no idea existed.

I recently stumbled across a video of Patrick Lennon reading a statement supposedly from Doug Williams regarding a global conspiracy to usurp Vince Mahon from his position as owner of the WWE. After a bit more research i discovered a story about Alex Shane allegedly working for the WWE and running angles in the FWA as a testing ground for Vince before the same angles were run in the WWE. The story is sold as a shoot but just comes across as a thorough but poorly executed work. So what is the full story behind this and what was the actual truth?

Oh geez.

OK, so, FWA, Frontier Wrestling Alliance, is a British wrestling promotion that started out as Fratton Wrestling Association in 1993, then became Frontier in 1999, then was disbanded in 2007, but reformed in 2009 and is still kicking today. We’re looking at just after it reformed in 2010, and there was an angle where it was alleged that WWE an unnamed global wrestling company was looking to take over the world and steal lots of stuff from FWA specifically.

The angle kicked off because there was a group that had formed in FWA, The Agenda, which was a heel faction that was designed to destroy all the British talent not in the Agenda and thus get big fat Yankee contracts on the basis of this dominance. They had armbands and such.

Then the Nexus formed in WWE. With armbands and such.

This began the whole angle, they claimed certain other things were ripped off from them too, the Foley/Edge spear spot at WM for one, apparently, few other things. The whole thing sort of fizzled out, as the attempt I believe was to capitalise on what was basically a coincidence and try and generate some buzz out of it. It’s not an angle that was well received by the public, and other than a few videos and podcasts and such, it didn’t really go anywhere, until Alex Shane turned heel and revealed he was the true leader of the Agenda and I think that ended it, somewhat?

I mean, maybe there are diehard FWA-Truthers out there, but it seems just FWA wanted to paint themselves as the ECW style scrappy underdogs fighting back against the big bad WWE, but it didn’t work.

Unless it did, and this is all part of the conspiracy.

Connor? Where’d he go?

Whatever happened to Gary Michael Cappetta?

GMC was an announcer with the WWF from 74 to 85, then worked for the AWA and then WCW, where he remained until he was let go for budget reasons in May 1995, replaced by David Penzer, whom he’d been mentoring. More recently he’s done some work for ROH, conducting backstage interviews for their DVD releases for a brief stint in 2005.

He’s written a book about his career, converted it into a one man show, there’s a screenplay he did, and today he teaches Spanish at Christian Brothers Academy in New Jersey, apparently. He did Spanish commentary for WCW back in the day, so that bit isn’t hard to imagine.

Basically he was a bland but solid ring announcer, and WWF had Fink for that, and after WCW fired him, there wasn’t a whole bunch of places to work. He has done some small shows and such, I believe, I think there was a Botchamania with something recent he did but I might be wrong about that.

When you’re not a wrestler, the wrestling business can be a hard place to work. Wrestlers with anything resembling a name can usually find some bookings somewhere, but if you’re an announcer or a commentator or whatever, you can just run out of places to work that’ll have you. At that point you either start your own company or find something else to do. Gary has other stuff to do, apparently. Hopefully he’s happy.

Richard asks why certain people didn’t have certain music.

Back in the day The Slickster had the greatest thememusic of all time – Jive Soul Bro. All of his wrestlers entered to it (even Martel briefly) I think (with the possible exeption of the Bolsheviks). But when he managed Power and Glory and the Warlord all of his wrestlers entered without any music. How is that? Why did they stop using Jive Soul Bro?

That’s odd, they had some music on their debut…

But not afterwards, no.

According to a Paul Roma shoot, so take with all the grains of salt you need, he had the idea to put the team together, since neither of them were doing anything, and they were travelling together anyway. Vince was ok with that, but since it wasn’t his idea they never got pushed, according to Roma. Now, that doesn’t explain the lack of music as such, but Warlord did start with using Jive Soul Bro early on, until they stopped.

I think it’s a case of the song sticking out too much with these three guys, so they didn’t want to use Jive Soul Bro, but as heels they didn’t need music to get the fans behind them, this was still at the time when music wasn’t universal, and P&G&W weren’t getting pushed too much, so why waste money on theme music? This was acts being managed by Slick, rather than Slick managing someone being the act, if that makes sense.

Speaking of sense, Rahil?

What is the highest selling wrestling DVD?

To the best of my knowledge, the highest selling wrestling DVD of all time was the Rise and Fall of ECW DVD, which surpassed the former record holders of The Ultimate Ric Flair Collection, Tombstone: The History of The Undertaker, and Wrestlemania XX, which at various points were the highest selling WWE and thus wrestling DVD of all time. Certainly after a certain point streaming and the Network and such curtailed the DVD market so the numbers are lower, but to my knowledge, ECW still holds it.

And the lowest selling wrestling DVD?

Well, considering no-one has bought the “Best Of Massive Q: Vol 1” DVD, that would have to win, zero sales.

But I mean, any Indy show is going to have a half dozen badly produced DVDs of local shows that maybe three people will ever buy, so there’s no way to definitively answer the question. As far as WWE goes, I know for a long time the Superstar Billy Graham DVD was a massively poor seller, with the WCCW one not much better, they sold like 4000-5000 or so, which is bad for WWE, but then again great for the collector’s market, there’s lots of really bloody rare WWE DVDs out there.

John?

You always hear from announcers and other wrestlers that did not win there match, that the winner cheated by grabbing their tights. My question is, has a ref ever stopped a three count pin due to a wrestler grabbing tights?

… I know that a little while back a ref DQed someone, I think it was Jericho, for having a handful of tights, but my Google-Fu has failed me. Readers? Am I insane?

Jorge from Puerto Rico has a whole bunch of questions that will ride us out this week.

1- In 2002, Wrestlemania XVIII, why have Stone Cold face Scott Hall. I mean there were so many people who he could’ve faced which would have been better opponents for him. If you’re going to have Rock v. Hogan, why not have Austin v. HHH? If there was any match that could’ve followed Rock Hogan, I can only see HHH/Austin? Or instead of having Angle v. Kane, which seems like a total lost, why not have Austin v. Angle? Was the plan always Austin v. Hall?

The original original plan was for Austin, Rock and Taker, as the big three faces of the WWF, to fight Hogan, Hall, and Nash in some combination of the three, to sell the notion that the nWo were bad dudes and this was a major problem, as well as having a little arc with the final match being the tiebreaker, maybe. Austin had Hogan, that wa the giant money match everyone saw, but Austin refused it, so they went with Hogan/Rock, and then Austin ended up with Hall.

HHH was getting his big return title win over a heel, and while I can see Austin wanting Angle as a heel who can give him an awesome match, Austin at that point wasn’t the easiest guy to work with, and the nWo angle was still supposed to be a thing, and Austin wasn’t turning heel again, so it was the best option available.

2- On that same note, what’s the idea of bringing the NWO, making it seem like this huge deal and then have both Hall and Hogan lose at Mania?

The nWo. Did Vince create it? No? Huh, something Vince didn’t create, losing. What a shock.

The idea with the nWo, like with Flair, and Goldberg, and Steiner, and everyone they ended up bringing in from WCW far too late to do anything with, was to try and add the WCW fans back to WWF ratings. The WWF was obsessed by the fact that when the Monday Night Wars ended, a couple million or so people just stopped watching wrestling. So they chased the idea of finding whichever piece of WCW was the one they were missing, and they could get those people back, just by having the people there.

They couldn’t beat proper WWF guys though, they had to be inferior, WCW had to know it’s place, even now, after Vince owned it and thus could do what he wanted with it and it would help and benefit him since he owns it and gets the money and thus booking an InVasion angle is easy because oh no I’ve gone crosseyed again.

Moving on.

3- When was the idea to have Hogan turn face at Mania done? If it was before the event, I think it’s only logic to have Rock/Hogan last. I think it’s pretty obvious that after Hogan/Rock the crowd would be dead.

The WWF Title was supposed to be the biggest thing there. I know Hunter afterwards admits Rock/Hogan should have gone on last, but at the time, I doubt you needed to tell him more than zero times that he should get a main event spot.

That said, the Hogan face turn was going to happen, the reactions were there prior to the show, and more importantly it was a trade off for putting Rock over clean. They worked it out that Hogan would put Rock over, then turn face, and then win the title at some point later that year. They expected a 50-50 crowd, and the face turn would come at the end, but then the fans decided to skip a few steps, so they had to improvise a bit for Rock to play heel, and then they did the face turn as planned. Then the reactions Hogan was getting caused Vince to want to cash in on the nostalgia dollar ASAP, so they again skipped a few steps and got the belt on Hogan ASASAP, at which point the crowds died, because apparently while we wanted to see Hogan, we didn’t want to see Hogan actually wrestle.

*1/100th of a Chandler*

I was watching Superbrawl 1996 and have a couple of questions regarding the event. First of, Bobby Heenan kept all through the show repeating a lot of things said by Steve Mcmichael and Tony Schiavone, was this a rib on someone, or why was he doing it? He didn’t do it only at Superbrawl,he did it multiple times after with Dusty. Was Bobby Heenan messing with someone?

Not to speak ill of those who have left us and whom we miss, but there are a couple of PPVs in Heenan’s WCW run where he was of questionable sobriety. Hog Wild 96 is the most famous example, but he didn’t enjoy his WCW run all that much, so I can maybe understand him choosing to enjoy a beverage or six before a show.

Possibly. Maybe I’m wrong there.

Second of all, during the event Gene Okerlund made some sort of announcement for the hotline stating that two former WWF Champions (he didn’t specify which title) were coming to WCW, was this Hall and Nash? This was about a month before Mania XII.

Yes. This was about the time that they began negotiations, if I recall correctly. There was a few months prior to them leaving where they were on the way out, the notion that Hall and Nash were suddenly on WCW one week and no-one knew is BS.

They gave their notice, they worked out their notice, then turned up in WCW.

Third, Johnny B Badd (Marc Mero) wrestled DDP for the TV title and kept it, but he appeared at Mania XII, was he still under contract at SB? Did he leave because his contract expired?

Yes, he was under contract at Superbrawl, and for a little while later, he swapped the TV title with Lex Luger a couple times before dropping it to Luger on WCW Saturday Night March 9th.

He then left the company, as he was uncomfortable with the angle with DDP and Kimberly. He then signed with WWF almost immediately, and so turned up at Wrestlemania. Simple.

Fourth, what’s the deal with the match with Pillman and Sullivan? Did Pillman made some sort of shoot by calling Sullivan Booker man? I know he appeared after said ppv but after his accident he went to ECW and then WWF, what was up with his deal with WCW? Was he let go because of his injury?

It was a worked shoot that Pillman was working in order to shoot work WCW and thus work shoot everyone else.

I think.

OK, so Pillman convinces Sullivan and Bischoff that he could get everyone talking by playing a loose cannon, and that if he did a worked shoot, everyone would be talking about WCW and him. He managed to convince the WCW higher ups, and so they did the Booker Man thing, as well some other things Pillman did that were crazy, like grab at Heenan’s jacket and such. Weird, sure, but understandable.

So he’s still in WCW after Superbrawl and such, but then he has a great idea. He goes to Bischoff, and he says he needs some time to really work people, and to work out some kinks in the gimmick, stuff like that, and he asks to go to ECW to do it. It’ll work better there, get more attention, so on and so forth. Bischoff agrees to this, since Pillman is persuasive. But then Pillman says it really needs to be believable, it needs to be legit, so he asks for a real release from his contract, so everyone will believe he’s insane, if WCW has fired him. Bischoff agrees, with the understanding that in a few months, Pillman will come back.

Instead, Pillman does turn up in ECW, but he also signs a contract with WWF, since his release from WCW was legit. Then comes the car crash and the injury and so on.

But yeah, he worked WCW into giving him a shoot release by working a worked shoot angle that was a shoot worked shoot work.

And on that note, the angle shifted from Pillman to Benoit, was this before Benoit and Nancy were together? If not, wouldn’t it have been extremely uncomfortable for them to be working together even though Benoit was with Sullivan’s ex? Did she leave Sullivan for Benoit or what exactly happened then? I know they started an angle regarding Nancy leaving Sullivan for Benoit, was this making a real life angle?

It was before, yes. Benoit and Nancy got together because of the angle. Sullivan booked his own divorce, as the joke goes. He wrote that Benoit would steal his woman, and as an old school guy he insisted that they travel together and such, and then Benoit did in fact steal his woman, as it were. Similar to StepHunter, they were put together for an angle and then having to spend lots of time together led to them developing a relationship. Before it all went to hell, Benoit did say that although there was obvious issues, he never felt Sullivan took liberties in the ring, but then considering what they both did while ‘working’…

And on that very uncomfortable note, a reminder that next week’s edition of Ask 411 Wrestling will be my last, so get any of those last second questions in, and I’ll see you then!