Charles Wright Discusses Papa Shango’s “Missed Cue” at WrestleMania VIII

In the main event of WrestleMania VIII, Hulk Hogan faced Sid Justice in a grudge match that was supposed to end in a disqualification. Voodoo villain Papa Shango was meant to interfere and stop Hogan pinning Sid, leading to a two-on-one battle that would set up the return of the Ultimate Warrior to save Hogan.

Shango didn’t get to the ring in time, so Sid had to kick out of Hogan’s leg drop. For years, the moment has been described as Shango missing his cue. But on a recent interview with Sportshadow, Charles Wright, the man behind Papa Shango and the Godfather, set the record straight as he sees it, revealing that he was never punished or even chastised for it.

“I didn’t miss my cue!” he said. “What they did is, I didn’t go until they told me to go. I was behind the curtain like a track star getting ready to run, because it was a long run. The mistake that they made was they never timed how long it was going to take to run from the curtain and it was a long run to the ring. Okay? So, they never considered that. And as time has gone on, Bruce Pritchard, a lot of people said our mistake was we should have timed how long it was going to take him. We didn’t do that. The reason that Papa Shango’s
run didn’t go longer had nothing to do with that. Nothing at all. I never heard about that. I didn’t hear about that. I didn’t know I ‘missed the cue’ until years years later.”

“I just knew what I had to do when I got there and I never heard one thing about it from anybody because it wasn’t my fault. It was, I’m not going to throw, I’m not going to throw the person under the bus but it was the person that was at the Gorilla station. As of what happened to Papa Shango, that has nothing to do with the WWF at the time. It has to do with me. I was going through a really, really, bad divorce.”

Wright has previously discussed how his post-divorce behavior led to his release from WWE at that time.