It’s a new dawn for Pulse Wrestling Answers. Instead of just doing one large installment every week, we’re going to do several smaller updates on a more regular basis. This shall makes things far more prompt and tickle Widro a gayer shade of pink. The address is the same, so send in your wrestling queries and we’ll get right onto them.
Firstly, check this out, from page 130 of “Wrestling’s Made Men†by Scott Keith…
†I have to shoulder some of the blame for Test, because there seems to be a curse whereby anyone on the cover of my books has his career go into a down cycle. Goldberg was on the cover of “The Buzz on Pro Wrestling†and he was put on the shelf for two years as a result of the WCW’s demise soon after; Steve Austin was on the cover of “Tonight in This Very Ring†and was retired by the time the book came out in 2003; and Test adorned the cover of “Wrestling’s One Ring Circus†and was fired when that one came out.
I’m going to start putting HHH on all my covers and hope for the best.â€Â
And who was on the front cover of “Wrestling’s Made Menâ€Â? Not just Test, but Chris Benoit too.
Dang, that’s eery.
Scott, your next book’s cover better feature a montage of Vince Russo photos…
â€ÂHey Iain,
I was watching the match on RAW the other day between Carlito and Kennedy where they tease a suplex off the apron over the ropes onto the floor whilst the person inside the ring tries to suplex his opponent back inside the ring. I also remember Kurt Angle teasing this spot with a German suplex a couple of times as well.
I was wondering, has this spot ever actually happened in a non-hardcore match? Just because I think I’ve seen it done through tables and things before.â€Â
– Patrick Robinson
It has been done on numerous occasions, none of which I could remember off the top of my head. Still, a bit of digging around brought up plenty of examples, including:
– Paul Orndorff did it to Cactus Jack at Superbrawl III (though that was in a Falls Count Anywhere bout, so maybe that doesn’t qualify as a non-hardcore match)
– Bob Holly did it to Test in a match on ECW last October (the 24th, to be precise)
– Bryan Danielson did it to Roderick Strong during their title match at ROH Vendetta in November 2005
– Christopher Daniels did it to A.J. Styles during their 30 Minute Iron Man match at TNA’s Bound For Glory 2005
– The Rock did it to The Hs during their Iron Man match at Judgement Day 2000
– Razor Ramon did it to Shawn Michaels during their Ladder Match at SummerSlam 1995 (did Shawn ever learn to protect his back?)
– Kurt Angle did it to Shawn Michaels during a three-way with John Cena at Taboo Tuesday 2005 (nope, guess he never)
– Chris Benoit did it to Kennedy ROLF during a Smackdown match on the 12th January this year
And no doubt there are many other examples as well, most of them no doubt involving crazy little people from backyards and Mexico.
I was going to put in a suplex video clip here but got bored browsing through YouTube. Besides, after happening upon this hilarious Scott Steiner promo it would be folly to try to find something better:
That was really impressive actually. He started out as Big Poppa Pump, segued into Hulk Hogan, threw in a bit of Sid, morphed into WOYAH, sprinkled a little Ric Flair and then brought it all home by implying that he was going to sodomise Goldberg. Even funnier was Mean Gene no-selling the entire thing with a look that brought new definition to the phrase “too old for this shit”. WWE, who had of course been paying attention this whole time, would later go on to book Steiner in an on-air debate with a Harvard graduate. I can’t quite figure out if that makes them smarter or dumber than WCW.
“First, an intersting clip (jump to 1:46 or so if you don’t care for the rest) –
Now DJXL5 vs Total Crap is a battle between two mix tape artists, that is to
say they put together compilations of bad TV/movies and present them to a rabid
crowd.
Most of this crap is in French (the guys are from Quebec province), but you
don’t need to know the language to appreciate Macho Man and Pat Patterson’s
exchange. Needless to say, Pat looks VERY happy, very, very HAPPY.
As for a question, I have a doozy. Before Jake Roberts accidently lost his
dentures during a match, we had Ronnie Garvin stomping Ox Baker’s dentures in
Kentucky. Poor Ox wanted to eat steak but was forced to stick with soup. But
the thing is that Ox was something of a monster heel. Pretty shabby treatment
for a former big evil monster who killed a man in the ring with his heart
punch.
Do you feel that any other monster heel has suffered as much as Ox at the hands
of promoters looking to make a joke?”
– Sylvain Parent
First, here’s the clip in question:
Perhaps Sylvan Grenier was finally let go when he at long last tired of dressing up like Macho Man and heading around to Pat’s house to re-enact that scene (and to improv an apres). It’s just a theory but, still, if I’m Jay Lethal then I’m screening my calls.
And here’s the ICW recap of this scintillating Garvin/Baker feud:
I just love Garvin’s train of thought – “I just thought, why not crush ’em?” It’s like Clinton’s “I just thought, why not f*ck ’em?” or Bush’s “I just thought… wait, why am I thinking?” It’s hard not to love Baker’s motivation here either. He really likes steak, he hates soup, he needs teeth to eat steak, Garvin took away his teeth, now he has to eat soup, ergo Garvin must die! Wow, if only WCW had booked the Hogan/WOYAH ’98 feud around the nWo planning a jaunt to a steakhouse, things might have worked out much better for them. They could even have turned their Halloween Havoc match into a Tofu on a Pole bout, with the loser being forced to suffer the humiliation of veganism or be fired. Then Ed Leslie could have turned into Captain Carrot and feuded with the loser, empowered by a mystical stalk of celery that empowers its beholder with teleportation abilities. Then – SWERVE – it turns out that the nWo hid a slice of bacon in the granola, so now they’re fired anyway. But wait! Goldberg does not stand for bacon! Unleash the revenge!! Who’s kosher?!?
Oh, I’m dwindling far, far away from whatever the question was…
Monster heels turned into jokes? Right.
The obvious answer would be Vader, whose WWF tenure consisted of progressively less interesting failures. By 1996 he had amassed a reputation as a hard-hitting bad-ass so powerful he bordered on comic book super-villain territory. His matches with Sting had built-up one of the best ‘plucky underdog against monster heel’ feuds in wrestling history. His encounters with Cactus Jack were eezeedub before eezeedub had ever been chanted. His feud with Hulk Hogan did nothing for him but should not have cost him stature considering Hogan had always been booked so strongly. Besides, being fired from WCW for lumping Paul Orndorff upside the head ought to have kept up his unsettling persona. The WWF did actually handle his debut rather well, hyping it up for weeks beforehand and having him overwhelm the Royal Rumble prior to Shawn Michaels eliminating him. That set up a future encounter between the two, yet in the interim he got to squash Gorilla Monsoon, the acting WWF President, and received a suspension to cover up the shoulder surgery leave he required. So far, so good. Jim Cornette launched a campaign to get Vader reinstated so that he could take down Cornette’s former charge, Yokozuna. The feud was diluted significantly by being turned into a six-man tag for WrestleMania XII, with the 60+ minute main event leaving the undercard rather rushed. A post-disqualification assault on Jake Roberts and the referee at King of the Ring ’96, plus a pinfall over now-WWF Champion Shawn Michaels at In Your House 9 left him looking strong. Then it all went to shit. Booking 101 would dictate Vader taking the title from Michaels at SummerSlam, retaining it against a number of other faces and then having Michaels rally himself to take the title back – most likely at his hometown event, Royal Rumble ’97. However, circumstances dictated that the over-arching plan was for Michaels to drop the belt to Bret Hart at WrestleMania XIII. Michaels, as we all know, was far from happy about that and certainly would not be pleased about cutting his reign into two shorter ones for any reason. Of course, he did go on to briefly drop the title to Sid later in ’96, yet by that point nobody could delude themselves into thinking that the babyface HBK era had a hope in hell of succeeding. At the time of SummerSlam, many still held out hope for it and thought that going over Vader was a pivotal step along the way. Ultimately, they went for a count-out victory for Vader that did nobody any favours. Hell, Vader didn’t even get another PPV title shot until February ’97. By this point the WWF really didn’t give a shit about anything that didn’t involve Michaels, Hart or the up-and-coming Steve Austin. Even Mankind and the Undertaker, to whom Vader was linked for the rest of ’96 despite having very little in particular to do with them, got short-changed by the struggling booking team. When July ’97 came around and Taker was the champion, Vader would again get a PPV title shot. However, that was mainly due to everybody else being taken up by the ten-man main event tag match. The ship had certainly sailed on the fans being able to buy into him as an unstoppable force. His last PPV appearance for the WWF was a loss to Bradshaw in September ’98 – long, long, long before even Ron Simmons saw anything worthwhile in Bradshaw.
The strange thing about WWE nowadays is that they have so many would-be monster heels that have reached humiliating lows akin to Vader’s and yet they have been repackaged into supposed awesome threats in the blink of an eye, as if the company expects the audience to just play along and pretend the past never happened. Mark Henry has been positioned as the heel powerhouse of Smackdown for the past couple of years, in spite of his unforgettable turn as a Barry White wannabe who impregnated an eighty-something woman that later gave birth to a deformed hand. Big Daddy V is being set up for a run over all of ECW, conveniently forgetting his beginnings as a chirpy rapper so wholesome he made the Fresh Prince look like someone even the NWA could not cope with… oh, and then he turned into a vampire… and after that he was a love machine with a thing for skinny white chicks. Now he has Matt Striker and no shirt. Yay. Hell, even the Big Show suffered from this, being pushed as a lazy f*ck, a comedian, a happy-go-lucky big guy and an intimidating ‘extremist’ without rhyme nor reason.
Oh, and I should also mention the One Man Gang. In the early ’80s he had great success as a scary, shit-kicking biker with a f*ck-yer-ma mohawk and metal chain to assist him. It was simple, effective, well-played and soon came to the attention of Vince McMahon. In his initial WWF run it was business as usual, as Gang squashed jobbers, was the runner-up in the inaugural Royal Rumble, caught the attention of Hulk Hogan and made it to the semi-finals of the title tourney at WrestleMania IV before losing to eventual winner Randy Savage. After that, with Andre and Dibiase taking the main heel spots, Gang got shunted further down the card and then got turned into Akeem the African Dream by his manager, Slick. Strangely, this worked out great in the short-term as he and the Big Bossman finally did manage to get a big feud against Savage and Hogan. Unfortunately, they were little more than a backdrop for Savage and Hogan to feud with one another rather than doing anything with the so-called Twin Towers. They got stuck curtain-jerking with the Rockers at WrestleMania V, before the WWF decided to ditch Akeem in favour of Bossman the following year.
Here’s when the One Man Gang died:
Ah, for the days when Mean Gene still cared… I’m amazed they actually acknowledged his background as One Man Gang upon his debut. Not quite as much as I’m amazed at how I still do the African Dream shuffle sometimes. But close. Close.
If you have a question you’d like to pester us with, send it here. Look out for another update, coming soon!
Special plug: check out our SummerSlam Roundtable before tonight’s festivities get underway.
