Ask 411 Wrestling: How Long Was the John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels Match in London?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 . . . the last surviving weekly column on 411 Wrestling.

I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling. If you have one of those queries searing a hole in your brain, feel free to send it along to me at [email protected]. Don’t be shy about shooting those over – the more, the merrier.

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Andrew is going long:

Back on April 23, 2007, Shawn Michaels and John Cena wrestled their match on Raw in London that spanned (from opening bell to closing bell) 56 minutes of TV time. However, since this match was wrestled in London and the actual Raw broadcast to the states was hours after the match was done, I presume the TV network is able to find an efficient way to time the TV breaks to fill the time slot around this match. Therefore, the minutes actually shown in the match was around 40.

I guess my question is were there any reports from the people that watched this match live in the London show timed how long the actual match was? How close to the actual 56 minutes of TV time was the actual match they wrestled that day?

By all reports, the match legitimately ran 55:45, so what you saw on television was more or less real time, as though the show was live even though it aired on tape delay in the United States.

Jonfw2 is checking his calendar:

For years (decades maybe), it was a given that all WWE pay per views were on Sunday evenings.

Then, around the time they went from PPV to streaming, they started mixing up the nights with most the PLEs on Saturdays.

Why the switch?

My best guess is that the PPV companies just wanted to make sure they weren’t conflicting with boxing or UFC. But once WWE went on their own (or with NBC), nobody could dictate what night they used.

Any better info here?

I feel like I’ve answered this before but can’t find the prior answer in the archives, so I’ll just do it from the ground up.

WWE executives have been interviewed about this, and the answer is that they’re trying to build up live gates by making more PLEs into events that, like Wrestlemania, fans will fly in from out of town to attend. If you want people traveling to your shows, holding them on Saturdays make the most sense because that will maximize the odds of people being able to get away from work and other commitments.

Tyler from Winnnipeg is serving hard time, which explains how he’s able to send in so many questions:

If you took 1980 to 1989, what letter grade (A,B,C,D,F) would you give The Big Bossman?

This is a somewhat difficult to grade to give, because 1980 through 1989 covers a LOT of territory. The Man who would later be Big and Boss debuted in 1985 under his real name, Ray Traylor. Initially, he was just an enhancement wrestler on Crockett TV, but in the late spring of 1986 he was renamed Big Bubba Rogers and became the bodyguard for Jim Cornette as Cornette managed the Midnight Express. That turned into a feud with Dusty Rhodes which lasted several months. He continued to wrestle top babyfaces in Mid-Atlantic until he jumped ship to the Watts UWF in the spring of 1987. He almost immediately became their Heavyweight Champion, mostly defending against Barry Windham and remaining champ when UWF and Crockett merged. He dropped the title to “Dr. Death” Steve Williams in Crockett and continued to feud with him, trying to regain the belt.

Big Bubba finished up with Crockett/UWF at the end of 1987 and took a couple of months off, next appearing in All Japan Pro Wrestling in 1988, where he mainly worked as a tag team partner for Bruiser Brody and Jimmy Snuka before losing to Jumbo Tsuruta at the end of the tour. With that out of the way, the Big Boss Man debuted in the WWF in the spring of ’88 and, after a couple of months of being built up by squashing jobbers, it was right into the feud with Hulk Hogan which lasted about eight months. The Twin Towers of Bossman and Akeen then did a house show run with Demolition, and Traylor finished 1989 in the WWF by feuding with . . . Dusty Rhodes, which satisfyingly brings us full circle.

So what’s his grade for this whole run?

I’m going to go with a sold B+. Though not a generation sort of talent like Hogan or Dusty, he managed to remain in the mix with those guys and was an excellent foil for them, always doing what was asked of him and always doing it admirably. He had a role to play, and he played it just about as well as could be expected.

Stromi is all abuzz:

Quick question about face runs. Thinking about how wrestlers like Ricky Steamboat and Tito Santana were 99% face for their careers. Did the Killer Bees ever wrestle heel, collectively or individually, in any promotion?

Not that I was able to find record of. There may have been a brief blip of a heel run or a one-off match somewhere, but I think that you can put them in the 99% face club with Tito and the Dragon. In fact, Brian Blair has claimed that one of the reasons he left the WWF in 1988 is that Vince McMahon proposed the idea of turning him heel and he didn’t like it, so there may even have been some resistance on Blair’s side from ever leaning that way.

That being said (bee-ing said?), I do have to document one interesting angle that kinda sorta but not really involved a Killer Bees heel turn.

On March 12, 1988 at the Philadelphia Spectrum, Hulk Hogan wrestled Ted DiBiase in a lumberjack match during the odd period between DiBiase being stripped of the WWF Championship by Jack Tunney and a new champion being determined at Wrestlemania IV.

The Bees appeared to be (bee?) out as lumberjacks, though conspicuously (conspicuous-bee?) they never removed their trademark yellow-and-black masks. Midway through the match, the “Bees” assaulted the Hulkster. On the version of the card that was broadcast on Philly’s Spectrum television network, the announcers made it abundantly clear that, based on their actions, these were NOT Brian Blair and Jim Bruzell, and Ted DiBiase must have paid somebody to beat up (bee-t up?) the Bees and steal their masks for this spot, even though Blair and Brunzell had wrestled earlier on the show against the Bolsheviks.

After Hogan defeated DiBiase (Di-Bee-ase?), the faux Killer Bees attacked again, but Hulk easily dispatched them. He tried to unmask one, but the heel Bee was wearing a second mask under his first mask.

For you Coliseum Video fans out there, this match was later included on the Hulkamania 4 VHS tape.

I always thought this was an odd angle, because even though you had the announcers to explain it to the television and home video audiences, the match was primarily being put on for purposes of the live event, and those watching without the benefit of commentary really would have though they were watching a Killer Bee heel turn.

I’m gong to teach Sim something:

Why is Matt Striker considered one of the worst commentators? Especially when compared to others in the same position (JBL, Booker, Coach, etc). Sure he’s no Monsoon or Heenan, and I guess his “oooh”s at every big spot can get annoying after a while, but IMO he did a decent job. What’s your take? Was he really that bad?

When I think of Matt Striker’s commentary, the phrase that comes to my mind is “try hard.”

When I was listening to him, I could just tell that he so, so, sooooo badly wanted to be a Jesse Ventura or a Bobby Heenan and he was trying to force that to an uncomfortable degree. None of it came off as natural, and none of it came off as though he was trying to create his own persona. It’s the same reason I’ve never really liked the Miz. He feels to me like somebody who’s playing wrestler as opposed to actually being a wrestler, if that makes sense.

JBL and Booker felt like they had natural personae. Ditto Tazz, for that matter. I will say that I rate Striker over Jonathan Coachman, though. Coach, whether he was a heel or face, just came off like a puppet with Vince McMahon’s hand shoved firmly up his backside – similar to early Michael Cole.

Bryan is, umm, let’s just go to the question:

Do you think there’s a parallel between the death of kayfabe and the fall of mankind in the garden of Eden?

To avoid a theological lesson the skinny: God made paradise along with Adam and Eve and said “do whatever you want, just don’t eat from the tree of knowledge.” They were tempted by a talking snake, i.e. the devil, then ate from the tree they got knowledge of life and death and the innocence was lost and everything sucked since then.

In wrestling the “devil” Dave Meltzer, tempted us with dirt sheets, we got a look behind the curtain but the magic of kayfabe was gone and we don’t really enjoy pro wrestling as much as we did in the pre-internet days.

Do you see the parallel or is too much of a stretch?

I have never been more confident that the writer was high when submitting his question than I am right now.

First off, I’ve never subscribed to any philosophy that embraces the notion that people are for some reason better off because they’re ignorant of something. I’ve always believed that knowledge, even of unpleasant realities, is power, and we should strive to gather as much knowledge as we can. That may be one of the reasons that I never decided to become a Christian – their entire origin story for humanity really turns me off.

I also don’t subscribe to the notion that knowing what wrestling is and how it works somehow ruins wrestling, either for me or for fans writ large. If you don’t like knowing behind the scenes goings on, you can just ignore those reports. It’s pretty simple.

Another problem with the analogy as it’s been laid out here is that Dave Meltzer didn’t kill kayfabe or expose wrestling as being predetermined. Mainstream media reports on wrestling mention that it’s worked at least as far back as the 1930s. This was generally known in society for at least half a century before the internet existed. If you somehow didn’t know that before you got on the internet, you either had your head buried in the sand or were a literal child.

Also there are some old, problematic antisemitic tropes evoked by analogizing a Jewish man (Meltzer) to the devil, but I am not going to harp on that too much, because I don’t believe that it was intended.

Greg is an authority:

I have noticed in the last little while that refereeing is sliding. I have seen many hands and feet under the ropes it is just diminishing wrestling.

I’m not sure that this is a question . . . but I think Greg is right. Referees do seem to be fouling up more and more these days. The recent clip of the AEW referee helping a wrestler kick out of a pin attempt really had me shaking my head and longing for the days of Mark Curtis or Tommy Young.

That being said, there have also been more angles recently that have involved worked incompetence by referees as a means of protecting wrestlers and/or setting up rematches. Gunther versus Randy Orton in the King of the Ring finals was one such example.

Ernie is taking over:

The nWo angle was red-hot for quite a while and from my memory a lot of it had to do with the real life heat generated from the Hulk Hogan heel turn as the third man.

My question:

1) Could an nWo angle ever be revived in wrestling today and be as effective as it was back in ’96?

2) Do you think there could ever be anything that generates as much legitimate shock and genuine surprise as Hulk Hogan’s heel turn did back in 1996 at Bash at the Beach?

My guess is that we will never ever see that kind of visceral reaction ever again.

The question asks whether we will “ever” see something like this again, and I’m hesitant to say something will never happen again, because forever is a long, long time.

Do I see anything like this happening again at any point in the near future?

Nope.

That’s because the nWo angle was as big as it was due to the fact that it involved stars allegedly from a major wrestling promotion jumping ship to and “invading” another major wrestling promotion that had its own audience that was just as big as the audience of the promotion that the guys were jumping from. In other words, it was a company invading an equivalent company.

In the modern era, WWE is so much larger than its next largest competitor that an invasion won’t work in the same way. If AEW stars were to invade WWE, it wouldn’t take off like the nWo did because AEW stars don’t have the same cache with WWE fans that a Scott Hall or a Kevin Nash did with WCW fans in the 1990s. If WWE stars were to invade AEW, it would no doubt be a big deal to the AEW audience, but the AEW audience is so small relative to that of WWE that it wouldn’t have the same reverberations as a company the size of WCW being invaded.

On the shock of Hogan’s heel turn, something like this occurring is more likely than an nWo style angle working again, though I think the probability is so low because of how little emotional investment people have in wrestling overall. Fans interact with wrestling more or less like any other television show or movie these days, whereas it used to be that wrestling had more emotional sway over its audience for whatever reason.

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.

Ask 411 Wrestling: How Long Was the John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels Match in London?

Ask 411 Wrestling: How Long Was the John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels Match in London?

Ask 411 Wrestling: How Long Was the John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels Match in London?

Ask 411 Wrestling: How Long Was the John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels Match in London?

Ask 411 Wrestling: How Long Was the John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels Match in London?