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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Tyler from Winnipeg is running on Diesel:
If you had to ball park it, from wrestling alone, how much moolah did Kevin Nash collect?
We’ve actually got good, hard data for a period of several years.
WCW was sued for racial discrimination by Sonny Onoo and others. As part of that suit, WCW had to release pay information for several years for virtually all of its wrestlers. That information has been archived by the website Wrestlenomics.
According to that data:
Nash was paid $336,261 in salary in 1996. (He joined the company roughly halfway through that year.)
Nash was paid $752,576 in salary in 1997.
Nash was paid $1,475,128 in salary in 1998 plus $39,356 in licensing fees and $4,495 in merchandising.
Nash was paid $1,257,244 in salary in 1999 plus $226,550 in licensing fees and $1,684 in merchandising.
Nash was paid $1,595,131 in salary in 2000 plus $265,384 in licensing fees and $3,547 in merchandising.
If my addition is correct, that’s $5,957,356.00 over the course of four-and-a-half years. That’s what we here at Ask 411 refer to as “not too shabby.”
Of course, that’s only about one-fifth of Nash’s career as a talent who wrestled on a somewhat regular basis. Most likely, these are also the top earning years of his career, or at least the top earning years adjusted for inflation given how hot WCW was at the time.
We do not have good, solid data on the remaining years of Big Daddy Cool’s career because those details were never required to be made public, but in the relatively brief amount of time referenced above he earned a million dollars several times over, so you can probably anticipate many more millions of dollars across the other ~17 years of his career.
Ticking Time Bomb Taz plays by his own rules:
Back in the days of WWF Superstars and Challenge, you had traditional jobbers. Some of the jobbers were able to get some offense in the match (Barry Horowitz, Iron Mike Sharpe, etc.) and were able to display some personality. Other less known jobbers would get in no offense and be there to make the “SUPERSTAR” look good. They even had a generic look about them and were often vastly out of shape. Was this all discussed beforehand in the back as to how much offense a jobber was allowed to get in? Did any of the jobbers go into business for themselves and get punished? Any insight you could provide on these great athletic contests of the mid 80s to the mid 90s would be greatly appreciated?
Regarding discussion of matches backstage, no there probably wasn’t much discussion in most instances because matches in that era were by and large called in the ring. Wrestlers might have a finish, but everything else was done on the fly.
As to a jobber going into business for himself, let me tell you the tale of Mike Blackwell . . .
As most reading this will know, in 1989, Dan Spivey and Sid Vicious teamed up and were know as the Skyscrapers. One fateful evening, they wrestled a team of stereotypical job guys named Mike Blackwell and Avalanch. (And, yes, according to on screen graphics, there was no “e” on the end of “Avaclanch.”)
Mr. Lanch was thrown out of the ring quickly and was essentially a non-factor in the match. However, Blackwell apparently decided that he was going to make a name for himself. Though he didn’t attempt to hit any offense on his much larger opponents, he decided that he wasn’t going to sell a single thing. Every time he was hit with a move by Spivey or Vicious, he would pop right back up, until the Skyscrapers hoisted him up for a brutal stuff powerbomb and seemed to forcibly hold him down on the mat for the pin.
After the bell, Vicious and Spivey were obviously pissed, and they just began pummeling Blackwell at ringside. Teddy Long, who was managing the Skyscrapers at the time, has done shoot interviews in which he said his team’s mentality was, “You’re not going to sell? Then we’ll give you something to sell.” Also according to Long, Blackwell was then accompanied to a room backstage where he was locked in with Vicious and Spivey and given more of the same.
I’ve seen conflicting reports online regarding why Blackwell did what he did. Some people have said that he had family in the audience that evening and didn’t want to look bad in front of them, while others said that he was lined up for a push in another promotion (I believe the USWA) and was trying to keep from looking like too much of a jobber before he worked there.
That’s why you didn’t see jobbers going into business for themselves. In the words of Teddy Long, if they weren’t going to sell, they were going to be given something to sell.
Matt B. raps:
Why did we never see Nova in WWE as a character would have been more interesting than the dud that was Simon Dean?
We actually did. He reverted to being the Blue World Order version of Nova for a while in 2005 off of the success of ECW One Night Stand. The bWo even feuded with the Mexicools in a rivalry for the ages.
Scott from Scotland got the moves like jobber:
Plenty of finisher moves have become transitional ones over the years (i.e. DDT) and a number have been upgraded to a finisher after basically being around for years (i.e. stun gun > Stunner): Question, what moves (if any) have never been a finisher? Finisher as in a repeated “go to” move for a wrestler to win multiple matches?
Hope you can help with that. Likely a b**** of a question as sure back in the annuals of time bloody armdrag, armbar and dropkicks have been *someone’s* finisher?
There’s no way I’ll be able to come up with a comprehensive list here, but here are several thoughts off the top of my dome:
Monkey flip
Knife edge chops
Back rake
Bronco buster
Slingshot
Tarantula (you can’t use it as a regular finisher because it forces a rope break in most matches)
Collar and elbow tie-up
Test of strength / Greco Roman knuckle lock
Boot scrapes
Cactus clothesline (both guys fall out of the ring, so it can’t really be a finisher)
Open hand slap (not to be confused with a palm strike/shotei, which has been a finish)
Pescados, topes, and suicide dives (I’m not aware of somebody hitting a tope con hilo and then taking the count out win . . . except for that one time Edge broke a Boricua’s neck.)
Hair mare
Fishhook
Shinbreaker
Richard U. is holding up his three count:
What is the Mount Rushmore of wrestling referees?
Tommy Young
Earl Hebner (maybe you can count Dave too since you could put one face on the mountain to cover both of them)
Red Shoes Unno
Tirantes
Those are the four most iconic referees that came to my mind immediately upon reading the question. On another day, guys like Dick Woehrle and Bronko Lubich might come to mind, though I would categorize Lubich as “memorable” far more than I would “good.”
Eddie C. takes us older school than usual:
What is the story on Masked Superstar turning babyface and teaming with Paul Jones to win the NWA World Tag Team Titles? I found video clip where he was attacked by Gene Anderson, Jimmy Snuka and Ray Stephens. Any footage of Superstar and Paul Jones on this? Also in Superstar’s interview he said that whenever he won the title he would remove his mask, any reasoning behind this?
To give some context for the rest of the readership, Eddie is referring to Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling in 1980. Paul Jones had previously been in the territory in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most recently as a heel. He left to wrestle in the Florida territory for a while, returning in the second half of ’80 with a new babyface attitude. When Masked Superstar (a.k.a. Bill Eadie a.k.a. Demolition Ax) turned face following a dispute with Anderson, Snuka, and Stevens over interview time, he and Jones formed a tag team of reformed heels. I didn’t find footage, but according to an old text interview with the website Mid Atlantic Gateway, Eadie said that booker George Scott pushed for him to be a babyface, though Eadie nixed Scott’s idea of unmasking full-time because he enjoyed having the hood on.
That being said, the Masked Superstar did unmask when he won title matches as a babyface with Paul Jones as his partner. However, he only briefly removed the mask and flashed his face to the crowd rather than totally unmasking going forward. Why was this done? That I have not found a definitive answer to, but the most likely answer is that it was just a gimmick to sell extra tickets by giving the fans something that they had not seen before.
Michael is all about the hypotheticals:
Probably been asked before but what do you feel are the 5 biggest “what ifs” in wrestling history? Magnum TA’s accident is probably one of them but what else do you feel is at the top?
Here’s the thing . . . I write a column about wrestling in which people regularly send me questions about wrestling, many of which are hypothetical questions about how changing one event in history would impact the rest of the timeline. So, really, I can answer this on the basis of which “what if” questions I seem to receive variations on the most.
With that in mind, I’ll go with:
What if Hulk Hogan didn’t go to the WWF? – I feel like I’ve answered this one mulitple times and had it sent in several other times without answering it. The answer, by the way, is that the WWF probably still would have become the dominant wrestling promotion because they were in New York, one of the media capitals of the world.
What if Vince McMahon brought in bigger names for the Invasion? – This is the ultimate question for armchair bookers who were watching wrestling during the Monday Night War and who don’t understand how the economics of running a business work.
What if Vince McMahon went to prison? – The steroid trial putting Vinnie Mac behind bars was a very real possibility, and it could have had some radical impacts on pro wrestling.
What if the Montreal screwjob didn’t go down the way it did? – This is a bit of a catchall, because I’ve had people ask what would happen if the screwjob didn’t happen at all, and I’ve also had people ask what would happen if it occurred but played out somewhat differently.
What if [insert name] didn’t die? – Chris Benoit. Owen Hart. Eddie Guerrero. Brian Pillman. With the unfortunately large number of early deaths in professional wrestling, there are plenty of questions to ask about what would have happened had these tragedies did not occur.
Basti shakes them ropes:
I once heard that the original plan for Summerslam 1992 was for the Ultimate Warrior to turn heel and align himself with Mr. Perfect and Ric Flair. Do you think the Warrior could have worked as a heel?
Not really. In order to be an effective main event heel, particularly in that era, one of two things had to be true. First, you could have the in-ring chops necessary to be on offense for the majority of a longer match and to control the ups and downs of the crowd through pacing and psychology. Second, you could be a monster heel and just wreck people.
Warrior was never going to fall into the first category for reasons that I hope are obvious to anyone reading this.
Regarding the second category, Warrior had some of the qualities that could have made him an effective monster heel. (In fact, per Dave Meltzer, he was originally considered by New Japan for the Big Van Vader gimmick before he signed with the WWF.) However, I think he would have been handicapped by the fact that he was a babyface first. Oftentimes when you introduce a dominant monster heel, they win so often and so effectively that the crowd eventually turns them babyface. The reverse only very rarely happens, though, because it’s harder to get people to boo an asskicker when you’ve already conditioned them to cheer the guy for being an asskicker. This is one of the reasons that Bill Goldberg’s heel turn was such a miserable failure – and Goldberg and Warrior have a lot of parallels.
In short, I’m fine with the Ultimate Warrior having remained exactly where he was.
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.
