Ask 411 Wrestling: Would Diesel and Razor Ramon Succeed in WWE Today?

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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Jonfw2 is oozing machismo among other things:

Assume that a young Kevin Nash and Scott Hall came in to WWE today as Diesel and Razor Ramon. Same exact gimmicks, but in the current age of wrestling.

I would assume that instead of almost immediate main-event caliber guys, they’d be looked at as goofy gimmicks now and not really get off the ground.

What say you?

I actually think Diesel would work in 2024. He wasn’t really a heavy “gimmick” wrestler. He was (pre-face turn) a mostly silent, badass bodyguard who ran over everybody in his path. Yes, his gear and his entrance and whatnot were all themed around 18-wheelers, but that was more a motif than it was a goofy gimmick. It’s not like when he did cut a promo every other word out of his mouth was trucker lingo. The announcers didn’t act like he was driving over the road when he wasn’t wrestling. In other words, he wasn’t Tugboat or Duke Droese. It’s sort of akin to Becky Lynch having a steampunk look at one point in her WWE tenure. The promotion wasn’t actually trying to portray her as a 19-century mad scientist. She just looked cool in goggles. Diesel and his leather jackets was the same thing.

Razor Ramon is a different story. All due respect to Scott Hall, but the Razor gimmick was a white guy pretending to be Cuban. There’s no way that flies in the 21st Century . . . nor should it . . . and it probably shouldn’t have flown when it did.

Steve opened for Taylor Swift:

I have to admit I stole this question from a Reddit thread, but as a longtime reader of your column, when I saw it, I immediately wondered how you might answer it.

As you know, WWE likes to organize its history in terms of largely self-contained eras that are characterized by a certain ethos. This typically starts with the Golden Era, or Vince McMahon’s national expansion on the back of Hulk Hogan, followed by the New Generation Era after Hogan and some of his contemporaries departed for a deep-pocketed WCW, then the Attitude Era, and so on and so forth until we get to today.

If you had to do the same for WCW, how would you divide the eras up? What are the approximate dates of the eras, what would you name them, and what defines them? The origins of “WCW” are a little murky, so feel free to start the clock whenever you feel the company becomes definably itself, regardless of the name they were officially using.

I don’t think that WCW was around for long enough to have eras.

As to the company’s origin, I don’t think it’s murky at all. I can tell you exactly when WCW came into being: November 1988, when Ted Turner purchased Jim Crockett Promotions. That’s when the promotion named World Championship Wrestling was formed, even if “World Championship Wrestling” previously had been the name of a pro wrestling TV show.

Most people reading this will be familiar with WCW’s endpoint, namely March 2001.

That means, all told, you’ve got a wrestling promotion that lasted slightly less than 13 years. Is something around for that short a period of time even worth categorizing into eras? Personally, I would say that it’s not.

If I had to draw some line somewhere, the most sensible division would be pre-Hulk Hogan WCW and post-Hulk Hogan WCW, which conveniently also splits the promotion’s history almost right down the middle. It was definitely a major shift from WCW having a lot of the territorial identity that it inherited from JCP to attempting to be something that was more rooted in the WWF’s model of wrestling.

Bryan loves New Yawk:

Do you think Vince Russo deserves to be in the WWE Hall of Fame? I know they won’t induct him. And I know he “wants nothing to do with the wre sel ing bus I ness bro” but him kick starting the Attitude Era can’t be ignored. We all laugh about “swerves” and everything being “on a pole” but there is a possibility the WWE may have gone bankrupt without him. What’s your input?

There’s no such thing as “deserving” to be in the WWF Hall of Fame because there are no objective criteria or processes for getting in. The WWE Hall of Fame is a marketing gimmick designed to sell tickets to a live even once a year and create content for the company’s streaming platforms.

In that sense, Russo deserves to be in as much or as little as anybody else who is in, whether that’s Bruno Sammartino or Kid Rock.

Do I think that Vince Russo would belong in a legitimate pro wrestling hall of fame?

That’s a pretty solid “no,” bro.

First off, Russo was never the guy behind creative in the WWF. He worked as part of a team, whether it was was with Jim Cornette or Bruce Princhard and always with Vince McMahon. He contributed but was never alone, and I’m not sure why some people give him significantly more credit than others who were in creative at the same time . . . particularly when one of those guys was Vince, who had final say over every aspect of the creative.

Also, when we did see Russo out on his own in WCW and Impact Wrestling, it stank to high heaven. That’s not just my subjective opinion of the product, either. His work was objectively not successful from a business standpoint and actively hurt the promotions that he was part of, to the point that his continued involvement is a major factor in Impact being canceled by SpikeTV, which took them from legitimate number two national promotion to glorified indy.

Richard U. is looking back to the past, when we were all we had:

Connect Abraham Lincoln to Turbo Floyd. You know, Lincoln wrestled somebody who wrestled somebody else . . . who wrestled Turbo Floyd.

I gave this the old college try, but I don’t think that it’s possible.

Yes, Abraham Lincoln engaged in a form of wrestling early in his life. However, it was legitimate combat and not professional wrestling as we know it today. Furthermore, from what information exists regarding Lincoln’s time wrestling, it doesn’t appear that he was part of any sort of organized league or circuit in which he was wrestling regular. It appears instead that he was wrestling other men in his hometown as a means of entertainment – the same way that a few guys might have a pickup basketball game against each other today – or wrestling within his military regiment back when he was in the service.

The earliest American pro wrestlers as we think of that term today – guys like Martin “Farmer” Burns and Ed “Stranger” Lewis – really don’t start popping up as pro wrestlers until approximately the 1880s, and by that point Lincoln had been dead for for over a decade.

Is it possible that there is some link somewhere between a guy that Honest Abe scrapped with and somebody who then went on to become of those early pro wrestlers? Yes, it is possible. However, I don’t know if we have the historic records to make the connection.

That is because, in large part, records about who Lincoln may have actually wrestled are sparse. There are stories floating around that Lincoln wrestled as many as 300 matches during his lifetime, but there appear to be no credible sources backing that claim. In fact, in researching this answer, I could only come up with documentation of three wrestling matches engaged in by our sixteenth president. Of those three, two are pretty commonly accepted as having happened, while the third is one that I found reference to in a primary source document but have not seen discussed anywhere else on the internet. (That’s right, we may be adding to the historical record here.)

The first, which has been written about in several Lincoln biographies, was against John “Jack” Armstrong and purportedly took place in New Salem, Illinois while Lincoln was living there, which meant the fight would’ve been sometime between 1831 and 1837. By most accounts, Lincoln dispatched Armstrong handily.

The second is often cited as Lincoln’s one documented defeat, coming at the hands of Lorenzo Dow Thompson (sometimes called “Hank” Thompson) in 1832 in Beardstown, Illinois, which was part of a spat between the two men’s companies in the Black Hawk War. Reportedly, Thompson took Lincoln down not once but twice, which is documented in author Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln.

As noted, you can find a fair amount of discourse on these two matches, but I have not seen anybody else write about the third.

While writing this column, I stumbled across an artifact in the digital archives of the Illinois State Library. The artifact is titled “Reminiscences of William L. Wilson on the Black Hawk War and Lincoln” and is dated February 3, 1889. In the document, William L. Wilson recounts his memories of encountering Lincoln during the Black Hawk War in May of 1832 and defeating him in a wrestling match, after which Honest Abe tried to save face by challenging Wilson to a foot race.

Granted, at the point this document was written, Wilson probably would have been in his 70s and was detailing an encounter with one of the most beloved Americans in history that happened 50 years prior – with Lincoln having been dead for quite some time. Thus, one does wonder whether Mr. Wilson might have had some incentive to exaggerate the outcome of their meeting just a bit.

In any event, whether it is Armstrong, Thompson, or Wilson, I could not find any links that would carry any of them through to modern day and Turbo Floyd.

Tyler from Winnipeg is gonna get me killed:

Is Steamboat/Savage in the top ten Wrestlemania matches?

Assuming that you are talking about pure in-ring quality, I’m going to say . . . no, no it’s not.

I’ve mentioned in this column before that I think this match is somewhat overrated. That’s not to say it’s a bad match. It’s actually an excellent match. It just gets overhyped relative to its quality because it happened on Wrestlemania at a time when Wrestlemania (and the WWF as a whole really) was not known for producing a lot of mat classics.

It was the best Wrestlemania match ever for many years, but, as styles have changed and WWF/WWE wrestlers have on the whole become more proficient in-ring performers than they were in the 1980s, many Wrestlemania matches have surpassed it.

Off the top of my head, ten better Wrestlemania matches that happened in subsequent years are, in chronological order: Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart (WMX), Shawn Michaels vs. Razor Ramon (WMX), Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin (WMXIII), TLC (WMXVII), The Rock vs. Steve Austin (WMXVII), Shawn Michaels vs. Triple H vs. Chris Benoit (WMXX), Kurt Angle vs. Shawn Michaels (WMXXI), Shawn Michaels vs. Undertaker (WMXXV), Shawn Michaels vs. Undertaker (WMXXVI), and Daniel Bryan vs. Randy Orton vs. Dave Batista (WMXXX).

If you expand that out to top twenty, I suspect Savage/Steamboat would crack the list.

Uzoma has a question about an Angle angle:

On the SmackDown after the 2004 Royal Rumble, Eddie Guerrero was mysteriously taken out before he was set to take part in the 15-man Royal Rumble match. Rey Mysterio attacked Chavo Sr. and Jr, suspecting them as the assailants considering their feud with Eddie and Chavo Jr. vowing vengeance towards Eddie for bloodying him as payback for doing the same to him. Before Rey attacked them, they claimed they didn’t do it. Who was the assailant?

As alluded to in the intro to the question, you were supposed to believe it was Kurt Angle, who eventually turned heel on Eddy and became his opponent for the WWE Championship at Wrestlemania XX.

Josh snuck past my security to ask this question:

I remember a segment on Raw a number of years ago where Batista was warming up in gorilla before his match when a fan ran in front of him and did his machine gun entrance in front of the camera before running off from security and leaving Big Dave befuddled. I often see this clip on compilations of fan interference in pro wrestling but to me it seems like it was a plant. My question is if this was legit or not and if it was does anyone know what happened to the guy and if it wasn’t then what was the point of doing it because I don’t remember any follow up on it?

Yeah, it was scripted and the guy was a WWE employee. It was part of a larger storyline in which Raw was supposed to be “out of control” because they lacked a strong general manager or other authority figure at the time.

APinOZ wonders about the parallels between Barney and Jurassic Park:

Back in the mid-80s when the WWF was transitioning into a more kid-oriented product with Rock n Wrestling etc, their house shows (for example the Madison Square Garden shows) still contained a high degree of violence and blood. I’m thinking of the Sergeant Slaughter-Iron Shiek matches that were pretty bloody and brutal, or even some Hogan title defenses where he and/or his opponent bled heavily. Did WWF have a distinctly different product for their house shows as opposed to their TV in this era?

No, not really.

Granted, it is true that you didn’t see a lot of blood or harder violence on the WWF television of the era, but that’s not because they were attempting to promote different products for different audiences. It’s because the blood and stronger action were reserved for live events due to the fact that we were still in the era where live event ticket sales were the main way that the company made its money. Those things were on the house shows not to hide them from kids but rather because the Fed wanted the best action to be reserved for paying audiences.

It’s also not as though the the WWF Championship went on Hulk Hogan and a switch flipped that automatically made everything kiddy friendly. If you watch 1984 and 1985 Hogan, he was booked and wrestled much in the same way that Sammartino, Morales, and Backlund did. It was only as his time as the company’s top star wore on that he really became a cartoon character, with that status being in full effect by the late 1980s/early 1990s.

(Though even in the early 90s you still had some more “adult” content, including Hogan getting color in his Wrestlemania main event against Sgt. Slaughter and Ric Flair threatening to leak nudie pics of Miss Elizabeth the next year. I think some of this also has to do with society in recent years getting much more prudish about what is and isn’t acceptable for children to watch, but that’s another column well beyond the scope of what people want to read about on a pro wrestling website.)

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.