The 8 Ball 06.07.12: Top 8 Wrestling Urban Legends

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the 8-Ball. As always, I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and we are back for another foray into the world of counting down wrestling-related items.

I’m willing to bet that, as soon as human beings developed the capacity for spoken language, we were using it to gossip. For some reason, we love to talk about one another, oftentimes regardless of whether the stories that we are telling are true. Professional wrestling is not immune from this phenomenon, and, in fact, historically speaking, there are aspects of wrestling that encourage rumors and gossip.

The first is that so much of the “sport” in years gone by was built on fooling the audience into thinking that it was something it was not, which gave both fans and sometimes other wrestlers several layers of misinformation to cut through in order to come up with the truth. When individuals are trying to ascertain the truth from another group who are actively trying to deceive them, there will almost always be some less-than-accurate information that gets spread, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally.

The second is that wrestling spent many decades as a “territorial” business, with wrestlers, fans, and front office staff in the United States separated by strictly-enforced boundaries. In a pre-internet world, tracking the business between these territories could be rather difficult, and the desire to keep tabs on what competing wrestlers and promoters were doing combined with a lack of good technology to do so lead to the creation of a fair number of rumors and half-truths.

And, of course, these rumors and half-truths often travel from wrestlers to the fans, particularly once the internet took hold and stories from both the present and past could be easily transmitted and preserved. So, in a way of paying homage to those stories which have been passed around wrestling circles but are not entirely true, this week we present Wrestling’s Top 8 Urban Legends . . .

NOTE: This should be clear from the rest of the introduction, but I will say it explicitly here so that there is no confusion. The fact that I have included a story on this list should NOT be taken as an indication that I believe it is true. In fact, with virtually all of the entries on this list, the exact opposite is true, and I have included them here precisely because they are FALSE, which is what distinguishes an “urban legend” from an actual news story or historical tidbit.

Since the late 1990’s, the Death Valley Driver Video Review has been a forum for discussion of pro rasslin’ on the internet. Originally DVDVR was simply a series of notes about what its founder, Dean Rasmussen, had watched since the last edition had come out. Over time, more contributors’ thoughts were added to the reports. However, as things progressed further still, the significance of the reviews faded as more and more traffic was picked up by the message board that was added to the website. DVDVR still exists today, and, for the last several years, the board has been the only truly active portion of the website.

Though I’m sure many of the posters there would regret it, perhaps the most widespread contribution of the DVDVR message board to the internet wrestling landscape is the so-called “sleaze thread,” which was started at some point in the mid-2000’s and was a compilation of off-color stories that posters had heard about pro wrestlers. As you can imagine, most of them were sexual in nature, and most of them were far more disturbing than simply “x slept with y.” Though the original thread has been wiped from DVDVR’s archives, its contents have been copied, pasted, and circulated through a variety of other, smaller forums, leaving many fans to read literally hundreds of half-truths about “bisexual orgies in the OMEGA locker room” and Jake Roberts sticking his finger up opponents’ butts.

The whole thing is frankly disgusting, but it keeps getting circulated (and added to), so apparently there are some folks out there who find it entertaining. If it did nothing else, at least it taught a generation of wrestling fans to never eat off of the glass-topped coffee table if they get invited over to Jimmy Valiant’s house.

The internet wrestling scene in the late 1990s was an unusual place. People nowadays criticize 411mania’s news board for being a “copy and paste” site. It is true that we don’t break news around these parts (as even Larry Csonka himself has publically admitted on numerous occasions), but at least we’re aggregating wrestling news from what, by and large, are the most reputable sources for this news that exist outside of direct conversations with the professional wrestlers themselves. The few remaining sites that are similar to ours essentially do the exact same thing. In the late 1990s, however, it seemed like every fifth fourteen year old wrestling fan threw together his own “wrestling news” website, in which he basically made up whatever rumors and tidbits that he thought sounded good in a particular week . . . and also stole made up news items from other websites operated by fourteen year old wrestling fans. This lead to an odd phenomenon in which some of these fabricated stories were repeated so frequently that they seeped into and became a permanent part of the collective consciousness of the so-called “IWC.” (One of these days, I’m going to do a column counting down the eight reasons that I despise that acronym.)

Perhaps the most prominent of these stories was that WCW intended Bill Goldberg to be their answer to “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, because, as the story would have you to believe, the two wrestlers were “doing the same gimmick.” Yes, apparently the defining character traits of Steve Austin were that he had a shaved head and a goatee, because, if you actually watched what the two guys were doing, these were the ONLY two things that Steve Austin and Bill Goldberg had in common. Yet, for whatever reason, this story took hold and survived for years, even after Eric Bischoff himself weighed in and stated that he never intended for Goldberg to be WCW’s version of Steve Austin and instead stated that he intended for Goldberg to be WCW’s version of Ken Shamrock because he took joy in the prospect of creating a “fake shoot fighter” who could become more popular than the legitimate shoot fighter that was being marketed by the World Wrestling Federation.

The other big problem with this story is that Austin is hardly one to hide his true feelings, so, if there really was a perception that Goldberg was stealing his act, he certainly would have said something about it in one of his shoot interviews by now. To the contrary, all indications are that Austin and Goldberg are rather friendly.

This entry blurs the line between “urban legend” and “conspiracy theory,” but I’m including it anyway. In some ways, this entry stems from the same odd nature of the late-90’s internet that I mentioned in the prior entry, though, as we will see, this one took on a much larger life of its own.

For a brief period of time in late 1999, the single biggest story in all of professional wrestling was the defection of Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara, both members of the WWF creative team, to WCW. Granted, very few fans at the time had heard of Russo or Ferrara or knew what they did for the WWF (unless they were familiar with Russo’s stint writing for the company’s magazine under the name Vic Venom), but the internet hype machine – which was in part powered by Russo and Ferrara themselves – made it sound as though these two guys jumping ship, more than any piece of on-screen talent jumping ship, created the opening that WCW needed to regain its former lead over the Federation in the promotions’ years-long ratings war. However, things didn’t really work out that way. Instead, the new regime completely failed to cut into McMahon’s lead and, if anything, contributed to WCW’s ratings being almost a full point lower on average one year after they made their debut.

In fact, the whole thing was perceived as such a blunder within both the industry and amongst “smart” fans that a rumor began to percolate that Vince McMahon intentionally sent Ferrara and Russo to WCW so that they could book a product so bad that the rival company would be guaranteed to go out of business. There are a couple of different version of the story, with one holding that McMahon knew the duo would be flops despite their best efforts and let them go without objection and the second holding that Russo and Ferrara were actually double agents working for Vince all along. The former is much more plausible, but there is no hard evidence that either is accurate . . . and there is virtually no way that a secret this large would remain a secret nearly thirteen years after the fact, particularly since WCW no longer exists.

And what did I mean by this legend taking on a life of its own? It is one of the few stories here that has actually received acknowledgment on an official WWE DVD release. In the “Rise and Fall of WCW” documentary, none other than Arn Anderson stated that it seemed as though Russo and Ferrara were sent into destroy their new employers.

Ahhh, the Montreal Screwjob. I don’t know if there is a single event in wrestling history that has led to more discussion and debate amongst fans. There were essentially three camps in the discussion. The first camp thought that Vince McMahon was justified in screwing the Hitman, as he had to preserve his championship’s integrity. The second camp thought that Bret Hart was in the right and McMahon was the devil, mainly citing to the fact that Bret had a creative control clause in his contract governing how he would exit the company. There was also a third, smaller camp who bought into the urban legend that they entire thing was a huge work, designed to set up a further McMahon vs. Hart feud further down the road.

Of course, history has proven to us that this is not the case, shooting numerous holes in the theory. First of all, if Montreal was a work and there were not legitimate hard feelings between McMahon and the Hart family, there is no way that we would have gotten a twelve year gap between the Hitman’s exit from the promotion and his re-signing with the company. Yes, there were problems with Hart’s physical health for several years that likely would have made a return impossible, but there was nothing about his condition in 2009 that made a return particularly better for him then than it would have been in 2008, 2007, or 2006. The long layoff before the story was paid off on WWE television militates against this being a work. Furthermore, as I noted above in regards to a different conspiracy theory, it would be nigh impossible for all of the individuals who would have known that the screwjob was a work to keep mum for such a long period of time. SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE would have spilled the beans, particularly in light of the fact that this is the professional wrestling industry and its participants having falling outs with each other all the time which lead to them spilling each other’s deepest, darkest secrets.

I do admit that there are a few things that could make a suspicious mind think that Montreal was a work, including the very conveniently placed Wrestling with Shadows camera crews and the lack of legal action between the parties, but, at the end of the day, the evidence against the “work” argument far outweighs what exists to the contrary.

This is a story that seems to be almost universally accepted, to the point that it is almost unquestionable in some circles of wrestling fandom. The story goes like this: Of all of the wrestlers to ever have wrestled, the one that you least want to get into a legitimate fight with is the artist formerly known as Haku, a.k.a. Meng, a.ka. King Tonga. However, on closer scrutiny, the story doesn’t hold all that much water.

Don’t get me wrong, Haku is definitely a tough guy. There are stories that involve him pulling out individuals’ eyes and biting off their noses in bar fights, and there is very little indication that these things did not actually occur. Plus, he did spend numerous years as a sumo wrestler, a sport which involves a significantly more “tough guy” qualities than the average American might realize. However, when you consider some of the people who have been involved in pro wrestling over the years with legitimate fighting backgrounds and other talents, it becomes almost impossible to accept the theory that nobody could take out the Tongan in a shoot. After all, even if you ignore the past and focus exclusively on the present, today’s wrestling scene involves an Olympic gold medal wrestler in the form of Kurt Angle, a former UFC and NCAA heavyweight champion in the form of Brock Lesnar, and the world’s strongest man in the form of Mark Henry. Almost anybody with those sorts of credentials could destroy a run-of-the-mill bar fighter with less refined fighting skills or less raw power, yet, every time you see a fan-produced (or even a wrestler-produced) list of legitimate badasses within the industry, Meng is almost always ranked either above or coequal with the Lesnars, the Angles, and the Henrys of the world.

I wouldn’t consider this urban legend to be so worth debunking if not for the fact that the subject of the myth himself has acknowledged that it’s not true, as Dave Meltzer relayed in one of his radio shows a few years back. As the story goes, in the late 1990’s, when WCW was at its peak and the Ultimate Fighting Championship was enjoying its first major wave of mainstream popularity (though nowhere near what it would enjoy in the mid-2000’s), Eric Bischoff had the idea of sending a WCW wrestler in to UFC to dethrone its champions and add some credibility to professional wrestling. Based on the legend that surrounded him, Bischoff approached Haku/Meng about filling this role. However, the man himself declined, as even he acknowledged that he would be destroyed if he went up a crop of elite fighters.

When a guy shoots down a story about how tough he supposedly is, that’s when you know you’re in urban legend territory.

I almost feel bad about posting this one, because it is so horribly outlandish and involves one of the biggest wrestling-related tragedies in history. However, it still has to be mentioned in a discussion of the industry’s urban legends, because, like it or not, there is a strange subculture of people who actually believe that Kevin Sullivan was either the perpetrator or the mastermind of the June 2007 deaths of Chris Benoit, Nancy “Woman” Benoit, and their seven year old son, Daniel Benoit. Before proceeding any further, I want to stress again that this “legend” is completely untrue.

Frankly, I don’t even know where the idea came from. All of us who have watched wrestling and followed it online since the 1990’s know that Chris Benoit was perhaps the most revered performer in the history of internet wrestling coverage. Some people, particularly certain rotund Canadian reviewers with $3.00 haircuts, elevated him to an almost godlike status, but, even given that fact, I have a hard time believing that these individuals could take a completely innocent man like Kevin Sullivan – without even a shred of evidence pointing in his direction – and accuse him of the horrific crime of triple murder, particularly when that murder involves an innocent child. It’s simply disgusting. Yes, the people who are part of this community will try to tell you that Sullivan had a “motive” because, in 1996, an on-screen rivalry between Benoit and Sullivan in which the Crippler stole the Taskmaster’s wife turned into reality, as Nancy Sullivan actually left her husband to become Nancy Benoit. However, this ignores the fact that there are thousands of men every year whose wives leave them for other men, very few of whom become murderers . . . and almost none of whom murder their ex over a decade later. Yes, the people who are part of this community will try to tell you that Kevin Sullivan was a Satanist and therefore without a moral compass, but the fact of the matter is that Sullivan’s “Satan worshipping” was a gimmick for a professional wrestling promotion and, even if it was not, one of the eleven primary tenants of the Church of Satan is to refrain from harming small children.

Yet, somehow and for some reason, there are still people out there who have adopted the belief that, despite all of the evidence against Sullivan having any involvement (not the least of which is the fact that law enforcement never seriously investigated him) and despite all of the evidence in favor of Benoit bearing sole responsibility (not the least of which is the severe degeneration of his brain detected in post-mortem investigation), the former leader of the Dungeon of Doom was somehow involved in this grizzly event. Fortunately, the group appears to have decreased in numbers as the years have passed, and, hopefully, they will soon be completely erased from existence.

On March 29, 1987, Howard Finkel stood in the middle of the Pontiac Silverdome and announced that the crowd at Wrestlemania III had set a new attendance record at the venue, namely 93,173 individuals. A cheer went up throughout the arena, and the number became a part of WWE mythology, with the company still bringing up the breaking of this “record” as one of its crowning achievements.

The problem with WWE heavily touting this record? It’s completely fabricated. I’m not saying that fabricating the number was a bad thing. Virtually every professional wrestling promotion in every country in history has fabricated an attendance figure at some point or another, which isn’t surprising when you consider the fact that the entire foundation of the business is convincing people that something is not exactly what it appears to be. However, it is amazes me that, despite the fact that pro wrestling fans these days are well-attuned to the fact that those within the business are constantly trying to get them wrapped up in elaborate “works,” there are many who refuse to even accept the possibility that the 93,173 figure might be something other than the god’s honest truth and feel that those who say otherwise have some deep-seated grudge against WWE that they are carrying it through one of the most bizarre means possible.

What is the source of the information for the lower attendance figure? It’s none other than the promoter of the event himself. Though they are not widely discussed, in the 1980s, the World Wrestling Federation relied upon a series of independent, regional “promoters” to publicize events within a particular geographic area and fill seats. One of the most successful and respected promoters in the business was a gentleman by the name of Zane Bresloff, who was with the Fed from 1984 through 1994 and spent most of the 1990s working with WCW. It was Bresloff that the WWF turned to in order to do the local promotion for Wrestlemania III, and he apparently did a hell of a job, because the crowd was huge. However, a few years after the event, Bresloff circulated to a variety of individuals official documents provided to him by the WWF which showed that the attendance was slightly over 78,000, approximately 15,000 less than the 93,173 claimed by the Federation.

Nowadays, the surprising part of this story is not that WWE exaggerated and continues to exaggerate the number. That’s standard operating procedure for any wrestling company. The surprising part is that there are some fans that are so vehemently supportive of perpetuating the myth, for no apparent reason. Want proof? Go read the “talk” page of the Wrestlemania III Wikipedia article, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

Here it is: The ultimate pro wrestling urban legend.

What amazes me about this one is the fact that it spread in the pre-internet era, and it seemed to spread virtually EVERYWHERE. Every wrestling fan that I have talked to who was in elementary school in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Ultimate Warrior was at the height of his popularity had some version of the tale about the “original” Ultimate Warrior dying and being replaced by a new wrestler under the same name and face paint. There are many different variations on the theme, but the most popular version is that the “first” Warrior died around the time that he departed the WWF after Summerslam 1991 and that a “new” Warrior replaced him when the character returned to save Hulk Hogan after the main event of Wrestlemania VIII. The “evidence” cited for the change included such things as the “new” Warrior being smaller and the “new” Warrior having a lighter hair color, because, you know, professional athletes never change their physiques and celebrities never highlight their hair. It just doesn’t happen.

As noted, the exact details of the death rumor varied from time to time and place to place. Many people claimed that the “new” Warrior was Kerry Von Erich, while others claimed that it was a wrestler who we had not seen in the big leagues before. Some versions of the story had the Warrior dying and being replaced multiple times, which would make the gimmick the pro wrestling equivalent of Macbeth. (I’m hoping more than seven people get that reference.) Of course, the cause of death was also wildly speculated about, with some claiming that it was a car accident, while others simply said that it was “steroids” in an eerie foreshadowing of the common steroid-and-recreational-drug-induced “wrestler deaths” that would claim a number of competitors’ lives at unfortunately early ages several years after the Warrior supposedly passed away for the first time.

Of course, thanks to the power of the internet, the decline of kayfabe, and just generally getting older and more reasonable, we now all know that the original Ultimate Warrior was Jim Hellwig – who later legally changed his name to “Warrior” – that he is the only man to have ever played the role, and that he is still very much alive, much to the chagrin of Hogan fans and liberals everywhere.