Randoms

Hi Scott   A few fairly random questions if you're interested.

Sure.  Maybe I'll do a whole e-book on this sort of thing one day and clean out my inbox for good.  

 

1) I dug out Owen-Austin SS 97 recently for the first time in ages and it got me thinking. What if Austin's injury had been serious enough to retire him at the time? Given the momentum they finally had, what do you think the most sensible strategy to employ short-to-medium term would have been in order to maintain some momentum without "Stone Cold"?

Man, the world would have been a totally different place, for sure.  I think maybe the development of Rock and HHH would have been rushed forward and they would have survived in the long term, but I don't think there would have been the same kind of boom without him.  

2) Was there ever any prospect of putting the AWA World title on Sgt. Slaughter in 1985? I'm pretty sure he was there at the time and it seems to me that he would have been the perfect champion for the promotion during the Reaganite eighties, especially when it came to competing with Vince.

There was never any thought given that I know of, no.  Slaughter was considered on the downside of his career even back then.  Please I think Gagne considered him a gimmick worker, and he always wanted "real" wrestlers to be his champions.  

 

3) Leaving aside whether the match was ever seriously proposed, if Hogan-Bret at Summerslam 93 had gone ahead what do you think the best way to book both the match and the buildup would have been?

I don't know, because it would have been a really weird dynamic, and the more time they had to build it up, the more time that Hogan would have to get out of doing the job.  Frankly I think Bret was fooling himself if he thought that he was ever going to get a win over Hogan without something drastic happening.  I think that Bret would have ended up doing a quasi-heel turn like Shawn Michaels in 2005, where they have a series of misunderstandings and Bret finally turns on him, only to learn his lesson in time for a team-up against the foreign heels.  Or something.  

 

4) What's your opinion of Slick? No real reason beyond the fact that he was one of the more prominent managers of the Hukamania era yet his name never seems to come up except in passing in any discussions.

I love Slick and was always a big fan of his in the good old days.  Once he found Jesus, not so much, but the pimped out heel character was entertaining as hell, especially on the squash shows.  He was a lot of fun to hate.