Hi Scott,
I have a few questions for you, that I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on.
1) Following Wrestlemania X, Lex Luger wrestled Rick Martel on Raw, and during the commentary, Vince McMahon kept hyping what would happen when Lex Luger was able to get his hands on Mr. Perfect in a match. Were there plans for the two to wrestle, following the incident at Wrestlemania X? If so, how come if never happened?
2) Was it ever in the cards for Luger to win the WWF Championship? I know the opinion of the fans at the '94 Rumble during his and Bret's tie saw the crowd massively in favour for Bret, but I'm still surprised that Vince never gave Luger a chance with the belt. I mean, he SHOULD have been the type to be favoured by Vince McMahon, right?
3) Speaking of Bret, I assume his insurance company have been paying him, following his retirement in WCW and such. I don't know if he still gets insurance payments, but if he does, how was it he would have been able to get back in the ring every so often since Wrestlemania 26 without getting into hot water with the insurance company? I know insurance matters might not be your field, but I thought maybe you might have heard something about it.
Thanks in advance,
Marty.
1. Yes, they absolutely were supposed to get into a program together, but Perfect once again decided his back injury was too crippling to continue wrestling, and never followed through with it. Coincidentally, he also started collecting a large sum of money from Lloyds of London.
2. It was in the cards in 1993, certainly, but by Royal Rumble they had cooled on Luger significantly and Bret was pretty much set in stone to get the belt again. But yes, the original (second) plan was for Luger to win at Summerslam by countout, and then take the belt at Wrestlemania. The ORIGINAL original plan was Luger winning at Summerslam, but they decided to stretch it out until Wrestlemania. Whoops.
3. Insurance companies no longer cover wrestlers, mainly because Mr. Perfect fucked Lloyds over so badly in fact. So no, as far as I know Bret was not collecting insurance after his retirement.
I thought that Bret received insurance payments due to his stroke. He had a section on it in his book and I could've sworn I read that the reason he was able to "wrestle" without violating the terms of the insurance policy was that he couldn't take bumps or get hit in the head. If you notice in any of the matches he had coming back, he never took a head shot or really any offense from the heel except kicks to the gut and I can't recall him bumping, just kinda falling to his knees from gut shots.
ReplyDeleteYou're wrong on the third point Scott - Bret started receiving payments from Lloyds in 2000.
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons he left so abruptly in 2010 was that Lloyds were pissed at the level of physicality he was exhibiting in the ring, and threatened to pull the plug.
I remember reading that Foley was pissed at insurance companies for not covering him. I know insurance entities can be evil and heartless in a lot of ways, but man, can you blame them for not covering him? Considering how much willful damage he does to himself?
ReplyDeleteThen again, I guess you could say that a guy with heart problems who has a fetish for bacon and pork is also willfully damaging himself yet expects to be covered when he goes in for his coronary bypass...
I thought it was from the concussions. I seem to recall that he wrote in his book that he had trouble getting coverage because of an insurance doctor who was giving him a hard time, with wrestling being fake and all.
ReplyDeleteI really don't know if the second paragraph is still talking about Foley or not, haha.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right actually. I haven't re-read his book in a while. I think he was trying to get the insurance after Goldberg kicked his head off and he got fired from WCW. Didn't the insurance guy try to rile him up by talking shit about Stu?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I believe so, although I think it was the insurance doctor who tried to piss Bret off. Maybe the guy had dealings with wrestlers before trying to scam the company.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing it was the Dynamite Kid. 8 )
Haha! My other example was a chain-smoker but I was hungry and went with the more delicious one.
ReplyDeleteThank God there's no "Luger blabbed the finish to reporters and it was changed" nonsense here.
ReplyDeleteWhether it was a legit fan vote or not, Luger finishing second to Bret in the "Superstar of the Year" vote in November of '93 was probably the first major sign that Bret was still the man.
Wins and losses definitely don't matter. Just ask Lex Luger.
ReplyDeleteLUGER AGAIN.
ReplyDeleteIf he was half as interesting in the ring as his career was out of it, I'd have given more of a damn about him.
SPOILER: Someone big is coming back and is expected to get involved in the worst storyline going.
ReplyDeleteUgh. What could he possibly bring to that lame storyline?
ReplyDeleteDidn't Rick Rude collect a ton of money from one of the insurance companies too?
ReplyDeletePerfect had a bad back in 1991, but made his comeback in 1992 and was somewhat healthy (for Perfect) until he bowed out of Survivor Series 93. The rumored him to return as a wrestler with Luger in 1994, and then he returned as an announcer in 1995. There was talks of him making a return, as a heel manager, where he would manage Triple H. The rumor he balked on an actual wrestling return, due to his insurance payments, but because he wore his trunks and took a bump from Triple H in the back - they voided his policy. Perfect, apparently, got angry of losing his insurance money - asked Vince for a ton of money and just decided to sit out the rest of his announcer contract and wait for a WCW payoff.
ReplyDeleteHennig was not the same wrestler he used to be, although he wasn't totally horrible either. WCW tried to sell Raven and Hennig's debuts as something big - but Hennig played the boring "free agent" being backed by Ric Flair and Raven just sat in the audience as a gothic midcard act.
They should have just had Hennig show up as a nWo member and been done with it, instead of implying Flair and Hennig were buddies, or the lame feud with DDP. I mean sometimes all you need is a backstory, and they couldn't even do that right. I mean when Hennig joined the horseman, and then just finally turned heel in the War-Games match - what could have had a brilliant backstory was just another lame heel turn. It was like they really had no idea what to do with Hennig, because having him be a heel nWo member would be too predictable and tried to have him be something he wasn't.
It was the usual, "Hogan and Bischoff promised me money," where you could have really used their old WWF feud as a backdrop. "I turfed you out of one company, now I'm turfing you out of another." Sadly, Hennig was probably too busy doing drugs and drinking on the money he was making, instead about putting on a good storyline.
And I almost forgot about his West Texas Redneck period, where WCW was trying to let the nWo just die into the backdrop (until Russo brought it back). Don't know how a guy from Minnesota is a redneck, but whatever . . .
And how did WCW and Russo get by with "The Perfect One" and "The Perfect Event" without WWE launching a lawsuit on them? Maybe they did, and I missed it - because if Russo got by calling Shawn Stasiak - The Perfect One - but they couldn't do that years earlier when it could have helped Hennig? (Then again, again if they had called Hennig "The Perfect One," or "The Perfect Event" then it might have been the same thing that happened with The Boss (Man, Is He Big).)
At some point Hennig left WCW, forgot when - but then he was attempting to launch to XPW - which was Jimmy Hart's promotion. Then WWF decided to sign him back in 2002, which actually was a good thing - but Hennig's drug problems had him "sparing" with Brock Lesnar and Hennig was stuck in XPW house shows and TNA-weekly PPV land until his death in Jan 2003. (I think he died at a Jimmy Hart XPW event or some sort)
Off track/side note: TNA in the early years was weird, they'd do pay on appearance and just hot-shot a bunch of stuff. They'd bring out Nikita Koloff, but he never cut a promo - nor wrestled. Dusty Rhodes ended up doing a feud with Koloff, which resulted in David Flair challenging Dusty Rhodes for Ric Flair's 1983 NWA title on a ladder, where Nikita ended up helping Rhodes and hugging him. (I won't go into the infamous Dusty Rhodes' trash can promo, but I will say they feuded over Ric Flair's trophy title he kept from Starrcade 1983 - but either R-Truth, Jarrett, or Shamrock was champion at that point. Eh, whatever.)
Once Hogan hinted at coming in 2003, only to just sell a guitar shot for Jarrett - to make Jarrett look like he was something - I gave up on Total Nonstop Action.
If he just cuts promos and doesn't wrestle, I'm golden.
ReplyDeleteDid you know that there was a 2nd Ultimate Warrior? The first one died.
ReplyDeleteProbably put over how great the one guy is that's involved in the storyline.
ReplyDeleteRic Flair! :D
ReplyDeleteYeah, I remember there being an incident on Raw where the Anvil was hitting him in the back and Rude was furious about it because he had to keep up the illusion he was practically crippled. Foley explained it best in his book - guys weren't faking their injuries, they were taking advantage of the system by suffering injuries Lloyds of London defined as career ending but a wrestler would typically come back from.
ReplyDeleteMultiple things! There's going to be the sexual tension between him and AJ because apparently woman still want to have sex with Ric Flair, even if he's 40 years older than they are. He can whoo anytime it's needed. If Vickie wants to get over as a heel she can hit him in the head with something, which will cause him to roll around screaming "oh god" while bleeding. He can give someone a nut shot. Flair can add so many things.
ReplyDeleteWhy did Perfect leave so suddenly in 1993? I think Perfect was fully capable of wrestling once the initial back injury healed after 1991, but he had the Lloyds of London thing, and enough back damage that he could always go back to them and claim he couldn't wrestle anymore. It was probably just a matter of money, if what he was going to make wrestling was more than what he'd make sitting out, he'd wrestle. If not, he's sitting out. Probably explains why there was no "can he or can't he wrestle" controversy when he went to WCW - with the money they likely threw at him he was wrestling.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait to see what Mattel thinks when Flair bleeds all over some kid's pink T-Shirt
ReplyDeleteFlair made "all the virgins bleed" don't ya know
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty vague on it, but I remember 5 wrestlers taking Lloyds of London insurance back in 1992 including Bret, Roadwarrior Animal, Perfect, and 2 others I forget now, I think Rude may have been one, but after that Lloyds of London stopped insuring wrestlers.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with insurance is that anybody who is insured can take more risks than somebody who isn't insured and knows they can get away with them. People also don't care how much anything costs because the insurance covers it. There are too many people out there who are doing things that they know are bad for their health and then expect other people to pay more so they can get the health care they need.
ReplyDeleteI can understand why the insurance companies don't want to insure wrestlers. Even putting aside the high risk of being scammed by a wrestler faking a career-ending injury, wrestling is an extremely risky activity and injuries are frequent. If they sold career-ending injury policies today, the risk of being scammed would be even higher because wrestler pay is lower today than it was in the 1990s, so wrestlers could probably do better financially if they could get an insurance company to give them money for a "career-ending" injury that isn't.
Isn't that one of the reasons Foley tried taking that Vader powerbomb, hoping it would permanently fuck his back up?
ReplyDeleteI love you Scream.
ReplyDelete"If Vickie wants to get over as a heel she can hit him in the head with something, which will cause him to roll around screaming "oh god" while bleeding. He can give someone a nut shot. Flair can add so many things."
This part especially had me cracking up in the coffee shop.
I wonder what they would have gone with at Wrestlemania X had Luger just won the title at Summerslam 93 from Yoko. Perhaps the DREADED Ludvig Borga challenging for the belt? As long as Bret vs Owen and HBK vs Razor were still there, it probably wouldn't have mattered who Lex defended against, but its interesting to consider.
ReplyDeleteI guess it depends on your definition of redneck. Most of my family is from Mississippi and they definitely qualify. But one of my cousins married a man from Minnesota and he and his family also fit a lot of the stereotypes (hunting, fishing, camping, builds/fixes their own stuff, dipping). AFAIK the only thing they lack is racism and they very well may be (I don't know his side of the family that well).
ReplyDeleteAnd HBK and Tommy Lee brawled backstage over Pamela Anderson.
ReplyDeleteIt was the sleeper where Vader dropped him straight backward onto the concrete, although I think by the time it came around he had already been denied coverage and he just went ahead with it anyway because he didn't care about wrestling. That's why I don't really see how any insurance company could cover wrestlers: how do you determine fraud? You'd have to be a wrestler yourself and probably be in the ring with them to figure out whether someone was just hurting themselves intentionally for the insurance (as opposed to hurting themselves intentionally for the sake of a wrestling match, I guess.)
ReplyDeleteIt could have been Bret/Luger, if the Luger apathy and support for Bret still happened as it did, even if Luger had the title. It'd be hard to do face/face with Bret winning if they're still pimping Luger as an American Hero, but they could have turned him heel and played off the angle at Wrestlemania 9 between the two.
ReplyDeleteI don't think having the title changes much for Luger - even if he wins the title at Summerslam, he's still leading a team of All Americans against Evil Foreigners at Survivor Series, and probably a title defense against one of them at Royal Rumble. Having the title likely doesn't make this any more enthralling than it turned out to be and the crowd probably still favors Bret.
That makes sense, since all but Bret would have long-term back/neck injuries. Rude was one for sure - he milked that back injury until the day he died, literally, as he was finally getting ready for a comeback when he died. But the spot where they say he hurt his back against Sting in Japan is nasty. Dibiase, same thing. Wasn't it a neck injury in Japan? It's not that they were faking the injury, but they would take them out and just wait for a "career ending injury", as defined by the policy.
ReplyDeleteHe had some sort of coverage. I'm pretty sure he did have a Lloyds of London policy that they decided not to renew after a year or so. He mentions that his payout for the career ending injury wasn't going to be that high because his salary wasn't as high as others but it would've given him enough to live off of until he figured out what to do next with his life.
ReplyDeleteFoley mentions that the insurance companies thought wrestling was entirely fake and there would be little risk in covering them. They guys who got hurt and lived off their policies weren't faking their injuries - it's not as simple as fake limping in and picking up a check. But it sounds like the policies for wrestlers were similar to the policies given to other professions and by terms of the policy a back injury would be a career ending injury. In reality the wrestler is an athlete who'd take some time off (maybe) and be back in the ring sooner or later, but based on the policy that particular injury would be considered career ending so they could collect their payoff. It's a pretty sweet deal when you think about it.
Cant bleed in PG WWE, instead glitter and rainbows come out.
ReplyDeleteI'm think Bret Still wins the Rumble, so yeah, it probably would have been Bret/Luger at WMX. Which means that there probably wouldn't have been a Bret/Owen match. Though they mave have switched the title back to Yoko at RR94 to not have it be face/face. And you're right, Luger having the title wouldn't have affected the fact that Bret was still the #1 face.
ReplyDeleteAnd Elizabeth was Vince's niece.
ReplyDeleteAnd that more than 600,000 viewers turned to RAW when Tony said, "yeah that'll put butts in the seats".
ReplyDeleteAnd that 600,000 viewers turned to RAW when Tony said, "yeah that'll put butts in the seats".
ReplyDeleteWhoops not sure how I posted this as a guest haha.
ReplyDeleteWould have been cool to see Bret win the rumble, challenge Lex for the title at WMX and then have Luger turn heel during the buildup but still do the All-American gimmick. Luger as an obnoxious American calling Bret a dirty foreigner could have been awesome.
ReplyDeleteHe could've turned it into a sarcastic "I'm what a real American is supposed to be" thing. The way they handled Luger was strange - he was a somebody before he went to WWE. He's just a natural heel. But they really just gave him the one big face push and when it didn't work turned him into a Patriotic midcarder. Was Vince so upset his new Hogan didn't work out he gave up on Luger all together? Or was he just pulling him back for a while before trying a super-Luger face push again?
ReplyDeleteAnd there were 93,000 people at WMIII.
ReplyDeleteNo one here has yet to mention that Henning was set to join WCW soon after Wrestlemania 10. Henning was in fact at Slamboree backstage but WCW didnt want to put him on camera. Henning was I think supposed to wrestle Flair at Bash at the Beach that year, but that changed after Hogan signed with them. Then there was rumors that the masked man who kept attacking Hogan was going to be Henning.
ReplyDeleteThis would've been fantastic, and a great way to subtly insult Hogan too -- insinuate that the 'real American bodybuilder' character was now something to be booed, not admired. It also would've set Luger up to feud with Bret post-Mania (Bret/Luger II at King of the Ring would've been more interesting than Bret/Diesel), then foreign faces like British Bulldog, the Headshrinkers, or even pretend-he's-part-Cuban Razor Ramon. Luger also could've feuded with other American faces who think he's being a xenophobic jerk; heck, a Luger feud with Tatanka suddenly takes on all sorts of new socio-political layers if Luger is playing this kind of character (and I'm sure the WWF would've treated it with respect!...wait....)
ReplyDeleteAnd let's say in this alternative universe of WWE, that Hart still turns heel in 1997. Luger turning on him in 94 would have given him even extra motivation to be anti American.
ReplyDeleteAnd apparently Yokozuna was set to join the Hart Foundation in 1997, too.
ReplyDelete