What's in a Name?

What's in a name? Well, if you're trying to forge a career in the wrestling industry, a name is one of the most important things you can have.

Just ask Steve Austin. When he first entered the WWF, he was given the name of The Ringmaster. Nobody gave a rat's ass, and Austin knew it. Wanting to take on a more serious character, Austin went to the creative team and asked for a new name. They gave him a huge list of names that would suit his new serious, cold, serial killer-like character. And right at the top of that list was Chilly McFreeze.

Can you imagine this - "And that's the bottom line, because Chilly McFreeze said so!" Sends a chill down your spine, doesn't it. A short time later, Austin's ex-wife Jeannie accidentally came up with the Stone Cold nickname, and the tag stuck.

But there will always be instances in the wrestling business where names are recycled, rehashed for a new audience. This kind of creativity will always be a hit and miss kind of affair.

Take Demolition for instance. Ax and Smash were one of the most dominant tag-teams in the WWF in the late eighties and early nineties, winning the tag-team titles on three occasions. But then Bill Eadie, the man behind Ax's face paint, developed health problems. Not wanting to break up the team in the middle of their re hot feud with the Hart Foundation, Brian Adams was brought in, and as Crush, became the third member of the team.

But after the team lost the tag-team titles and feuded with the Legion of Doom/Road Warriors, Ax left. The Demolition team of Smash and Crush began to flounder, and went nowhere afterwards. It just wasn't the same.

The same could be sent of the team that beat Demolition to end their last tag-team title reign, the Hart Foundation. After Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart lost the titles to the Nasty Boys at Wrestlemania VII, Hart and Neidhart went their separate ways. They reunited for one match against the Nasties, but the plan was to push the Hitman as a singles superstar.

Away from Hart, Neidhart floundered. He served a stint as a colour commentator, before losing a televised match to Ric Flair. After the match, Neidhart was attacked by the Beverley Brothers. The angle just cried out for revenge, but Neidhart couldn't do it on his own. And so Owen Hart arrived on the scene. Christened "The Rocket" because of his high-flying skills, Neidhart and the Hitman's younger brother became The New Foundation. There were obviously many comparisons to The Hart Foundation. Again, it just wasn't the same, and the team didn't last that long. Neidhart left the WWF, while Owen formed another tandem, High Energy, with Koko B. Ware.

Hit and miss is certainly a good way of describing the use of the Midnight Express name. The name was originally used for a stable in the Memphis and Alabama territories in the early eighties, before Dennis Condrey and Bobby Eaton formed the team that many fans are familiar with in 1983, managed by Jim Cornette. The team eventually found their way to the NWA, but Condrey left shortly afterwards, to be replaced by Stan Lane. Soon, the original
team of Condrey and Rose surfaced in the NWA, managed by Paul "E. Dangerously" Heyman, for a feud with the team of Eaton & Lane. Both incarnations of the team were successful in the NWA, winning the World and U.S. tag-titles. The team came to an end when Cornette and Lane left the NWA in the early nineties.

However, that wasn't the end of the name. In 1998, Cornette revived the name in the WWF, as the pairing of Bob Holly and Bart Gunn became known as the "new" Midnight Express. Despite winning the NWA tag titles, the gimmick didn't go over well with the fans.

Adding the word "new" to a tag-team name just doesn't seem to wash with wrestling fans. Just ask Marty Jannetty and Al Snow. In 1996, Janetty returned to the WWF for the umpteenth time, and this time with a new tag-team partner, Leif Cassidy. The team were known as The New Rockers.

The gimmick really didn't work. People believed a few years before that Janetty and his former partner Shawn Michaels really were "rockers", that they spent their time away partying all night long. The problem with this new incarnation was that Al Snow's Leif Cassidy character was just too goofy. Claiming that he was a fan of the likes of seventies teen heart throb David Cassidy doesn't go too well with a "rocking" kind of image, and the fans knew this.

After the team split up, Cassidy took on a more serious nature, but would soon find a far better gimmick by adopting a mannequin's head as his manager.

What a lot of people realise is that The New Rockers nearly came about a few years before, while Shawn Michaels was still a member of the team. Michaels was having one of his many disputes with the WWF, and realising that they could lose the team that applied to a teenage demographic, Vince McMahon hired the young Shane Douglas to replace Michaels on the team. Of course, Michaels settled his dispute with the WWF, and remained a part of The
Rockers team until their memorable split. Douglas remained in the WWF as a singles wrestler, but didn't really go anywhere.

The "new" word was also used to describe another tag-team that was based on a classic pairing from the 1970's. The Blackjacks team of Blackjack Mulligan and Blackjack Lanza were one of the most successful tag-teams of the period. In 1997, the name was used again by the WWF, this time for the teaming of Barry Windham, and the man who would later become known as John "Bradshaw" Layfield.

The New Blackjacks name was given to them because Windham was Mulligan's son, and Bradshaw was Lanza's nephew. But in 1997, the wrestling fans were getting smart. The sight of two men dressed in cowboy outfits and sporting moustaches that Yosemite Sam would be proud of just didn't wash with them. The New Blackjacks mainly fought in low-card matches, and were hardly successful

The word new was never used as far as the Fabulous Freebirds were concerned. The original threesome of Michael "P.S." Hayes, Terry "Bam Bam" Gordy, and Buddy Roberts were top stars wherever they competed, and they are probably best known for their legendary feud with the Von Erich family in the old World Class territory in Texas.

Hayes kept the name when he went to the NWA in the late-eighties, forming a new Freebirds tag-team with Jimmy Garvin, The team was just as successful as the previous incarnation, capturing the World and U.S. Tag titles, and even adding a third member, the masked Badstreet, for a short time.

Of course, it isn't just tag-teams that have rehashed names over the years. Some singles wrestlers have as well.

In 1996, after Scott Hall & Kevin Nash left the WWF for the big money contracts of WCW, Jim Ross announced that Razor Ramon and Diesel, the characters they portrayed in the WWF, would be making a welcome return. Many doubted this, and then WWF President Gorilla Monsoon denied that this would happen, stating publicly that Hall and Nash were under contract to another organisation, although not actually mentioning WCW by name.

So it was a great surprise to many when, after a verbal tirade against his bosses on Monday Night Raw, Ross introduced the returning Razor Ramon to an astonished world. Although it wasn't the Razor Ramon we remembered. He was a bit taller, and carried a few extra pounds. This was Razor Ramon, but it was a new guy, Rick Bogner, playing the role. A short time later, he was joined by a new Diesel, played by a pre-Kane Glen Jacobs.

The fans didn't buy it. The WWF's way of thinking was that the fans only cared for the characters, and not the men who played the characters. They were wrong. They brought into Hall and Nash playing the characters, but not Bogner and Jacobs. They saw the new Razor and Diesel as nothing more than cheap rip-offs.

Some faction names have also been used time and time again, the most notable of these being the Four Horsemen and the New World Order.

The original Horsemen team of Ric Flair, Tully Blanchard and Arn & Ole Anderson is considered the best of the lot, as, under the management of J.J. Dillon, they caused a great deal of havoc in the NWA in the mid-eighties. But the various comings and goings which saw the likes of Lex Luger, Barry Windham, Sting, Brian Pillman, Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Steve McMichael, Curt Hennig, and various managers come and go only watered down the gimmick. By the time they were roundly trashed by the NWO, they were hardly an effective force.

The New World Order was the best thing that ever happened to WCW, yet it was rehashed so many times that by 2000, nobody cared about the final incarnation of the group that featured Kevin Nash, Bret Hart, Scott Steiner and Jeff Jarrett. They had seen and done it all before.

And the WWF version of the NWO wasn't that convincing either. When Vince McMahon announced, at the beginning of 2002, that he was bringing in the NWO to kill his own creation, many thought that the original threesome of Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and Hulk Hogan would go on a rampage in the WWF, causing havoc the likes of which had only been seen in WCW in 1996-97.

But the problem was that the NWO was exploding the moment they stepped foot in a WWF arena. Hogan was starting to ride a wave of nostalgia, and the fans wanted him to turn baby face as soon as possible. Hall caused problems backstage on his first night, starting an argument with the Dudleys, saying that although he admired their Dudley Death Drop finisher, he couldn't wait to kick out of it on national television. Nash proved to be very injury prone, and at times it seemed that all Nash had to do to get himself injured as to take one step forward.

Others, such as the Big Show, X-Pac, Booker T, Shawn Michaels, and even Ric Flair joined the NWO in some capacity, and the angle could have been saved, especially when Michaels announced one night on Raw that Triple H, who was then the property of Smackdown, would be joining the NWO. But that same night, Nash suffered another of his long-term injuries, tearing his quad muscle by walking across the ring. The NWO, and the entire angle with Triple H, was binned within days.

Story lines in professional wrestling are rehashed and reused time and time again, and most fans seem happy to accept this. But rehash a tag-team or faction name, and the fans just won't buy it. We may be asked to recycle our rubbish, but we can't recycle our wrestling gimmicks.