Building ex-WCW World Heavyweight Champion Ron Simmons into a credible contender for the Intercontinental Championship in 1996 didn't need to involve changing his name to Farooq, having him wear a bizarre looking helmet, and also inexplicably be managed by Sunny. In literally stripping everything away from Ron Simmons that made him Ron Simmons, the people literally had to wait until November 1996 to buy into Simmons as a credible contender for the Intercontinental Championship as the head of the Nation of Domination. WWE has always had a need to re-create already successful wrestlers in the company's own image. Just as Dustin Rhodes became Goldust, Ron Simmons had to lose his ability to speak freely as a character and act in a manner that was in not in accordance with the wrestler that many wrestling fans were familiar. Maybe in the most obvious example of WWE's re-branding causing fan acknowledgement of a wrestler's past to drop to zero, the initial incarnation of Farooq is a heel that absolutely nobody cared about because there was absolutely no desire for the company to compel the fans to remember who he was.
Besides having been an independent professional wrestling manager for a decade, Marcus Dowling is a Washington, DC-based writer who has contributed to a plethora of online and print magazines and newspapers writing about music and popular culture over the past 15 years.
