When WWE invoked religion for Wrestlemania 25's Shawn Michaels versus Undertaker tilt, it was arguably brilliant and tastefully done. However, in 1993, when WWE debuted long-time veteran grappler Mike Shaw as "mad monk" Friar Ferguson, the gimmick was in such poor taste that the Catholic Church of New York (which is where WWE was taping Raw at that time at the Manhattan Center) asked the company to discontinue the gimmick after a few weeks. In all reality, Mike Shaw's career was a slippery slope of gimmicks that were well executed but met with considerably less fanfare with each turn of character. Starting as evil Indian heel Makhan Singh in Calgary, his next big run came as mentally deficient asylum patient Norman the Lunatic, followed by Ferguson, and later grotesque hump-backed fat man Bastion Booger. However, in the case of Friar Ferguson, sometimes a gimmick is too offensive for the fans to even begin to consider caring about, and then they're gone before they really even started.
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.
