15 MORE Incredible WWE Ruthless Aggression Era Moments Nobody Ever Talks About
11. Scott Steiner & Christopher Nowinski’s Debate
Oh boy, this is gonna take some explaining.
No-one has ever blamed Scott Steiner for being a wordsmith, mathematician or genius. Having big muscles, hitting enough suplexes to make Taz start drooling and making really rather scary threats was Scotty's wheelhouse. He knew his strengths, and he tended to stick with those. WWE creative...didn't.
This had to be a rib. Seriously. Live on the 14 April 2003 episode of Raw, the writing team put Steiner out there with a microphone opposite the stuck up Christopher Nowinski. Their goal? Have a great debate on par with Kennedy vs. Nixon. Frankly, people would've accepted 'a great debate on par with even the most mediocre WWE talk show skits' going in.
Amongst other things, Steiner and Nowinski debated the situation in Iraq, and Scott prattled on about how he'd wrestled all over the globe before calling poor Christopher a "master-debater". That was definitely funnier in some overworked writer's head.
The whole deal was surreal, and it’s a pretty bare-faced snapshot of WWE’s approach towards such topics back then: The United States was brilliant, everyone else sucked and that was that. Anyway, 3 Minute Warning ran in to put a stop to it, for whatever reason. Fans reacted because Steiner was over, but the segment proved to be messy and nowhere near as accidentally hilarious as some probs hoped it might be.
Mere months earlier, Scott had been wrestling Triple H for the World Title. By April '03, he was stinking up the place with Nowinski and yakking on about war. Incredible.