15 Things We Learned From Dark Side Of The Ring: Muhammad Hassan
5. UPN Banned Him From SmackDown
TV execs at UPN were appalled by an angle on the 7 July 2005 episode of SmackDown. In light of the London Bombings earlier that miserable day, WWE had Muhammad Hassan use Daivari as "a sacrifice", then five hooded men attacked The Undertaker after Hassan gave a beheading gesture. Knowing this would cause some backlash, the company ran a crawler warning fans about the segment, but they didn’t cut it from the broadcast.
Bruce Prichard has put blame at UPN's doorstep before via his 'Something To Wrestle With' podcast. According to him, there was also no way to quickly edit the tapes back then once they'd been sent to the station. Hmm, surely something could've been done, because this was catastrophic to WWE PR and to Copani's career as a whole.
UPN were horrified by the reaction, so they told WWE his Hassan character couldn’t appear on their channel afterwards. That's when writer Michael Leonardi popped back up on VICE to says he didn’t agree with what the promotion was doing creatively, and felt like they “needed to scale back”. He then claims he was “stripped of all [his] responsibilities and demoted” almost immediately for speaking out.
This was a dreadful day all round. People in London were terrified, then WWE aired footage that seemed to glorify their pain and misery later that same evening. Copani deeply regrets playing a part in all of that stuff. He'd pushed back against the creative direction, but was pretty much told to keep his mouth shut by higher ups.
Even so, he felt bad.