One MIND-BLOWING Secret From EVERY Month Of The WWE Attitude Era
22. July 1999 | The Worst Name Ever?
When producing Attitude Era retrospectives, WWE will mock itself for the New Generation Era, if only to depict 1998 as some genius comeback story. God, what were we thinking giving wrestlers plumber gimmicks and the like?
Man, success made us lazy for a while there. Good job WCW gave us a kick up the ass to remind us what a creative powerhouse we are!
The thing is, the WWF gimmicks didn’t change all that much. They just got more rude. Val Venis was still an occupational gimmick! It’s just that his occupation was ploughing dames.
Some names were a different kind of dumb. Prince Albert was named after a genital piercing. Edge was an edgy, disaffected youth, so they called him Edge. Vince Russo has claimed that Test was so named because over-eager fans like to “test” bodyguards; in reality, the character was nudge-nudge, wink-wink reference to steroids.
The WWF loved playing around with insider lingo around this time because Vince Russo wrote the product, and contrary to his shoot interview drivel, he loved the idea of smark fans thinking he was cool. Triple H liked it too: who could forget his Game Over / Damn Right I’m Over! T-shirt design?
Along these vaguely meta lines, according to the July 5, 1999 Observer, Joey Abs almost went by a different name: ‘Heater’. You see, Abs was the only actual wrestler in the Mean Street Posse. Pete Gas and Rodney were just Shane McMahon’s actual mates, and Abs, by default, was the heater of the group.
It’s just as well Pat Patterson and Gerald Brisco got there first, otherwise William Regal might have been named something else.