The Secret WWE History Of The Bloodline
In an era where time moves substantially quicker than it ever does now, The Headshrinkers lived a surprisingly full and fruitful life in WWE, cycling through every stage a tag team managed once upon a time. And while it’d be untrue to say that all the familiar stereotypes yet again weren’t adhered to, it’d be reasonable to add that the more the company attempted to “modernise” the aesthetic, the less believable it became.
Arriving in 1992 alongside manager and mentor figure Afa, Fatu and Samu made an immediate impact as heels when they were credited with costing the Natural Disasters the Tag Team Championships against Money Inc. No direct link was made between the heels, other than the simple act of villainy liking company, but this was a perfect example of the organisation yet again seeing Samoans as upper card concerns. The Disasters were done within months of losing the belts, but The ‘shrinkers went from strength to strength.
Off the back of their influential interference, Samu and Fatu moved on to the Survivor Series for a pay-per-view debut and victory over Owen Hart and Koko B. Ware’s High Energy. On the first ever WWE pay-per-view without one or both of either Hulk Hogan or The Ultimate Warrior, the impressive work from both units was a (temporary) statement of intent from the company that it was time to move on. The contest couldn’t quite meet the standard set by Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels in the main event, but it was well on the way. And so were the new clear and present dangers of the tag division.
Kept far away from a lifeless titular Royal Rumble match in 1993, The Headshrinkers’ natural WrestleMania opponents revealed themselves in yet another killer doubles opener on the show. The Steiner Brothers battered The Beverly Brothers, and suddenly WWE’s doubles division had two brand new duos to wage war on their ‘Grandest Stage’. Hulk Hogan’s 1993 return would go on to cause greater problems, but one of them impacting Fatu, Samu, Rick and Scott was that their potential outing stood no chance of being for the Tag Team Championships.
Hogan’s return ostensibly only occurred in order to defend the honour of Brutus Beefcake after ‘The Barber’ was brutalised by Money Inc. Ted Dibiase and IRS were still on top, and consequently ‘The Hulkster’ was suddenly vying for a different prize and the belts were part of a “double main event” alongside Bret Hart’s WWE Championship battle with Yokozuna. Nothing would be as simple as any of that sounds on the night of course, but one constant remained for everybody inside the dolled-up Caesars Palace car park - The Headshrinkers and The Steiner Brothers were all about beating the bejesus out of each other.
Match of the night on the ‘Show Of Shows’ by such a margin that it almost embarrassed the rest of roster and the booking, the four worked as daylight turned to dusk but lit up Las Vegas like few others. Its influence was felt a full 30+ years later too - an amazing spot saw Rick Steiner suplex an airborne Samu as he sat on Fatu’s shoulders.
It was borrowed by The Wolf Dogs in 2024 by - appropriately - Steiner’s son Bron Breaker, highlighting yet another wrestling bloodline that could well thrive along the one currently helmed by Roman Reigns and The Rock.
More so than Afa and Sika ever had, and relying less on the cheap heat The Islanders often leaned hard into, The Headshrinkers were quickly becoming known as one of the company’s rare-for-the-time workrate acts. This was further enhanced by some stellar television singles matches, such as Fatu’s run at Bret Hart on a pre-WrestleMania Raw and Samu’s choice effort against Mr Perfect during the company’s still-profitable 1993 UK Rampage tour.
The houses weren’t getting any bigger, but just because the company wasn’t drawing it didn’t mean that opportunities weren’t available for acts that still - in ways harder to quantify - continued to connect. Leading from the front, ‘The Hitman’ was the embodiment of the philosophical shift the company needed, but he couldn’t do it alone. Underneath him, Shawn Michaels was just as ready for the challenge, and only slightly below him, the likes of Razor Ramon, The 1-2-3 Kid, Mr Perfect, Bam Bam Bigelow and Matt Bourne’s incredible turn as Doink were asking more of WWE fans’ attention bell-to-bell than any point in the company’s history.
In the same vein, Samu, Fatu and The Steiners remained top of the tag team tree with the likes of The Smoking Gunns and the incoming Quebecers shoring things up underneath. Where there was less money to be made per night, WWE instead ran more nights. The “killer kalendar” was a schedule of events WWE added to the in-house magazine during the mid-90s, but the wacky alliteration was strictly the preserve of the sub-editors.
The wrestlers named it that for how hard life was hitting endless small towns for endless smaller payoffs, but even now the quality of the wrestling - if not all of the booking - holds up and the nightly reps were if nothing else a boot camp for bouts of brilliance. There was a paradox at play across most of North America with WCW also struggling - as box office returns diminished, the wrestlers had theoretically never held less value to Vince McMahon, Ted Turner or any other promoter attempting to market the world’s best pro wrestling.
But making towns and sending fans home happy had never been more vital to the bottom line, and the best of the 1993 crop promised a substantially better night’s entertainment than many of the bloated charlatans that defined the past.
Unfortunately, the year was to end on a humiliating low for The Headshrinkers. The reps and the bumps had taken them so far, but the industry was lightyears behind social norms and never was this clearer than in the multifariously embarrassing Four Doinks/Team Bam Bam Bigelow Survivor Series match. Fought under traditional Survivor Series rules, this literal clown show was anything but steeped in the business’ rich history.
As commentator (and booker!) Vince McMahon referred to the scene as a cartoon, Men On A Mission and The Bushwhackers donned the clown wigs and paint and fooled Fatu, Samu and their partner Bastion Booger with distractions ranging from balloons and scooters to - most insultingly - thanksgiving turkey. The dated savages stereotype was back for the night and to such an extent that even Afa couldn’t fight the past. The three succumbed their supposed instincts, choosing to excitedly pick at bits of meat rather than win the match.
It was all done in the worst possible taste and performed as disgustingly as possible presumably in order to satiate McMahon’s known penchant for such dreck. It was a grim foreshadowing of the dark days of babyface Doink, with his arch rival Bigelow framed as the biggest loser when he was pinned by all four faces. His partners had been too feckless to stave off elimination and stop the shut-out. Brighter days were ahead, but if ever a match existed to mark the end of something, this at least stood as an early farewell to The Headshrinkers as heels.
Linking up with Yokozuna - much more on him later - to help the WWE Champion dump The Undertaker into a casket and retain his gold proved to be one of their last acts on the wrong side of the tracks. After Samu unleashed his terrifying hangman spot in the 1994 Royal Rumble and Fatu gamely made it to the final four, Afa’s men were suddenly in the frame with fans as men to respect rather than simply fear.
Their last match pay-per-view as heels didn’t even take place. Part of the random assortment 10-man tag team match that was cut from the show when Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon’s ladder match ran long, the contest took place on a Monday Night Raw taping cycle that solidified the turning point. Prolific 1970s/80s manager Captain Lou Albano was brought into the company with a view of finding his next tag team success story, and formed a bond with Afa on the ground that they were both just the right side of insane.
Tag Team Champions The Quebecers were in the crosshairs, having tried and failed to manipulate The Headshrinkers into joining forces simply as a way to avoid defending their belts against them. Survivor Series 1993 may as well have been a different planet to the one Samu and Fatu were now occupying - they were wise enough to the cowardice and instead at long last became Champions.
It was smart and logical booking in the face of characterisations that sometimes inspired low hanging fruit creative - by listening to Albano’s advice, Fatu, Samu and Afa were able to see another way through, and were rewarded in kind with the gold they’d craved for nearly two years. It was best-of-times stuff, even if the times might just have arrived a little too late. Because Albano’s teachings had been vindicated and the pair were now babyfaces, WWE deemed the natural next step to be all about “Americanising” them. It was a patronising backwards step and the first of many.
The pair defeated Yokozuna and Crush at the King Of The Ring in June but it proved to be their only pay-per-view title defence. Exactly one night ahead of them taking on IRS and Bam Bam Bigelow in an effort to push back the rise of Ted Dibaise’s new Million Dollar Corporation at SummerSlam 1994, they were beaten on a house show by Diesel and Shawn Michaels. It was inexplicable in the context of the tag match - the SummerSlam pay-per-view opener was completely redundant without the belts - but all became clear as the night wore on.
Diesel lost his Intercontinental Championship to Razor Ramon, but the future ‘Dudes With Attitudes’ now had the doubles straps to worry about, keeping their programme red hot even if it completely extinguished The Headshrinkers’ fire. Perception is reality more often than not in pro wrestling, and it was increasingly difficult not to view the run as a damp squib after years grinding away in service of the spot.
In lockstep with the loss, years of toil caught up with Samu too. He departed to physically heal, and WWE mined whatever remained of the act by adding a repackaged Barbarian going by his real first name Sione. The New Headshrinkers struggled like every sequel act with the prefix typically would, not least when the supposed humanising (!) of the act extended to Fatu being confused and frustrated at the presence of wrestling boots.
Their contributions to the success of Michaels and Diesel’s act came full circle at the 1994 Survivor Series when they found themselves on the wrong end of ‘Big Daddy Cool’s rampage through the babyface ranks, but no payback came their way as ‘HBK’ and ‘Big Daddy Cool’ roared into 1995. The Headshrinkers never appeared on pay-per-view for the company again, and disbanded with insultingly minimal fanfare in 1995 ahead of Sione defecting to WCW and Fatu adding a beanie hat and leather jacket to the wrestling boots he’d magically become acquainted with. None of it made a difference, despite his best efforts
His 1995-1997 period was perhaps the weirdest of all of his runs with WWE, and think of the ground (and dimpled buttocks) that covers. With little-to-no attempt to thread the two worlds together, “Makin’ A Difference” Fatu found the former Headshrinker suddenly decked out in the neon of The New Generation with a backstory that took from his real life rather than literally everything audiences had been asked to believe about him in the years prior.
Gone was all the traditional samoan iconography, and though that was a giant leap forward for stereotyping in wrestling, the fact that he'd never been booked like more of a loser worked against whatever it was they were trying to achieve. For a short while, Samu returned alongside the future Umaga, suited and booted as "The Samoan Gangster Party" looking on to potentially recruit Fatu back into this updated version of the family fold.
That was quietly dropped alongside the character, and by 1996, the former Tag Team Champion was being put in a mask to work as The Sultan - a character 10 years out of date and even further away from what the industry needed. Perhaps out of loyalty to the samoan bloodline or simply as a nod and a wink to those that knew who wrestled behind the mask, Sultan got an Intercontinental Championship match at WrestleMania 13 against Rocky Maivia. After a predictable defeat, he was part of a post-match sequence also featuring Rocky Johnson. It was a family affair hiding in plain sight, long before both men had their lineages mined for an on-screen feud.
That would emerge from the most unexpected of circumstances, but before exploring how Fatu's life changed forever, it's worth delving back into the Bloodline's family album to see where he got much of his inspiration...