Because we’re wrestling journalists — and Buzzfeed contributors — we’ve decided that we needed to start creating a top ten list based on each Wrestler of the Week. We’ve decided to not include any criteria for the list, because we’ve been told by experts in the list-making field that it would just muddy our ability to explain why we’re right. You should understand, because you read us, that we know more about wrestling than you and what we think is best IS best. We promise. If you want, you can guess what why we’ve chosen these people the way we have in the comments. Where you belong.
So, without further ado, we give you the definitive list of the Top 10 Stables:
It’s Day Two of #TheNationWeek. In celebration of this month’s Survivor Series, we’re taking a look at famous stables from the wonderful world of wrestling. This is the twelfth installment in our patent-pending Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series. As always we started by making The Nation a Stable You (Should) Probably Know Better. Today, we give you the finer points of their oeuvre with some Essential Viewing. On Wednesday, we’ll be making lists and giving tapes. After Hump Day, we make our “Amazon.com on steroids” dreams come true with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…“. before finishing everything off on Friday with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ hopefully doesn’t erupt in a giant race kerfuffle like that episode of Community.)
Looking back at the The Nation of Domination is oddly like looking into the future of the WWE. Much of what happened with them was part of the non-wrestling sections of the show, the Attitude Era style that almost took the sport into full on soap-opera territory and took nearly a decade and a half to fix. And, worst of all, led to a decade of people talking about how much wrestling was happening on any given show.
And because of YouTube, their promos manage to exist in their own orbit while also appearing in a vacuum separate from the worst slog of the era, that awesome time those Japanese caricatures threaten to “Choppy-Choppy” pornstar-cum-professional wrestler Val Venis’s “pee pee”. So, the entire experience feels much more reminiscent of the current product: bits and pieces of important storylines are discussed but much of the things that propel the majority of less engaging (read: shitty) storylines forward are done outside of what I choose to watch. The difference between then and now is mostly that “outside of what I choose to watch” is the WWE App and YouTube channel shows, and not “the rest of the show I would have to sit through” like it was when Raw was the only game in town.
Another odd happenstance, mostly a function of the integral part that the faction played in the history of the company’s 2nd most popular current superstar, The Rock, is that there is a surprising amount of footage of them that hasn’t been taken down by WWE using internet magic. Many of the more important pieces of the NoD history, from when Faarooq kicks everyone not named D’Lo Brown out of the group — which at that time was rather intentionally the size of a small congregation — to when The Rock has the rest of the Nation do the same to Faarooq and most of it in between can be found if one wants to look hard enough.
This “Bigger Better Blacker” version of the Nation of Domination, now rid of the Hawai’ian scourge Crush and his Hispanic partner Savio Vega, would become best known for The Rock and his eventually juggernaut push to the main event through his power struggle with Faarooq. But it was also briefly home to Ahmed Johnson, who filled largely the same role the Rock would eventually take over, as the young future main-eventer who would eventually take down Faarooq.
It’s remarkable to think about — even after spending a week talking about it — how close Ahmed Johnson was to superstardom in the eyes of Vince McMahon. Thank god for small favors like Ahmed Johnson’s inability to stop hurting people intentionally and stay away from the buffet.
When The Rock joined the Nation, he gave the squad — which, after getting Ron Simmons as close as he ever would to the WWE title with a match at the 1997 King of the Ring against the World’s Champion, The Undertaker, had immediately been turned into the “Bigger Better Blacker” version — new life, and more importantly a new purpose: make The Rock a star in a way he hadn’t been able to do himself.
Spoiler alert: it worked.
From the moment he joined the group, the former Rocky Maivia became everything that he would be known for for the rest of his career: a cocksure, extremely impressive athlete who injected electricity and style into everything he did. The fact that the official WWE video for this moment is called “Joining the Nation of Domination, The Rock embraces destiny” gives not just a glimpse into what it meant for his career and how badly the WWE wants you understand that, but how they go about their creation stories.
The Rock didn’t just embrace his destiny, he insisted upon it. And in doing so, the angle became — however hollow as it would feel looking back — about the large question of what it meant to be a black man in Vince McMahon’s WWF. In the same way Goldust served as a large discussion of the role sexually ambiguous and androgynous characters played in the, The Nation forced social taboos — along with just regular old sex, drugs and rock n’ roll (wrestling) — to the merchandise/dinner table.
Dwayne seemed like a star, and a leader almost instantaneously. Not just with his words, but his actions, like this lovely bit of subterfuge during a backstage interview segment featuring the other members of The Nation.
The disrespect that Dwayne shows for Ron in that interview doesn’t just underline how he feels about Faarooq, but how he feels about everyone. The point of that promo, and this one, right before his WrestleMania XIV match against Ken Shamrock, is to show that The Rock knows that sometimes manipulation requires strong arming, and sometimes it requires bribing people with fake rolexes.
He would eventually push the old lion out of the pride, ordering him to be ambushed after a pull apart brawl between the two following the events of the aforementioned Shamrock match. After deposing Faarooq, the Rock would lead the group following a brief feud between the two.
Eventually, the Rock would find himself in a feud with Triple H, which would produce a few of the more memorable — if not necessarily great-in-retrospect and more than a little racist — promos, like the infamous Nation parody complete with blackface.
Plus, an actually enjoyable physical altercation or two that would, more or less, lead them both to main-event careers mostly spent in the pantheon of all time greats.
While there was a lot of the Nation that existed outside of him, it’s clear why the late-period mission of the squad was to be a star making vehicle for The Rock. And, ultimately, that’s not a bad, thing necessarily. It worked out pretty okay for Jerry Seinfeld, and it feels like it worked out for Dwayne Johnson too.
It’s Day Three of #AhmedJohnsonWeek, our celebration of all things Pearl River, and the first installment of our (patent-pending) Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series. We started off with A Wrestler You Should Probably Know Better, and then gave you the finer points of the Tony Norris oeuvre with yesterday’s Essential Viewing. Today, we’re asking the important questions with A Series of If…Whats on “Big T” Tony Norris, before we make our Amazon.com-on-steroids dreams come true with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…” tomorrow. We’ll finish everything off this Friday with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ erupts in a Legal-Rights-to-the-Letter-T-fueled civil war.)
If Ahmed Johnson had NXT, what would he have been like in the ring?
While it’s hard to say exactly what he would have been like, because Mason Ryan, chances are he would have at least been able to the basic aspects of wrestling that he seemed to have trouble grasping physically. It’s not as though Ahmed Johnson was exceptionally bad, he just wasn’t particularly good in the ring, and in an era of main event guys like Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels and even the Undertaker, it stood out even more.
From a “promoted to the main roster” perspective, and not to make the easy comparison, he likely would have been in the Big E. Langston position: put in a main storyline as a silent heavy who occasionally shows flashes of massive potential. Obviously, Big E. Langston is smoother — if not as intense — on the mic, but he’s also much smaller (5’10” to 6’2”) so it’s entirely reasonable to believe they’d be at nearly the same position for their first year or so, even in a significantly more shallow era.
Ahmed had way too much potential to not eventually get a mega-push, but they likely would have taken their time getting him to the top of the card for everyone’s benefit.
If Ahmed didn’t get hurt after earning a title shot after Summerslam ‘96 what would have happened to his career?
While this isn’t as depressing as the next question (these questions are all depressing, actually), Ahmed’s “kidney issues” (supposedly a result of Ron Simmons potatoing him because of some professional jealousy issues) were the most vivid reminder of the fragility of human existence most of can remember as children.
It also was the first instance in what would be a recurring theme in Ahmed’s career: a Greg Oden-esque inability to stay healthy. Like an athlete in a “real” sport, once you are considered injury prone (see: Sin Cara), the likelihood of ever getting another major push decreases ever so slightly. One can earn points back with the front office, but given that it’s a continuous show with almost no days off, not being able to be relied upon because of injury issues is only slightly above “drugs” or “sucking”, with being unsafe the worst of the bunch.
But, on the positive side, he was given another chance at a title match the following year, which shows how much faith they had in the character.
If Ahmed didn’t get hurt after joining the Nation of Domination what would have happened at Canadian Stampede?
This usually won’t happen, but for such a star-crossed career, “if Ahmed didn’t get hurt” was pretty much the theme of Ahmed’s career.
It’s unlikely that Ahmed would have beaten Taker, given that they were building towards the Hart-Michaels feud — Michaels cost Taker the title at SummerSlam, and would face Hart at the Survivor Series in Montreal that year… yes, that Survivor Series in Montreal — but him actually getting a main event title shot may have changed the entire direction of his career.
This run had the potential to be fantastic, and this is far and away the best that Johnson ever sounded on the mic, but as always, injuries derailed poor Ahmed before he ever had a chance to get out of the gate. When you compound this with the fact they turned him face again even with such a great heel character to play up the “babyface returning from injury” angle, and him being replaced by The Rock (which Dave spoke about during yesterday’s Essential Viewing) it’s clear that this was THE turning point in his career.
If WCW wasn’t a bunch of idiots, what would have Ahmed been able to do there?
As always, WCW took a good idea — Ahmed challenging Booker T for the rights to the Harlem Heat name — and pushed it one step too far.
Instead of just having the match be about that, they also put the “letter T” on the line in the match, as Ahmed was now going by Big T (his real name is Tony Norris) and needed to make sure he was the only T in WCW, apparently.
That his name matched his girth was actually the larger part of Ahmed’s issues in WCW, and it’s unlikely they would have been able to do much with what was at that point all of the bad parts of Tony Norris with almost none of the good.
If Ahmed Johnson magically stayed healthy, what would have happened to people like Batista?
The Brock Lesnar push would have not been reserved for the likes of Brock Lesnar, and everyone with the McMahon look would have been pushed to the moon, despite an increasingly sophisticated fanbase who would have cringed at the number of botches performed on a nightly basis up and down the card.
Of course, people like Batista would have had the training of OVW (like Lesnar and Cena did), but instead of a slow burn push, they would have likely been thrust into action like cars coming off an assembly line. It probably wouldn’t have been the downfall of business, but it safe to say it would have kind of sucked.
It was also entirely likely, however, that even if he stayed healthy, his weight would have become an issue like it did during his time in WCW. For someone with so much potential, it’s hard to say if it’s better that we at least have the ability to say “he just couldn’t stay healthy” as opposed to “he just couldn’t stay away from the buffet”.
Juice Make Sugar: #InternetWrestlingWriting for people who like the circus. 