WCW's Stupidest Tag Team Gimmick Ever, Explained
There are certain tag team names from wrestling history that immediately resonate. Call them The Road Warriors, call them The Legion of Doom, regardless, Animal and Hawk’s team name alone carried an aura of destruction and intimidation that fit their presentation and ring style well.
Names like The Steiner Brothers were straightforward in establishing a family connection, on top of increasing credibility as the Steiners built upon their reputation in the business. Harlem Heat was alliterative, sounded cool, and carried an urban vibe; while the racial implications of Harlem being applied to two men of color coming out of Texas might seem problematic today, it nonetheless worked for its time. But then there were WCW's Ding Dongs. Did a team by that name ever stand a chance?
Before They Were Ding Dongs
Before WCW would introduce a tag team billed as The Ding Dongs, the pair of Greg Evans and Richard Sartain worked the southern independent scene as The Rock ‘n’ Roll Rebels, according to Pro Wrestling Wiki making their ring entrance to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll.” The young team didn’t shy away from tapping into the ethos of tandems like The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express and The Rockers and were generally well received as a babyface pair.
It stands to reason that a talented and fresh young tag team would catch the eye of promoters working on bigger stages. Evans had already had a cup of coffee working as an enhancement talent for WWE, but it was WCW that came calling for the two of them in 1989.
The Concept Of The Ding Dongs Came From Jim Herd
Jim Herd was a short-lived WCW executive notorious for his complete lack of wrestling experience. He brought infamously bad ideas to the table, like rebranding Ric Flair in a Spartacus gimmick that he thought would appeal to the modern fans who flocked to the over the top characters promoted in WWE. Jim Cornette explained Herd’s concept for The Ding Dongs during a 1998 question and answer session. As documented by DDT Digest, Herd thought, “Let's have a tag team with bells on their neck, bells on their ankle, and bells everywhere. And we'll have them come out with a big bell, and whenever one of them's getting beat up, the other will ring the bell, and he'll get fired up. The kids will love it.”
The masked Ding Dongs worked their first televised match together at a Clash of the Champions special. While Herd may have been surprised, the rest of the wrestling world was not so shocked that fans rejected the cartoonish, nonsensical team with a fiery vengeance. Their poor reception took them from an act WCW had purportedly intended to push strongly in the months ahead, to instead being relegated to an enhancement worker role, used sparingly on TV. The Ding Dongs reached their climax as a WCW tag team in getting squashed by the too often forgotten Skyscrapers (at that point Sid Vicious and Dan Spivey) less than three months after their debut. In the aftermath of the match, the duo was unmasked and dropped the Ding Dong gimmick.
A History Of Bad Tag Team Gimmicks In WCW
WCW was not necessarily a stranger to poor tag team concepts. American Males featured Marcus Alexander Bagwell and Scotty Riggs in an awkward gimmick that seemed to emphasize their youthful good looks against the backdrop of one of the most grating entrance themes in wrestling history. (The team did end up winning the WCW Tag Team Championship, though.) The Boogie Knights killed off what credibility Alex Wright had left in a cartoonish dancing tag team with Disco Inferno. Harlem Heat 2000 paired the weaker member of the original team (Stevie Ray) with Big T (a rebranded Ahmed Johnson, after he’d lost all his momentum) for a pale shadow of one of the greatest tandems in company history. The Dynamic Dudes tried to convince fans John Laurinaitis was actually cool.
The Ding Dongs ultimately claim their spot as WCW’s all time worst tag team idea not because of the talents involved—who may have been just fine with a good, or even generic gimmick—but because of the concept they had to work within. The masked presentation looked silly, and the bell ringing was far more annoying than endearing. The gimmick probably wouldn’t have landed in WWE anyway, but was an abject failure for the WCW fans at the time, geared toward a more straight-laced serious style of presentation for their pro wrestling.
In the end, the greatest legacy of The Ding Dongs in WCW seems to be as an emblem of just how profoundly and brazenly Jim Herd misunderstood pro wrestling and what its fans wanted. They were an embarrassing act that two respectable wrestlers got subjected to, and the careers of the men involved were never quite the same after enduring this ordeal.
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