10 Wrestling Mysteries That Still Haven't Been Solved

Professional wrestling is an entertainment medium lends itself to wonder and curiosity. The fascination over won/loss records at WrestleMania, who's dating who, wrestlers' real names, what wrestlers were doing *before* coming to WWE, etc, etc. And with a plethora of informative avenues on the internet, and plenty of social media space with which to talk about the product, a fan's fascination with wrestling can only be further cultivated.

Fans who thirst for wrestling knowledge are bound to have many questions about the business that they love so much. Many of those questions have answers. However, there are some mysteries in professional wrestling that remain unsolved to this day.

Some of the forthcoming unanswered questions have been on the minds of wrestling fans for quite some time now, while others have taken on a dusty sheen, long forgotten as "cold cases". Perhaps rattling off these conundrums in this here list will bring us one step closer to actually figuring them out once and for all.

Robert Stack is no longer with us, so you'll have to deal with me as a narrator for these Unsolved Mysteries. If you're imagining me in Mr Stack's tan trenchcoat, please have the common courtesy to also imagine me with clothes on underneath. Thank you.

10. What Movie Was Gorilla Monsoon Talking About? (1988)

On the 18 January 1988 edition of Prime Time Wrestling, during one of the bumper segments, Gorilla Monsoon gave the impression that was he on the phone looking for Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Monsoon explained to Bobby Heenan (and the audience) that Ventura was on a movie set, working on a film about a prison.

A cursory look through Ventura's filmography yields inconclusive results. The Running Man, which involves prisoners, had already been released by the time this Prime Time episode was aired. His forthcoming films included Thunderground (a barely-released film about street-fighting for money), Abraxas (a low-rent sci-fi movie), and Repossessed (a Leslie Nielsen spoof of The Exorcist, which also included Mean Gene). Ventura *did* appear as an inmate in the Denzel Washington crime film Ricochet, but that wasn't released until October 1991, nearly four years after this Prime Time. So, what was Monsoon talking about?

9. What Was In That Envelope? (1988)

You may have seen Nickla "Baby Doll" Roberts on the Ric Flair 30 For 30 that aired last November. In her time in the business, Roberts valeted for the likes of Flair, Tully Blanchard, Larry Zbyszko, and Dusty Rhodes, among many others. It was in an angle with Zbyszko and Rhodes that a rather juicy bit of drama began to play out, with Baby Doll at the centre of the storm.

Baby Doll had a manila envelope that contained some sort of potentially-destructive secret of Dusty's. She vowed to show the world this secret that only she and Rhodes knew about if "The American Dream" didn't give Zbyszko a shot at his United States title. She even allowed Rhodes to peek at the envelope's contents, which greatly disturbed Rhodes to where he quietly walked off the interview set. Unfortunately, the angle would never be resolved, as Baby Doll was fired not long after, reportedly because her then-husband, wrestler Sam Houston, had signed with WWE. For what it's worth, Roberts claims to still have the envelope to this day, and has playfully hinted that we may one day get to see its contents.

8. Who Installed The Camera? (1997)

WWE's backstage cameras live out a rather flexible reality. Heels openly make nefarious plans that the commentators can see, but the heels don't notice the cameras, and yet none of the announcers thinks it wise to go let the babyface know that there's a plot against them. That's just one head-spinning quirk of WWE programming.

When those invisible backstage cameras first came to be in the mid-90s, it did leave those watching King of the Ring 1997 with a very, very good question: who installed a camera in the bathroom stall that Steve Austin just so happened to drag Brian Pillman into? Austin flushed his former partner's face in the commode, and there was a creepy voyeur cam there to document the entire act. Did WWE have some sort of fecalphiliac on their payroll, and is he (or she) still working there today?

7. Who Was Behind GTV? (1999)

Apparently, this one *was* solved after all, but yet the explanation still raises some scepticism. The unseen individual that was responsible for capturing the private backstage moments of WWE superstars was supposed to be....Tom Green? Yes, the awkward surrealist that was, for some reason, "a thing" at the turn of the century was supposed to be revealed as a dutiful documentarian of WWE's seedy underbelly. Chris Jericho and Vince Russo have both claimed this, with Jericho saying that Vince dropped the need to involve Green after finding Green to be unfunny (and given the juvenile inanity that Vince *does* find funny....well, ouch for Tom).

But something still feels a bit off about that explanation, that perhaps it's just a bit of lore that has become accepted as truth over time. The old rumour that the G stood for "Goldust" is still commonly accepted, and the lesser-heralded theory that Glenn "Thrasher" Ruth was to be the mystery cameraman gets mentioned as well. Whatever the case, WWE never officially revealed the voyeur.

6. What Did Ric Flair Do To Triple H? (2005)

After a three-month sabbatical, Triple H returned to WWE TV in the fall of 2005, on Raw's return broadcast on the USA Network. After working as a heel for several years running, "The Game" returned as a babyface, teaming with Ric Flair to take on Carlito and Chris Masters. The Evolution-mates won, but after the match ended, Helmsley brutally assaulted Flair with his sledgehammer, opening up a truly-nasty gusher on a man for whom bleeding is a second language.

At points during the assault, Helmsley grunted things like, "Did you think I was just going to let it go? Did you think I was just gonna let it fly?" while beating Flair to a further pulp. Thing is, that plot point was never again brought up. The assault was originally revenge for some unknown perceived slight on Flair's part, but such a slight was erased from the future scripts. Instead, Triple H explained that he beat Flair down as a means of driving a mediocre version of his old hero out of WWE, before he could further tarnish his legacy.

5. Who Tried To Kill Vince? (2008)

I'm not talking about the 2007 limousine explosion that would subsequently be scrapped due to horrifying real-life circumstances. The hasty ending that we got seemed to jive with how the angle would have played out anyhow, that Vince faked his death as a means of seeing what his loyal subjects really thought about him "in death".

No, this entry is reserved for the sudden ending of Million Dollar Mania, in which the staging area blew apart and collapsed on Vince, apparently an act of sabotage. One year after the limo explosion was snuffed out, this seemed like a reasonable place to enact another 'whodunnit' storyline, without actually invoking the absurd idea of a character's death. Yet, the calamity was barely followed up on, and McMahon returned to TV the following January, without any further mention of the incident.

4. Who Kidnapped Samoa Joe? (2010)

Of TNA's endless list of mystifying crimes, the idea that they had no idea how to use Samoa Joe in his last six years with the company has to be near the top of that set of charges. He's a ruthless killer with the body of Bond a villain henchman, painful-looking offensive moves, and a death stare that induces pants-pissing from mere mortals.

At some point in early 2010, Samoa Joe was kidnapped by ninjas. You may have heard of this. The Samoan Submission Machine was assaulted as he was leaving an Impact taping, being tossed into a van by unknown men in black hoodies which then drove off into the night. Joe would claim that the plan was to bring him back with even scarier edge, as though his kidnappers brought a new level of madness out of him. That was, until Vince Russo called him weeks later and told him they were just going to bring him back because they were short on babyfaces (liberally add your own uses of "bro" to that phone call as you imagine it). No explanations, no revelations, just, "Hey, Joe's back!"

3. What's That About Be A Star? (2011)

Ahh, the Pipe Bomb promo. CM Punk apparently doesn't like labelling his seminal speech by that shorthand name, but screw it: it's the Pipe Bomb promo, and it was a magnificent piece of television. Punk pissed on all things WWE like a spiteful house cat, only to have his mic cut by the apparently-fearful firm. This was all well and good, and generated a metric ton of buzz, but it begs the question: if Punk didn't know the precise moment that his mic was going to be cut, where would the speech have gone?

As the sound went dead, Punk was about to share an anecdote about Vince McMahon and the Be a Star campaign. He said, "We do this whole (anti) bully campaign," as his mic was cut, leading many to ask where that story would have gone. Punk had plenty to say about Vince (and others) in his appearance on Colt Cabana's podcast, but that particular tale has never been regaled.

2. What Was In That Lockbox? (2016)

Shane McMahon's return to the WWE fold in early-2016 was one of those landmark moments that actually startles the audience and makes them care. His confrontation with Vince and Stephanie proved pleasing to the ears of exasperated fans, as Shane echoed their criticisms of the WWE TV product during his speech. Oh, and apparently Shane had some sort of lockbox, in which the contents were apparently enough to blackmail his father, should he ever want to.

That plot point, if you've followed the pattern of this list so far, was quickly dropped. The idea that Vince was carrying some sort of deep, dark secret (just one, that's it?) could've led to a rather intriguing week-to-week storyline, but instead they let that sleeping dog lie.

1. Who Threw The Pie? (2016)

The 2016 Fourth of July episode of Monday Night Raw featured one of those old WWE staples: the food fight. None will ever top the one that took place at Butcher Vachon's wedding in 1984 on Tuesday Night Titans (and if you've never seen it, it's something else), but the 2016 Americana-themed flinging of morsels manages to hold its own.

The conclusion to the fracas, in which an unscathed Kevin Owens turns around, only to get pie-faced by an unseen belligerent, has led to much speculation. WWE never revealed who threw the pie, nor why Owens seems to have digital camera technology in his eye sockets (we were treated to a KO's-eye view of the pie headed his way). WWE.com produced a video in which suspects were interviewed, but nothing ever came of it. Maybe the answer's in Shane McMahon's lockbox somewhere.