Stephanie McMahon's Super Slap & The Wrong Way To Take A Pedigree: Ten Things You May Have Missed In Wrestling This Week
How much to take a smack from 'The Billion Dollar Princess'?
Another week, another round of, in many cases, inexplicable WWE releases.
While the releases of Lana, Aleister Black, Murphy and Ruby Riott all produced strong reactions for various reasons, the biggest and most shocking cut was Bruan Strowman.
The Monster Among Men was literally (on the surface at least) everything the company looks for in a main event superstar.
He had the size and the look and, to give him credit where it is due, had worked hard to improve both his physique, ring work and overall act in the last couple of years.
Reading the news of his release, you can't help but think that WWE really missed the boat with him.
In more positive news, AEW's Double or Nothing was a smashing success, welcoming fans back to Daily's Place for a tremendous card that offered much variety and many talking points.
The pay-per-view was proof - as if it were needed - just what a huge difference a passionate live audience makes to wrestling.
Those, along with the rumours of WWE preparing a sale to NBC, kept the wrestling world abuzz this week.
As always, there's a bunch of other nonsense, whimsy and hearsay that might have slipped passed your radar...
10. Unlucky Seven
In a career filled with outrageous matches, moments and characters, Dustin Runnels' very brief spell as 'Seven' in 1999 WCW has to rank up there as among the weirdest.
The gimmick was introduced via a series of eerie vignettes but, when it made its proper debut, Dustin immediately abandoned the act and cut a shoot promo denouncing it.
Supposedly, Runnels himself may have blamed the incoming Vince Russo for Seven getting shelved, but Russo recently set the record straight (well) on an episode of Writing with Russo.
"When I went to WCW, I adopted the Seven character. Now, Seven was Dustin [Rhodes] and that was a creation of Dusty Rhodes. He came up with Seven. I walked into WCW and they were doing the Seven character. When it came to Dusty and Dustin, I respected what they were doing before I got there. So I'm going to go along with Seven, no problem, I'm going to go along with this.
They cut vignettes and if you remember, there were children involved in these vignettes. I remember a window and all that stuff. Standards and practices pulled it. Dustin to this day, thinks I put the kibosh on it. No bro, I did not put the kibosh on it. I told you a million times, standards and practices put the kibosh. So now, we're in no man's land. The only thing I could do that that point was... Dustin went out there as the character and he cut a shoot promo".
Russo was famously so annoyed by the behind-the-scenes censors that he created the Standards and Practices tag team in order to mock them.
As for Seven, that probably would have been pretty bad 'The Natural'. Not 'Black Reign' bad, but bad.
Written by Lewis Howse
Features journalist for Cultaholic.com and script writer for the Cultaholic YouTube Channel.
