Inside The Mind...

Inside the Mind of the Booker

SO: Hello everyone, I’m Sean Oliver, and welcome to another Kayfabe Commentaries special WWF Timeline: 1993. The first installment is with former WWF booker, Bob Colling. We’ll take a look at each year he booked for the company starting with his first year, 1993. Thanks for joining us, Bob.

BC: Thanks, Sean. It’s a pleasure to be part of this series and I look forward to sharing stories with you and the Kayfabe fans.

January 4th, 1993 – RAW replaces Primetime Wrestling as the main show for the WWF. The show takes place at the Manhattan Center in New York.

BC: I joined the company in the last week of ’92 and noticed the rumblings about a new show coming around. I had grown up on Primetime, but that type of show had run its course. The WWF needed a face lift and come across younger. I thought the company did a good job of doing that with RAW. Plus, having a rather cheap building filled with a mostly rowdy fanbase helped.


January 11th, 1993: WWF World Champion Bret Hart accepts Randy Savage’s challenge for the Royal Rumble

BC: Our mindset leading into the event was we didn’t want to sacrifice a young heel to Bret early. There was talk of using Bigelow or Ramon, but they needed to be built up some more. It took me a little while to convince Vince that Savage still had legs in the main event scene and a match with Bret would be great. As it turned out, it was one of the best matches of the year for us.

January 24th, 1993: The Royal Rumble takes place. Bam-Bam Bigelow and Yokozuna win their respective matches. Bret retains the title over Savage. Mr. Perfect wins the Royal Rumble, to the surprise of many.

BC: I’ve always enjoyed Perfect’s work. I felt he never got that main event push that he should have gotten. Originally, Vince wanted Flair to win for a second straight year, but that wouldn’t have been interesting. The Rumble needs to make a new top guy. Help create a new main event guy. With a win, I felt like Perfect was seen in that light. As we will get to, McMahon never really got behind him, at that time.

FOX and the WWF agreed to bring back the Saturday Night Main Event series in late January to start on February 20th.

BC: I liked it. We only ran the Rumble, Mania, King of the Ring, SummerSlam and Survivor Series back then. So, having a television super card to be a place holder for the big events was fine with me.

Following the Rumble, Berzerker, Damien Demento, Bob Backlund and the Genius were released.

BC: They just didn’t fit in with the direction we were going in. Besides, Demento was and still is a lunatic.

Lex Luger joins the company as the Narcissist at the Royal Rumble.

BC: There is no mistake that Luger isn’t exactly the best in the ring, but he is marketable and his size is ideal. The Narcissist gimmick was perfect or Luger and he really made it work well. Getting him from WCW was great for us as we needed more heels for Bret. I knew that we’d eventually have an angle with Luger/Bret for the strap. Luger is just easy to hate.

Jack Tunney announces that Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty will wrestle in a steel cage at the 2/20 SNME for the WWF Intercontinental Championship.

BC: Vince never trusted Marty. That goes back to Marty falling off the wagon in ’92 when they should have had their blow off at Mania VIII. Do I think the boat had sailed by ’93? Probably. But, we tried to make it work as best we could. I wanted to finish that chapter and move on. It’s a shame, because Marty was a great talent and is really underrated in my mind. We just couldn’t depend on him to be there if we needed him. That’s what cost him.

SO: Also at this time a feud between Razor Ramon and Randy Savage developed. How did that come about?


BC: Randy suggested it because he saw a lot in Razor and no one put up a fight. Savage knew that we were looking to get Ramon to the top along with Bigelow. Razor didn’t have an ego at the time and was learning about the business, really. Savage was hands on with the feud and was open to suggestions.

Chris Benoit has a try-out match on 1/29 at Madison Square Garden.

BC: Bret was pitching heavily for Benoit to get a shot with the company. I remember checking some of his stuff out from Japan and Owen was really fond of their match they had that night. We didn’t get him right then and there, but Bret kept pushing and obviously he joined later in the year.

To be continued..


I’ll probably do this month by month, just so it’s not overloaded with material. If you’d like to partake in this idea, let me know.