When they walked him to the back, nobody said a word. They had dragged Steve from the ring to the back and were checking him over.

I have no idea how I got there but he didn’t knock me out.

If they had sat us all down and said, “We need to make this a work but we want it to look like a shoot,” that would have been fine.

. I couldn’t believe it. Jim Ross, who was in charge of talent, had been lobbying to bring his buddy Steve in for a long time but Creative didn’t know how to do it. Obviously, they didn’t know that Ol’ Sparky was a tough motherfucker!

The whole deal was set up purely to humiliate Bart because he had humiliated Jim Ross’s boy ‘Dr Death.’ The office knew he didn’t have a chance. But they genuinely did. Sometimes wrestling, a form of entertainment that's believed to be fake, can get real with real life consequences. Bob Holly explains: “As usual, time was passing, I wasn’t making any real money, and I wasn’t going anywhere. At a 1996 house show in Revere, Massachusetts, Erich Kulas, appeared in a tag team match as Mass Transit, a gimmick based on the look of a city bus driver, and became something of wrestling legend, though not the good kind. Bart was out-punching him, staying on him and taking him down. With the fight nearly over, Steve was still in there and then, out of nowhere, Bart nailed him with a left hand and Steve just fucking dropped. Steve couldn’t work with Austin now and they couldn’t put Bart in his place. This move has its origins in real shootfighting, making it far more terrifying. Tiger Ali Singh had been bragging that he was a shoot fighter and a bare-knuckle champion and could do this and that, but when it came to it, he chickened out and said he wouldn’t do it. We were in Anaheim at the Arrowhead Pond and the TV monitor backstage was sold out. Most people probably recognize Richard Belzer as longtime television detective John Munch from his appearances on shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Homicide: Life on the Street, and more than a half-dozen other shows like The X-Files and Arrested Development.

Butterbean said that he didn’t want fighting — just boxing. Everybody’s jaw was on the floor backstage.

We were still friends afterward — we’d cleaned each other’s clocks pretty good but neither of us was mad at the other. I thought he was pissed but he came back later that day and handed me a fifty. If the stars properly align, he will talk about For Love Of The Game being the best baseball movie of all time. And the fans absolutely hated the whole idea of Brawl for All with chants like "Boring!" Steve had wrestled in Japan for the majority of his career and had a reputation as a genuine badass, so they figured they would introduce him in the Brawl for All, he’d walk through everybody, and boom, they’d have a credible guy they could leapfrog over everybody else to put up against Austin in the main events. Steve and Bart started fighting — it was pretty even, punch for punch. He didn’t change as a person but he did start overestimating himself. The WWF learned from that and never tried it again.”. J.R. said he didn’t have hard feelings towards Bart but he did for damn sure. In the end, no one benefited from the Brawl for All. The night of the Brawl For All fight came. You could not get near that monitor; there was no room to move. Steve said, “So that means that if I want to take somebody’s knee out with a kick, I can do it, right?” Right about then they decided they needed to make some rules. J.R. was being vindictive because Bart fucked their plan up and fucked his buddy up. But because J.R. was so convinced that nobody could beat Steve Williams, he had everybody else in the office thinking it was a done deal too.

Steve’s jaw was dislocated and his hamstring was torn. It was inducted into WrestleCrap. The 60 or so people watching the monitor blew the roof off that place. They put Bart in the tournament but I wasn’t included. I was watching the fight backstage and ’Taker was there, sitting in a chair in front of the monitor. They decided to take 16 of the guys who weren’t doing anything and put them in a tough-man tournament. Bart Gunn went on to win the tournament, but was set up in a match at WrestleMania XV against professional boxer Eric "Butterbean" Esch, who proceeded to knock him out in 35 seconds. He knows every element of the fighting game; he’s strong, he’s smart, he’s lightning-quick — he’s a well-rounded fighter. Wrestling is a work. Bart had been around for six years as an underneath guy that nobody was going to buy against Austin no matter what management did. Even if Bart had beaten Butterbean, they would have found another way to screw with him. Bart was up against the Godfather next. We went out there and laid into each other. Godfather was a big, tough motherfucker but I knew Bart would take him. While clicking these links won’t cost you any extra money, they will help us to continue to bring you quality content!

Steve was in trouble and he didn’t know it. Well, he was let go by Vince McMahon in the fallout of the incident, but the wrestler still claims that his former boss was the one who put him up to it, as he claimed in Dark Side of the Ring. Follow Pro Wrestling Stories on Twitter @pws_official, Facebook @prowrestlingstories, or reach out via e-mail at admin@prowrestlingstories.com.

The whole Brawl for All idea was a bad way to get a wrestler over. When he's not writing about movies or television, Philip can be found being chased by his three kids, telling his dogs to stop yelling at the mailman, or yelling about professional wrestling to his wife.

I thought, “They’re going to fix the whole thing and make it a work.” I knew that if they didn’t, Steve wasn’t going to win. Unfortunately for him but fortunately for the rest of us, Steve hurt himself training against a 300-pound guy who rolled on Steve’s leg and blew out his knee. Bart owned Steve in the second round but the scorecards came up and they still had Steve ahead. They needed a replacement and Bradshaw told Bruce Prichard, who was one of the guys in charge of organizing the whole thing, “Bob may not look like anything much but he’ll surprise you. Savio Vega reaggravated an arm injury that led to him never working for the WWF/WWE again. . Victories could be via knockout (8 count), points, or referee/judge's decision. Bart lost weight and got into awesome shape, but I don’t care who you are, 10 weeks of training won’t prepare you to beat a professional boxer. The case eventually settled for $425,000 according to a 1987 report from United Press International. .” Bruce gave me a call to ask if I wanted in. Sadly, Kulas died six years later from complications during a gastric bypass surgery. The bout, which clocked in a 35 seconds, was a one-sided affair that ended with Butterbean knocking out his opponent who barely got in any offense. and "We want wrestling!".

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A lot of the other guys got injured during the Brawl for All too, and it really didn’t do anything for ratings. They popped because they knew the judges had been fucking with the scorecards and the wrong man would have won. It looked like he broke his neck. The shortlived WWE shootfighting (actual fights) contest "Brawl For All" will probably go down as one of the best examples of good intentions gone wrong during the height of the Attitude Era. In a 2015 Grantland article on the life and career of New Jack, it was revealed that the wrestler was later acquitted in the criminal case and the Kulas' family's civil case was later thrown out. Whoever landed the most punches in a round would earn 5 points. A lot of people were watching again and I said out loud, “This is gonna be interesting.” ’Taker turned around, looked at me, and said, “That’s your boy, isn’t it?”I said, “You’re damn right it is.”He said, “Fifty bucks?”We shook on it.’Taker thought Godfather would take Bart out no problem. Our ratings were getting better and we had drawn level with WCW again, but Vince was always looking for ways to stay ahead in the ongoing Monday Night War. It was un-fucking-believable. Season 2 of the Viceland original series Dark Side of the Ring got off to an upsetting yet fascinating look at the life, career, and tragic end of the Chris Benoit's story, but the show's second run also featured an episode dedicated to the "Slap heard round the world," or the time former WWE superstar "Dr. D" David Schultz slapped 20/20 reporter John Stossel not once, but twice after calling wrestling fake during a 1984 interview. The WWE Brawl for All was a "shootfighting" tournament held by the WWE (then the WWF). 5 points would also be awarded for takedowns, and 10 for knockdowns. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Wrestling/WWEBrawlForAll. One of our favorite wrestling autobiographies is Bob Holly’s, ‘The Hardcore Truth’. they already paid me the money to win this thing.” Jim Ross was absolutely furious. All the boys in the back were getting pissed. Shootfighting, Shooto, Pancrase, RINGS submission fighting and Shoot boxing. Instead, they basically wasted nearly half a million dollars and ended the careers of both Bart and Steve Williams. Earlier, when Bart and I were driving to a show, I told him, “You know they want Steve to win — you’re fixing to throw a wrench in their whole plan.” Bart said, “Yep, I’m going to knock him out.” Later during the same journey, Bart decided to call Bruce Prichard to say, “Get ready to make that check out to me because I’m going to knock J.R.’s boy out.” Bruce said, “That’s great, man — if you do, you do.” Bart knew Bruce wasn’t taking him seriously. : Spoiler Policy: No spoilers in titles for 24 hours after a show has aired. Brawl for All was a 1998 tournament held in the WWE (then the World Wrestling Federation) that featured wrestlers legitimately shootfighting. If you want someone to get over in order to put him against the top guy, you better make sure everything is a work before he gets to that top guy. That was basically the end of Bart’s WWF career on TV. There is nobody more dangerous than Steve Blackman, period. The WWF still promoted the match as under Brawl for All rules but Bart was told it had to be a straight-up boxing match. The feeling was, “Fuck you, you’re not going to screw Bart out of this.” There was no disrespect meant to Steve, just hostility towards the office for sending us all out there, telling us the whole thing was a shoot, and then trying to fix the outcome to suit their plans. If that hadn’t happened, Steve would have won the whole thing, hands down. It was brutal.