When it comes to the world of professional wrestling the right storyline can go a long way, and in 2008 former WWE talent Hade Vansen was being set up for a feud with The Undertaker.
During a recent episode of Wrestling With Freddie, former WWE writer Freddie Prinze Jr. noted that Hade Vansen was handpicked from FCW for a short term feud with Taker after another wrestler got injured. Freddie also noted that the company had been airing promos for Vansen on TV, and another promo had been filmed prior to a SmackDown event. It seemed that WWE was ready to move forward with the storyline, but everything changed during a production meeting.
“So, we’re all committed to this, or so we think. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Hunter [Triple H] says, ‘are we seriously going with this guy?’ And remember, this is not a pay-per-view match, this is not a guy who would get any sort of offense on The Undertaker. It would just be a build-up for The Undertaker to have something to do, so he could smash this guy and get rolling over to Edge.
“He says, ‘are we really going to go with this guy?’ And Vince goes, ‘What do you mean? What’s the problem?’ And he says, ‘he looks like he cuts my grass, man!’ And literally – and Vince laughed. And literally, all the air went out of the room. Everybody just went, ‘noooo.’ Like you could just feel it. Because now it’s embarrassing to the company, at least from my perspective. You put something on TV for three weeks, and then you remove it with no explanation? There’s no way you can do that. That doesn’t happen on any show. You could replace someone like Fresh Prince of Bel Air back in the day, all of a sudden there’s just a new mom, or on the soap operas where they’d be like, ‘the role of so-and-so is now played by Michael Barnett.’ I don’t know who Michael Barnett is.
“So I’m sitting there like, there’s no way, there’s no way, and Vince laughs, and then Hunter laughs, and then Kevin Dunn laughs. Boy, I mean, he sells for it. You would have thought that was the best joke ever. So I’m like, ‘Ah man, this is – we’re dead.’ And Vince goes, ‘alright, dump it!’”
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