What if Warrior Sold Out To Mr Perfect and became Heel World Champion at Summerslam 92 as originally planned?

[David Mantell]

This is widely reported as being the big plan for Summerslam 92. Some versions have Warrior spitting the idea out on sight, others that he was going along until days before the big event when he thought long and hard about the resulting collapse in merchandise sales and chickened out, throwing everything into disarray.

To my mind there are three subsections of this.

1) The short term

2) If the HGH firing doesn't happen - plan A for the long term.

3) If the firing does happen with Warrior as heel World champion.

I'll post my own thoughts on these in due course but I'm going to do this in separate posts because they're just my ideas/deductions and othe people's ideas are equally valid.

  However I will point at Ric Flair's second reign as being replacement booking once the Warrior refused the heel champion spot.

[David Mantell]

47 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

1) The short term

Okay I'll get the ball rolling with the nice easy one.  Warrior never accepted Savage's reformation I to being a good guy after WM7.  He was deeply bitter and angry about Savage being Reinstated as a wrestler and saw Flair getting his trunks hooked by Savage at WM8 as evidence that Flair was a "Brother" victim of the Macho Man's treachery.  Beyond that he had no use for Flair or Hennig other than as a meant to stick it to Savage.  Indeed Warrior and Flair have a "sporting" SNME World title match that ends in Savage running in and attacking both competitors.

Warrior was also bitter and distrustful of Sgt  Slaughter and his turn back to patriotic babyface. He gets to do the spot which in real life went to Naliz who beat up Slaughter so kayfabe bad that it ended his career. As an added bit of garnish to cement Warrior as a bad guy, Hacksaw Duggan tries to rescue his buddy Slaughter but Warrior beats him down, confirming himself as a crazed wild an who has thrown the moral compass out of the window.

I think he could also have had a double turned version of the Undertaker feud.

[David Mantell]

On 1/18/2026 at 4:27 AM, David Mantell said:

2) If the HGH firing doesn't happen - plan A for the long term.

Reportedly the original idea was for Warrior to eventually lose the belt to Bret at WM9 after a slow "dark horse" build similar to that given to  Bob Backlund over the course of 1977 while Superstar Graham ruled.  Warrior was replaced by Flair who had the inner ear injury so the coronation was brought forward to October 1992.  (At this point word got to Bret who then fantasised about beating Warrior in a babyface match.)

The wild card factor here is Hulk Hogan and his locker-room politics and what he might have done to sabotage a Warrior-Bret WM9.

[David Mantell]

On 1/18/2026 at 4:27 AM, David Mantell said:

l3) If the firing does happen with Warrior as heel World champion.

In the short term Bret beats Flair for the vacant title and life goes on a personal the real world.  But what if Warrior kept a copy of the belt on the indie circuit 1993-1995 and brought it back to the WWF 1996 for. feud with Shawn? 

Warrior gets Sid's spot at Survivor Series 1996 and beats Shawn with a stipulation that history gets rewritten and Warrior has been champion all along.  Shawn regains at Royal Rumble 97 with the stipulation that the lineage is officially split and Warrior has been co champion to Bret/ Yoko/ Hulk/ Yoko/ Bret/ Backlund/ Diesel/ Bret/ Shawn all this time.  

So in the end Warrior gets to have been champion for 4.25 years from SS92 to RR97.

[DMJ]

In the short term, I'd be curious who else they set up on the "babyface side" of things against what would then be quite a pairing of top bad guys with Warrior and Flair (with Mr. Perfect at his side) going up against Savage. They were also already warming up Razor Ramon by October 92'. Bret makes the most sense for teaming with Savage but a tag team match at the Survivor Series - ostensibly Bret & Savage vs. Flair & Warrior (who would still be champion) - seems so weird to me. Plus, by this point, Perfect was back in action, so I'm guessing it may end up being Bret & Savage vs. Flair & Perfect with Warrior defending the championship against Taker (in a match that would likely end in a non-finish to keep the title on Warrior).

Long-term from there and envisioning a scenario where Warrior doesn't flake and Flair sticks around for as long as he does...well, you've gotta think about the Rumble and what a seismic shift the 93' one was. They set up Taker/Gonzalez. They set up Yokozuna as top heel. Royal Rumble 93' is also the unofficial end of Savage's main event/World Champion-level run in the WWE (he was generally used to put over/work with the next batch of major heels like Yoko, Gonzalez, Shawn, and Crush on TV and the house show loops). Warrior being that top heel just feels so wacky in that context.

So, putting my booking hat on, I guess I'd say that, at the Rumble, we get one more Warrior/Savage match and Warrior retains after Savage had maybe suffered internal injuries caused during a match with Yoko a week or two earlier (this would accomplish Vince's goal of transitioning to Savage/Yoko and effectively ending Savage's main event run). Bret wins the Rumble. Bret beats Warrior for the title at WM9? But...I dunno...this is basically talking about a Warrior that (a) agreed to turn heel in the first place, (b) agreed to remain heel for 6 months, (c) somehow didn't flame out due to drugs or unprofessionalism, and (d) was willing to drop the title to Bret and I don't think there's even a 1% chance of b, c, and d happening. Maybe Vince could've convinced him to turn heel in August, but by October, he'd have either demanded a face turn or walked. 
 

What happens if Warrior gets fired while still champion at the end of 92'...I'd assume they'd bury him on TV with Jack Tunney announcing some sort of tournament and we'd get Flair/Bret in the finals, if the timing worked out, at the Rumble or a SNME. I doubt they'd put the title on the line again in the Rumble, though it would be kinda cool and a great way to have Bret win it by lastly eliminating Flair, who would theoretically be the favorite (having done it once before). Or maybe that's where the Flair/Perfect split happens. I don't think Yokozuna needs to win the Rumble that year to be presented as the top contender by April. You could also still run the Giant Gonzalez/Taker angle at the Rumble to explain why Taker doesn't win.

When you throw in Hogan returning in the build-up to WM9 things get even wackier because I assume Hogan would've politicked to be the one to beat Warrior at WrestleMania (rather than Bret) and it would've been kinda cool symmetry for Hogan to dethrone Warrior after losing to him at WM6 (6 and 9 being visually "flipped"). 





 

 

[David Mantell]

On 1/20/2026 at 3:36 PM, DMJ said:

and (d) was willing to drop the title to Bret

I imagine this was explained to Warrior in the initial pitch for the angle as with Superstar Graham re Bob Backlund, Bret for his third reign re.  Shawn and Hollywood Hogan to Crow Sting.  "You get another run with the World belt but you finish up putting over the new kid". (Admittedly Hollywood sabotaged Starrcade 97 and Graham enlisted Bruno's help to try feign an injury to sabotage Backlund's win.)

It really depends on how this was presented, particularly the finish.  I don't think the Warrior would have agreed to submit in the Sharpshooter as Bret envisaged after a version of the plan later on  found its way round the grapevine to him, but considering the finish for Warrior's loss at WM5  I could see him being okay about being ensnared by trickery, even clever legal trickery.  If the Warrior had Bret in the Gorilla press but Bret got his head end free, turned 90 degrees to point downwards and dropped down behind Warrior and through his legs into a sunset flip position and we last see Warrior flailing away "Aloha Arn" style before going down like King Kong off the Empire State Building into a double leg nelson -  or even a folding press with Bret flipping over into a bridge- that might be acceptable just as being tripped by Bobby Heenan while doing a suplex was acceptable.  

In real life, Bret reports, Warrior was actually very gracious towards him about the title win. The two tagged the next day with Warrior handing the belt to Bret at the end (the last time he publicly touched the belt.)

On 1/20/2026 at 3:36 PM, DMJ said:

When you throw in Hogan returning in the build-up to WM9 things get even wackier because I assume Hogan would've politicked to be the one to beat Warrior at WrestleMania (rather than Bret) and it would've been kinda cool symmetry for Hogan to dethrone Warrior after losing to him at WM6 (6 and 9 being visually "flipped"). 

Unfortunately I don't think this would have prevented some version of Halloween Havoc 98 as Hogan was also politicking for Yoko to be similarly brought into WCW to let Hogan get his win back.