Select Answers: Papa Shango 97, If Everyone over 35 retired, NXT ACL injuries, Steel chair sponsors

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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Why doesn’t WWE have a sponsor for steel chairs yet?

This was actually discussed once upon a time, and nothing came of it. I am pretty sure they'd be able to find one, but they want to make sure they have one up to their financial standards. I don't know that it's being actively pursued right now, but it was something that was being considered.

Hey SRS - question incorporating football and wrestling. The 49ers get injured often and various sports outlets (sorry don’t have a link) have said “that’s the way the 9ers do strength training.” Women in NXT seem to suffer a big number of knee injuries over the years - Dakota, Nixon Newell, etc,. Just throwing it out there but think there could be a link between how these two totally separate sports train their staff and a big number of injuries?

The reality is, there are a lot more non contact knee injuries in women than men, especially in sports. Women are much more susceptible to that. I have a friend who tore her ACL three times, and took every precaution after number 2 in order to prevent it, and there wasn't much could be done. Wrestling is especially physically demanding, and injuries will never be eliminated. That being said, it's something that was looked into years ago at the Performance Center.

hey Sean, I remember hearing the Godfather say on a podcast once that back around 99 or 2000, there were plans for him to go back to the Papa Shango character. do you know anything about what that may have looked like and why it never happened?

As best I recall, they were going to bring it back and add more of an Attitude era element to it. It was way more menacing than cartoonish. He got in good shape for it, Jerry Lawler did the face paint for it, and did promo photos. Vince McMahon spoke with him after doing the promo photos, and told him he'd be in the Nation of Domination and was going to do that moving forward. From that, he became the Godfather. It all came down to Vince McMahon changing his mind late.

Let's say everyone over 35 retired tomorrow: who do you see stepping up to fill the top of the card in WWE, AEW and TNA?

Well, over 35 means MJF, Hangman and Swerve would all still be there in AEW, so that is ideal. Kyle Fletcher, Konosuke Takeshita, Bandido, Kevin Knight, Will Ospreay are all very easy bets and you'd still have a great main event scene. Gabe Kidd would be signed for AEW as well.

Oba Femi, Carmelo Hayes, Bron Breakker, Trick Williams, Je'Von Evans, Dominik Mysterio, Logan Paul in WWE. Solo Sikoa would probably be booked higher, Ilja Dragunov would get more opportunities as well.

In TNA, it'd be Leon Slater above all. Myron Reed would be a great one to push. Mike Santana would still qualify, which is good for the sake of this argument. However, if I were them, I'd be signing Adam Priest, Jordan Oliver, Titus Alexander, and some more fresh blood.