Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
A gimmick is something that is intended to hook the attention of fans to a wrestler. They may be outrageous or steeped more in reality, whatever the case may be…some have succeeded and many others have failed. The Gimmick Table takes a look at the origins of some of your favorite and not so favorite gimmicks of professional wrestlers.
Today we browse the gimmick of Reverend D-Von
In 2002, Vince McMahon made the decision to split up one of his most successful tag teams in the Dudley Boyz. The reasoning behind the split, was Vince had “big plans” for D-Von Dudley as a singles competitor. This was during the ‘Ruthless Aggression’ era and not far removed from the ‘Attitude Era’ before that. Churches and religious based groups were protesting the adult content that WWE were airing on television. At one point, one of these groups made their way to WWE headquarters (Titan Towers) to protest in front of the building with a news crew present.
This apparently enraged Vince McMahon to the point he decided to create a character to put on WWE TV to poke fun at all the religious fanatics against him. McMahon was very aware that D-Von’s real life family had a strong religious background and decided to use him as his guinea pig for this project. Vince gave him the moniker of ‘Reverend D-Von’ and made him his personal spiritual advisor to help establish the character. Eventually, Reverend D-Von was paired with a rather green and inexperienced developmental wrestler Dave Bautista as ‘Deacon Batista.’ The Deacon was used as a sort of bodyguard to Reverend D-Von while passing out a collection box to some planted fans at ringside collecting money as donations.
Despite a rather sizable push as a heel and a pinfall victory over Triple H, the Reverend D-Von gimmick was as D-Von himself put it, was “destined to fail.” The gimmick was nothing more than a personal rib on religion and was used more to help get over Batista than anything significant for D-Von. After several months under the gimmick, it was ultimately trashed and D-Von returned to tag team competition as a babyface reunited with Bubba and Spike Dudley.