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 Irwin R. Schyster
Mike Rotunda was finishing up his run with WCW in 1991 and wanted to return to the WWF to get a fresh start. Vince McMahon was very aware of Rotunda’s previous gimmick in WCW as ‘Michael Wallstreet’ and was actually a fan of it. The Michael Wallstreet character was based on the popular movie ‘Wall Street’ starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen. Rotunda played an evil, rich businessman from New York City.
When Rotunda returned to the WWF, McMahon wanted to incorporate bits and pieces of the Michael Wallstreet character to his new gimmick. Vince obviously did not want to completely copy the WCW character, because he already had his own very successful version in ‘The Million Dollar Man’ Ted Dibiase. It was Vince who came up with ‘Irwin R. Schyster’ or IRS for short. McMahon felt that everybody hated the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) and nobody liked paying taxes…so why not create a gimmick based on that?
The name Irwin R. Schyster was completely made created by McMahon and while the R in IRS was never really revealed…Mike Rotunda stated that it stood for his real last name of Rotunda. Regardless, the IRS gimmick became pretty successful and lasted for four years, which included making to the finals of the King of the Ring tournament in 1991 and winning the WWF tag team titles with Dibiase as Money Incorporated on three occasions.