All That Glitters Is Not Goldman: The Brief History of Colt Cabana in WWE

Posted on September 27, 2022 by bdamage1

Brian Damage

For years, WWE has signed countless independent wrestlers to developmental contracts. Some thrived in developmental and then became stars on the main roster, while others faded into obscurity. The story of Scott ‘Colt Cabana’ Colton’s WWE journey was really neither of those examples. While he never had the WWE career he envisioned, Cabana certainly did not just fade away.

Scott Colton’s dream was to become a professional wrestler and one day become a WWE superstar. He trained under the watchful eyes of independent wrestler Ace Steel and debuted in 1999 under the name of Colt Cabana. For the next 8 years, Cabana honed his craft working in places like Ring of Honor, Wrestling Society X and abroad in Europe. All of Cabana’s hard work finally paid off, as he began wrestling a few dark and preliminary matches as enhancement talent in WWE under the name of ‘Chris Guy.’ Cabana chose that name in honor of his friend and trainer Ace Steel (Whose real name is Chris Guy).

His work in those matches impressed the right people and in April of 2007, Colt Cabana had signed a WWE developmental contract. Cabana said that was the highest point of his career, as his dream was always to become a star in WWE. Cabana knew, however, that his opportunity wouldn’t just be handed to him, he needed to prove himself all over again. He was assigned to OVW in Kentucky and kept the name of Colt ‘Boom Boom’ Cabana. He was pushed strongly in OVW, wrestling all of the top developmental names and winning the OVW television and OVW southern tag team titles along the way. When WWE dropped their affiliation with OVW, Cabana was reassigned to Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW) in Tampa, Florida.

After over a year in developmental, Cabana finally received the call to WWE’s main roster. Cabana met with the company’s creative team, to figure out how to present Colt Cabana to WWE fans. Cabana sat with David Lagana was a TV writer, who has a credit of writing an episode for the sitcom ‘Friends.’ Lagana asked Cabana what did he want to achieve in WWE? Cabana responded by saying he wanted to be made the General Manager of Sunday Night Heat. While Cabana was very serious in that idea, Lagana laughed and gave Cabana more time to think about what he wanted to be doing in the company. When asked the same question again…Cabana responded “jokingly” that he wanted to debut at Wrestlemania and beat the Undertaker. Lagana looked perplexed, but finally understood where Cabana was coming from.

Cabana wanted to have small, yet creative ideas about his character, because he felt those would be easier to get. Start off small and as the character gets more noticed, expand on creative ideas. Cabana then met with Vince McMahon, who started asking him about his background, hobbies, what he was good at outside of wrestling…etc. Cabana said he made the mistake of telling McMahon that he was Jewish and wanted to become WWE’s first big Jewish superstar. That conversation, resulted in Cabana getting his new WWE name…Scotty Goldman.

There was nothing flashy or exciting about the very generic name of Scotty Goldman. To make matters a little bit worse, he debuted the new character in a match against The Brian Kendrick and lost. There were no vignettes to build his character up, he was just thrown out there with no purpose and lost. Not exactly how he envisioned his WWE debut to be like. He knew he had more hard work ahead of him to try and get the Scotty Goldman character over. He started thinking of how Scotty Goldman could work and believed he could incorporate his sense of humor into the gimmick and become a comedic wrestler. Unfortunately for Goldman, that gimmick eventually was bestowed on Santino Marella.

Cabana wasn’t given any direction or advice on how to improve the character. This led him to be seen less and less on TV and more and more backstage in catering. Obviously frustrated with not be utilized on Raw or Smackdown, Colt kept other wrestlers and personnel entertained by telling jokes and just being his natural funny self. While Scotty Goldman was doing nothing on WWE television, Colt Cabana was a star backstage with everybody else. His personality and great comedic timing led to him being offered his own web show exclusively on WWE.com. It was entitled “What’s Crackin??? with Scotty Goldman.”

Here was how his web show was described by WWE…“SmackDown’s up-and-coming Superstar, Scotty Goldman, covers WWE in his new Video Original series like a schmeer of Nova cream cheese covers a poppy-seed bagel — with bite.” Despite all the blatant Jewish terms and references used for the production of What’s Crackin’…Colt Cabana somehow was able to make it work and be entertaining. The web show got the attention from some in creative and it looked like Scotty Goldman was back on track. There were reports that Goldman was no longer going to be used as a wrestler, but placed on the broadcast team as a color commentator and backstage interviewer using comedy as his gimmick.

Unfortunately, that idea never came to fruition and in February of 2009, he was released from his WWE contract. Just like it was the highest point in his career when he signed with WWE, it was also his lowest point when he was released. According to Cabana, he was told the reason for his firing was because “Creative had nothing for him.” Colt Cabana would eventually recover from the depression of being fired and use comedy to cope. He started a long running podcast called ‘The Art of Wrestling’ and created various small wrestling related businesses for himself.