Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
A cool name, a great finisher yet it still didn’t work out for Hercules and Paul Roma as ‘Power and Glory’. In today’s piece, Brian takes a look at the history of the short-lived team and what went wrong along the way.
In 1987, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF)came up with an idea to team two young preliminary wrestlers together and form the tag team known as ‘The Young Stallions.’ The team consisted of Jim Powers and Paul Roma. The Young Stallions gimmick was the brainchild of Vince McMahon’s right hand man Pat Patterson. The Young Stallions would initially get a monster push and feud with the Hart Foundation, but as time wore on….their push into the limelight began to fade away.
Ultimately, the tag team broke up and went their separate ways. The real reason being, Jim Powers and Paul Roma disliked each other backstage. As their hatred for one another grew, Roma finally went to Pat Patterson and told him that the team wasn’t going to work together. Both were sent back to jobbing on house shows and television tapings in singles matches.
By the time 1990 rolled in, Roma started traveling on the road with fellow wrestler Hercules Hernandez. The two formed a friendship and a close bond and that gave Roma an idea. Why not pair the two friends as a tag team. Roma gave the idea to Patterson who wasn’t completely sold on it, but Vince McMahon gave the okay. They initially had a televised tryout match as babyfaces on Prime Time Wrestling and won. The two pushed hard to continue this “experiment” and so an angle was built up.
First, Hercules had a match against ‘the Model’ Rick Martel and was sprayed in the eyes with his “Arrogance” cologne. It was Paul Roma who came in for the save. Another week, saw Paul Roma getting beat down by Dino Bravo and the Rockers made the save. Roma started pushing and shoving the Rockers as though he didn’t want their help. That is when Hercules ran in and attacked the Rockers. Roma and Hercules turned heel and officially became a tag team.
They then introduced Slick as their new manager and called the team ‘Power and Glory.’ Hercules was obviously the Power of the team and Roma was the Glory. A part of their gimmick was that Paul Roma would always get the pinfall victories for the group….hence the name Glory. Power and Glory quickly rose up the tag team ranks with victories over teams like the Rockers and the Bushwhackers. The team started having a series of WWF tag team title matches against the Hart Foundation. Bret Hart, who was slowly being transitioned into a singles wrestler apparently gave Vince his word of recommendation for Power and Glory.
Their finishing maneuver was called the “Power-Plex” and it was Hercules giving an opponent a superplex followed by Paul Roma doing a splash from the top rop and getting the pin. If for nothing else, it was extremely impressive looking move.
According to Paul Roma, plans were in the works to give the Power and Glory a brief, transitional run with the tag team titles. That is, until business got in the way. Roma started to complain to Vince that their team had no merchandising opportunities like other tag teams did. Vince McMahon apparently said that he didn’t envision anything about Power and Glory that would sell well. Roma then countered that he and Hercules would design and market their own merchandise and if it sold, the team would get the lion’s share of the profits. McMahon told both Roma and Hercules that he would sleep on it…but never got back to them.
Despite the lack of support from Vince and company, Roma designed the team’s own shirts and sunglasses. Roma became the vocal leader of the team behind the scenes and would immediately go to McMahon with anything he or they didn’t like. It became a constant battle creatively between Power and Glory and WWF creative. So much so, that their plans for Power and Glory defeating the Hart Foundation for the titles at Wrestlemania 7 were scrapped and instead faced Hawk and Animal of the Legion of Doom on the grandest stage. They would lose to the LOD in under a minute.
It was a sure sign that Vince McMahon was tired of the team’s constant backstage complaints and were quickly being phased out. According to Roma, the real reason was Vince was not happy that Power and Glory were getting over as a team and it was not his creation. Either way, seeing that the team was no longer a priority for Vince, Roma quit the company. Before he left, however, he made sure to give Vince one last piece of his mind. He criticized Vince for pushing teams that sucked up to him and had lesser value than Power and Glory. Hercules would leave the company not long after as well.
So that put an end to a once promising tag team. A team that was built on an idea not by Vince McMahon or one of his men, but by a couple of wrestlers with nothing to lose. What might have been with Power and Glory if they just remained company men and played the game. We more than likely would have seen them as tag team champions. The Power fizzled out and their Glory was no more.
