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 Mr. Hughes
When Curtis Hughes joined WCW in 1990, he used the very generic gimmick of ‘The Big Cat.’ It was a name he basically had while wrestling in the smaller territories and the AWA. In 1991, booker Dusty Rhodes approached Hughes with a gimmick makeover. Hughes said that Rhodes asked him if he was familiar with the wrestler known as ‘Big’ Bubba Rogers. Curtis Hughes was and was then asked by Dusty to reprise that gimmick.
Hughes said he began to watch hours of tape on Rogers and studied his movements in the ring and his facial expressions. Hughes wasn’t just satisfied with regurgitating an old gimmick, he wanted to make it his own and add something different to it. He noticed that before matches, Rogers took off his jacket, hat and sunglasses. Hughes thought that he could wrestle matches keeping his shades on. At first, the idea flopped because he couldn’t keep the sunglasses on his face when he bumped, so he used black electrical tape to secure them on his head.
While the electrical tape worked to secure the sunglasses to his face during matches, they continually fogged up, so Hughes used a defogger spray he retrieved from the trunk of his car eliminate that problem. As far as the name of his character goes, Dusty allowed him to come up with naming himself. Curtis Hughes chose the simplistic name of ‘Mr. Hughes.’ His thinking was that since he used his own name, it was owned by him and could be utilized for licensing merchandise and marketing himself. Mr. Hughes was booked as the bodyguard for the York Foundation and later as the bodyguard to Lex Luger. Aside from using Mr. Hughes in WCW, he also brought that character to the WWF and ECW. It’s a gimmick he still uses to this day.
To read other Gimmick Table Origins, click here.
