Scott's Blog of Doom
Rants

DiBiase, world champion?

By Scott Keith on 14th August 2021

The Summerslam reposts reminded me of this tangentially related question:

The commonly bandied about story is that DiBiase was originally scheduled to win the tournament at WM4 before HTM pulled his little power-play (and as I recall, at least one shoot interview, maybe HTM himself – so yes, consider the source – has confirmed that).
The original bracket appeared to set up a Hogan/DiBiase final and a few people on the blog have stated that the intent was to have DiBiase win via CO thanks to interference from Andre, or some other fuck finish. That way, you can get the belt on Ted, while
still protecting Hogan's superhero aura by making it clear he was cheated. My question is: is there documentation that this was how it was going to go down, or is this a “best guess” on fans' part?

I presume the aftermath was 1) Hogan would win the belt back at Summerslam 88 and 2) the Mega Powers still explode at WM5, only with Savage challenging Hogan instead of vice versa. If that's the case, the way it ended up going down was better because the symmetry
of Savage winning at WM4 and losing one year later in the same building to the guy who had his back when he won has more “artistic” integrity (also another handy argument against the contention that Savage should escape with the belt at WM5!).

Yes, I'm pretty sure it's been confirmed by Meltzer and a few others that Dibiase was going to win by countout and then drop it to Hogan at Summerslam, because they wanted to kick off the new PPV show with a big title change.