Former WWE Star Recalls Scrapped Faction Return Plans That Would Have Led To Undertaker WrestleMania Match

WWE

A former WWE star has recalled scrapped plans for him to return to WWE television leading to a WrestleMania match with the Undertaker.

At WrestleMania 25, one of the greatest matches in the history of WrestleMania would take place, when The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels faced off in their encounter that became instantly iconic.

However, the classic match was not WWE’s initial plan for Undertaker at WrestleMania 25, as he was originally set for a match on the show against a debuting wrestler named Hade Vansen.

Vansen would appear one time on WWE television, a one minute vignette in November 2008, where he said he had been studying the darkness, and that ‘others’ would follow him, seemingly teasing a group.

Vansen would never be seen on SmackDown again, leading to the Undertaker instead facing Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 25.

Kevin Thorn Recalls Plans To Return As Part Of A Faction To Feud With The Undertaker

Speaking on Rewind Recap Relive, former WWE star Kevin Thorn spoke about the plans, confirming that he was set to be part of the faction, with the promo cut by Vansen on SmackDown initially being written by him and Dusty Rhodes in FCW.

He said:

“They sent me down to FCW to kind of repackage. I went down there for a little bit and then all of a sudden I hurt my hip, I tore my labrum in my hip, and I was like screw this, I’m gonna go get this fixed.

“I go get it fixed, I get it all okayed, the office knows, I think I’ve told all the right people. I’m on my way home from the hospital all doped up on whatever they had me on and Johnny Ace calls me. ‘How was your surgery today?’ ‘Great, no big deal, they’re saying six months’. ‘Six months? Well they got an angle for you, you’re gonna finally be going against the Undertaker, we’re gonna need you back in six weeks’.

“I’m looking at my wife like ‘what the f- okay…’ This is a six month injury, it’s my hip, and I made it back in six weeks. I was in rehab every day twice a day, and the guy that was in charge of my PT said he would not release me until I could jog a mile at speed of 8 and incline of 7, and I did it. Almost killed myself doing it, and he released me.

“That’s when they sent me back down to FCW to start getting ready for this. They had a couple of different ideas, I know one was Hade Vansen, one was Black (Pain) from Puerto Rico, and something else, and we were gonna be a faction against the Undertaker.

“Me and Dusty did a promo at FCW that was sent to Vince and Taker, and Taker called me two days after and said ‘kid you’re doing it again, great stuff’.

“All of a sudden I don’t get a call, then I see Hade Vansen on WWE TV on Raw or SmackDown or whatever, doing my promo. The exact verbiage that I said. And I went ‘uh, okay…’ So I started trying to call everybody frantically like ‘what the f**k is going on’, and nobody had any answers.

“The next Monday and Tuesday they were in Pittsburgh and Baltimore, so I drove up to Pittsburgh and they’re like ‘what are you doing here?’ I’m like ‘I don’t know, the promo I did in FCW was just on the air’. They’re like ‘your promo?’ I was like ‘yeah, pretty much word for word, here’s what I wrote down’. You can just tell they were like ‘uhhh’, and I was like ‘that was mine’.

“It went on, I went to Balitmore. In Baltimore I walked in the office and I talked to Taker and was like ‘I don’t know what’s going on, this is getting old, they’re just running me around wild goose chase now, I don’t know what to do’. I went into Johnny’s office and went ‘hey if we’re gonna keep doing this stuff and stuff’s going to get stolen from me, I’ll just quit’.

“Johnny was like ‘no I don’t want you to quit, they still may do this for you’, but they already squashed it somehow because they didn’t like the way, something happened with Hade Vansen in the ring that day and they didn’t like it, and then they decided to go with Shawn Michaels and Taker for that match at WrestleMania.

“I was just fed up, I went in there told him I was gonna quit, he said ‘no we’re gonna do all this for you’. I drove back home, got piss tested like four more times over the course of a couple months, of course I passed, and then I got released. ‘We don’t have anything for you’, yeah go figure, I could tell.”

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• wwe
• WrestleMania
• The Undertaker
• undertaker
• kevin thorn
• kevin fertig
• hade vansen

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