WWE Was Going To Give The Undertaker A Son Until Triple H Stepped In
The Undertaker nearly had a son on TV at one point.
WWE had plans to give The Undertaker a son on television before Triple H caused Vince McMahon to bin the idea.
That is according to former WWE writer Freddy Prinze Jr., who revealed via his podcast that the creative team was asked to come up with an opponent for The Deadman to smash around before starting an angle with Edge.
Taker’s original opponent had gotten injured, so everyone was scrambling to find a suitable replacement. Someone suggested bringing a performer in from FCW who would also play The Undertaker’s offspring but from a “supernatural sense.” That person was supposed to have been British wrestler Hade Vansen.
“We write this promo, and he’s sort of hacking into the network feed. So we started hacking the feed on Thursday night SmackDown back then, and they would be kind of grainy pictures. They look kind of like 80s grainy and he had these messages for The Undertaker that he would come in with, ‘His (Undertaker’s) time is nearing and now it’s going to be my time,” Prinze explained in quotes cited by WrestlingNews.co (H/T Sescoops.com).
“I have anger and love for you.’ He was a British guy. His name was Hadrian. What a great name, Hadrian. I think it was Hadrian Howard. He had this accent and he sounded smooth when he spoke. He had a shaved head and a bit of a beard. He looked real cool, but he definitely was a smaller guy, smaller than me.
“I’m six one right now, like 185. So he’s cutting these promos and he’s doing a good job. So we get the story approved by Freebird, and then we get it approved by Vince. We start shooting these little segments and they’re airing on television.
“It’s an ongoing thing. He’s not calling out The Undertaker, but he’s speaking about The Undertaker, and you’re just waiting to figure out what the reason for it is. It was this father-son thing. So we’re building up, I think we get two weeks of TV out of it.”
Triple H Gives His Two Cents
Prinze said things were going well on that note until Triple H claimed Hadrian looked like a guy who cuts his grass during a meeting and caused McMahon to forget about the angle.
“So we’re in the production meeting and everyone’s putting their segments through, “ he continued. “Here comes our segment and nobody said boo the last two weeks or even three weeks of TV that we got out of it. Not one agent. Not Kevin Dunn. Not Vince. Not anybody.
“All of a sudden out of nowhere, Hunter [Triple H] says ‘Are we seriously going with this guy?’ Remember, this is not a Pay-Per-View match. This is not a guy that would get any sort of offense on The Undertaker.
“It would be just a build up for The Undertaker to have something to do so he could smash this guy and then get rolling over to Edge. He says, ‘Are we really going to go with this guy?’ Vince goes, ‘What do you mean? What’s the problem?’
“He says, ‘He looks like he cuts my grass, man’, and Vince laughed. Literally all the air went out of the room. Like you could just feel it.”
The writer was left with the “sickening” task of telling Hadrian the idea had been nixed.
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