One of the older names that pop up a lot when you interview an old WWF name is the “Red Rooster.” There always seems to be a lot of talk of Terry Taylor’s run in the WWF with the short red tights and him cock-a-doodle-doing through interviews. Many people call it the worst idea the WWF ever came up with back then and people like Bruce Pritchard seem to put the blame on Taylor himself saying he thought it was a rib and that the reason it failed was that Taylor himself didn’t believe in it.
But that got me thinking. What were they trying to do with The Red Rooster with what they did with The Honkytonk man a few years before?
What I mean is with Honky he was brought in and announcers like Jesse Ventura made it known that Honky was “better lucky than good” and that despite his apparent lack of ability, he became the Intercontinental Champion and was feuding with Randy Savage until he was squashed by the Ultimate Warrior at Summerslam 1988.
With the Red Rooster, they painted it that he was a nobody that got Bobby Heenan as a manager and Heenan said that the Roster wasn’t as big as Andre the Giant or as tough as Haku and painted him to be a real loser that the Brain was going to lead to the top. He was also given an undefeated streak. Taylor didn’t get much in the way of big wins or anything and maybe that is the problem. Whether Taylor “believed” in himself or the character or not.
The question is did they have an idea of who would actually defeat him or if the streak idea was just given up on when things weren’t going well? Of course, when they made the Rooster a face it didn’t really improve things much. The Red Rooster as a good guy was where a lot of the Dork-a-doodle-doo stuff came in. The red streak in his hair didn’t help matters and he seemed to be losing a lot more of his matches than winning them in those days. He beat the jobbers on TV but didn’t do much beyond that. It was obvious the company had given up on Taylor at that point and it was what many of the fans were thinking too.
Once he left for WCW in 1990 he got some refreshing and some new characters and did well as both a good guy against guys like Arm Anderson and a bad guy with the York Foundation and as the Taylor Made Man. He won some gold belts there too. When you look at the whole picture of both his WWF run and his WCW run, it makes you wonder if Taylor was as much at fault as has been said with how things turned out or if the WWF themselves had a hand in that.
Of course, I should mention that Taylor went back to the WWF around the start of Monday Night Raw in 1993 and that run was really “Terrific”.
