How Mae Young Cost Teddy Long A Victory In Wrestler’s Court

WWE Hall of Famer Teddy Long might’ve stopped a lot of on-screen battles by putting wrestlers in tag team matches, but he lost quite a few battles backstage.

Despite being an on-screen authority figure, Teddy Long’s power was limited to his on-screen character. Once backstage, he was one of the boys, which meant he was subject to the same rules and whims of the power players in that environment.

Long, like most people on SmackDown during the 2000s, had to conduct himself in a certain way else he risk being summoned to Wrestlers’ Court. Unfortunately, Long did find himself in that strange “ritual”, though it wasn’t for anything related to wrestling.

On an episode of Wrestling Shoot Interviews, Teddy Long revealed that he was summoned to Wrestlers’ Court for selling Viagra to the boys in the back.

“They had me go to wrestlers court for selling Viagra. Taker was the judge. Mae Young, God rest her soul, was my lawyer. The way that I lost my case, when Mae Young was defending me, she didn’t say Viagra, she called it Niagara. That’s how I lost.

I ended up in wrestler’s court and had a fine I had to pay. The fine was I had to buy chicken and beer for two weeks for JBL and some other people. With me being cheap, that got me. I had to buy a lot of chicken and a lot of beer.”

Besides Teddy Long, who else has been summoned to Wrestlers’ Court?

Before WWE became so corporatized and so tightly controlled from the top-down, Wrestlers’ Court existed as a sort of semi-formal mechanism for the men and women of WWE to police themselves.

With The Undertaker presiding as the judge more often than not due to the sheer respect he had, it wasn’t uncommon for wrestlers to be summoned to the Court for infractions ranging from messing up someone’s travel plans to trying to bribe someone on the creative team.

Some of the more well-documented Wrestlers’ Court stories include:

• Mick Foley & Al Snow being punished for abandoning Hardcore Holly to go to an amusement park
• Edge & Christian bribing Brian Gewirtz with action figures
• Melina for having heat with several people
• The Miz for eating chicken on Chris Benoit’s bag

h/t Fightful