John Tenta, was best known for his five-year WWE stint where he compete as Earthquake, before his brief return to the company from 1998-1999 with The Oddities as Golga, competing under a mask with a fixation with Eric Cartman from the TV series South Park.
On the latest Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard, Prichard talks about a rare dark-match appearance Tenta made in December of 2001 as he challenged Tank Meloche at a SmackDown taping in Orlando after host Conrad Thompson asked Bruce about it. “John Tenta gets a dark-match at the SmackDown tapings,” Conrad continues, “I was wondering why John Tenta was getting a look.”
“It was out of respect to John Tenta and hoping that maybe there was something there for him. John had lost a lot of weight at this point so it wasn’t the Giant Earthquake that was before; regardless, he was always a big man, even, unfortunately, when I saw John Tenta in the middle of his cancer treatments in Houston, Texas at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He had lost a great deal of weight but he was still a big man. I think it was a favor to him to see if there was anything there.”
-Bruce Prichard on the latest episode of Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard.
With the WWE Class of 2022 Hall of Fame yet to be announced, a recent article by Bleacher Report suggests that Earthquake gets his proper due by being inducted in this year’s Hall of Fame. Unfortunately, Tenta passed away in 2006 after a bout with bladder cancer.
You can follow Peter Bahi on Twitter @peterbahi
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