10 Best WWE Tales From Wrestlers’ Court-7

2. The Short But Lively Career Of Muhammed Hassan

WWE.com

There are two schools of thought on the hazing that Mark ‘Muhammed Hassan’ Copani received during his short tenure in WWE. One is that he absolutely deserved every bit of it, acting the prima donna because he was being pushed so hard at the tender age of 22, spending money he didn’t have, his ego inflated to enormous proportions… the other is that this wasn’t the case, that Copani tried to fit in, but that the locker room was jealous of the ultra-green rookie’s huge push – in the seven months he was onscreen, he appeared with Hulk Hogan, Shawn Michaels, Mick Foley, Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler, Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, Batista, John Cena and the Undertaker – and bullied him mercilessly.

We suspect the truth is probably somewhere in between. Whatever actually occurred, the hazing he received was fairly brutal. Hassan appeared in wrestlers’ court at least twice during this short period, which was only from December 2004 to July 2005. The first time, it was due to his allegedly refusing to sell properly for Sgt. Slaughter in their match on RAW on January 31^st – although rumour has it that as a rising foreign heel using the aging patriot babyface to get heat, he was specifically told to no-sell Slaughter’s offence.
The second time was a little harsher, depending on whose story you believe. Hassan took the late Eddie Guerrero aside one night and took him to task for using the Camel Clutch submission manoeuvre as his finish, as it was the one he was using. As you can imagine, the rookie’s presumption didn’t go down well with the fiery Guerrero, and he was verbally destroyed in wrestlers’ court, ordered to pay the locker room’s $4,000 bar bill.
The glorious irony was that, although the Sheik had popularised the camel clutch and given it the name, making it a traditional finish for wrestlers using a Middle Eastern/Arab gimmick, it had actually been invented by Gory Guerrero and originally called la de a caballo (the ‘horse-mounting choke’) – Eddie was paying tribute to his own father, a Mexican wrestling legend. Some say that Copani was egged on to confront Guerrero over it as a rib on the rookie, however…
Copani was never accepted by the WWE locker room. In Tokyo at a hotel bar, he bought everyone a shot to attempt to smooth over the heat, and everyone held up the glass… and then poured it on the floor. He still might have been able to fix the problems he had backstage, but his push was swiftly cancelled and he was taken off television after the UPN network complained to WWE management following the notorious ‘terrorist’ angle aired on Smackdown on the same day as the terrorist attack on London. Copani was release two months later, and never wrestled again.