This month I’ve decided to write about one of the hottest heels the WWF had in 1987 and 1988.  No, I’m not talking about Randy Savage, King Kong Bundy, or even Jake “The Snake” Roberts. I’m referring to none other than “Dangerous” Danny Davis, the former referee, turned pro wrestler and back again.  

Younger fans who don’t remember much about Davis’ run as a heel wrestler, have only the video tape of Davis counting lights for guys like Sam Houston and Koko B. Ware (men who were not exactly the upper echelon of the World Wrestling Federation at that time).  Yet fans who were watching attentively then, remember the thunderous boos this man received everywhere he appeared.  This angle had some serious heat.

Davis was a referee going to back to at least the early 80s, and like most referees, he had some training for the ring, possibly more than most refs.  And like most angles from the kayfabe era, this one had the foundations built well before the actual execution, unlike today where angles are manufactured at weekly boardroom meetings to be begun and finished in the same week, but I digress.

Although most would point to Davis’ in-ring debut to be the night the WWF drew 93,000 in Detroit at WrestleMania 3, his actual debut came about 2 years earlier.  How you ask?  Davis had an alter ego in the WWF.  While he was still a regular referee, he would often don the mask to work television or lower card house shows as Mr. X (probably one of many X’es which came through WWF rings over the years).  But the initial Mr. X matches that I could locate, which I believe are indeed Davis under the hood, occurred in 1985, around late summer or early fall (depending on when the TV shows were taped).

But let’s not harp on technicalities for trivia bits too long. Many point to Davis’ first heel reffing job as occurring on February 8, 1986 in Boston Gardens, when Randy Savage defeated Tito Santana for the Intercontinental Title.  However, while WWF announcers of the time and fans would point to this date, this is actually a case of rewriting history.  Yes, it’s true Davis was the ref the night Savage used a small bar-bell to render Santana unconscious to win the strap, but this was mere coincidence.  Davis actually called that match down the middle, and it was Savage’s cunning that kept the foreign object from being seen, not a crooked Danny Davis.

The first I saw of this angle was several weeks later on All American Wrestling.  Unfortunately, my memory has faded as to who exactly was wrestling, but I just remember Vince McMahon on commentary harping about what a terrible job this Danny Davis was doing of reffing a squash match.  I do admit that I thought these were shoot comments, and that I would never again see Davis in a striped shirt on WWF TV again.  But other than that, I thought little of the situation.

Then it would happen more and more frequently on TV.  Every time Danny Davis was refereeing, McMahon would harp on and on about how incompetent this referee was (personally, I thought it was a bad job of a commentator, but I digress again).  Jesse Ventura and Bruno Sammartino (who were also commentators on Superstars at the time) would say little of his reffing job.  Then it slowly began to dawn on me, and I assume other fans as well, that this was the start of a new great angle.

And these slow building angles were the best in those days.  It was like being a kid and finally receiving your latest Spider Man comic book to see what happens next.  You just never knew where these kinds of angles were going until they were finally sprung, and you just never knew exactly when that would happen either.