Over the years, the act of ribbing has become an artform in the world of professional wrestling, with the likes of Curt Henning, JBL, and even Vince McMahon going to great lengths to get one over on their fellow wrestlers. But few WWE prank wars were ever known to be as ugly, stanky, and long-lasting as the shenanigans that went on between Marty Jannetty and the late Owen Hart, which involved the use of padlocks, canceled flights, and a bag of old shrimp.
During a July 2023 appearance on Wrestling Shoot Interviews, six-time WWE Hardcore Champion Al Snow (who would have been a great Batman villain during the Attitude Era) offered a first-hand account of the war that raged on between the two superstars throughout the 1990s. He seemingly spared few details when breaking it all down, either. According to Snow, it all kicked off after Hart, who was known for his pranks, teamed up his brother-in-law the British Bulldog in order to mess with Jannetty. In Snow’s words:
Marty had a pair of gear that Marty didn’t like to wear; wasn’t flattering. And so the gear that he did like to wear, Owen and Bulldog put a padlock on his singlet so he couldn’t wear it. He tried everything to get that padlock off and he couldn’t do it.
The former Tough Enough host went on to explain that for the remainder of the run of shows, Jannetty did everything he could to get the lock off the singlet, even going as far as asking patrons at a gym if they happened to have had any bolt cutters to break the lock, which would have possibly been weird if they did. Spoilers: he eventually freed his gear, but presumably not before mounds of frustration had piled up.
As Isaac Newton’s third law states: every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and that’s pretty much what happened in the case of the padlocked trunks. As the tour went on, Jannetty put his plan of revenge into motion. First, he took the air out of the tires of Hart’s vehicle outside the arena, and then called the nearby airport and cancelled the Canadian athlete’s flight out of Pittsburgh. But only then came the coup de grâce, or the “bag de gross,” as it were.
During the final stretch of the tour, Snow said he and he Jannetty went to a local grocery store where the former Intercontinental Champion bought a bag of peel-and-eat shrimp for the sole purpose of ribbing Hart and the British Bulldog with the brine…days later. Snow continued:
The last night of the tour is Bangor, Maine, and Davey and Owen knew something was afoot, so they got dressed in their car. Finally, they brought their bags in, and then he grabbed that bag of brine and poured it into their suitcases on their clothes to get back at them for putting the padlock on his gear.
Snow went on to say that they continued going back and forth with those kinds of shocking and unpredictable pranks. One of the other most noteworthy gags he remembered was one involving Jannetty finding a skunk on the side of the road and then bringing that to the locker room with him the next night.
All of this comes out just a couple of weeks before the debut of the Dark Side of the Ring episode on Jannetty, which will focus on some of his biggest controversies and successes from over the years when it airs August 8th on Vice. But if you want, you can go back and watch some of the matches between Jannetty and Hart, as well as all the upcoming WWE events, with a Peacock subscription.