As a rule, wrestling pregnancy angles never end well. First of all, they are very difficult to follow through on: the “pregnant” woman must for up to nine months avoid taking bumps, wear baggy clothes or some sort of prosthesis to appear to be with child, and sell the angle in public in a way that actresses on normal TV shows would never be expected to do. If you recall how much heat Serena got from WWE for being seen drinking while kayfabe straightedge, imagine if she had been kayfabe pregnant!
Second of all, the ultimate purpose of every wrestling angle is to set up matches (except for some really lousy ones like the WWE walkout of 2011). That means that the storyline pregnancy will, if you’re “lucky,” end up being some sort of deception (Stephanie McMahon), or else involve questions of paternity involving wrestlers (Stacy Keibler, Gooker Award-winner Claire Lynch). Even then, the pregnancy was later found out to have been faked and then abruptly dropped as a story line. Typically, any pregnancy story line ends after a few months, after the ensuing feuds have run their course and the promotion gets tired of keeping up the charade and admits there was no real pregnancy.
That is, except for this week’s induction. Not only did the Kane-Lita angle involve rape and a nonsensical match stipulation, but it also introduced to wrestling the wonderful world of miscarriage!
When we last saw Lita and Kane, they had just been married per the Summerslam match stipulation requiring the Diva to marry her rapist because he could outwrestle Matt Hardy. Shockingly, all was not well with the marriage, as Lita had just intentionally cost her husband a match against Shawn Michaels. Still furious 24 hours later, Kane was offered up a jobber by Eric Bischoff upon whom he could take out his frustrations.
Enter Gene Snitsky. Nah, scratch that. As a jobber, Snitsky didn’t actually get an entrance. Okay, so already in the ring was Gene Snitsky, an unknown with suspicious muscularity and acne on his face and back (how do you think that happened?).
Snitsky’s real name, by the way, was Snisky. When he discussed his ring name with promoters, do you think it sounded like Marge Simpson trying to get vanity license plates?
“How about ‘Snisky’?”
“Uh-uh. Uh, you can have, ‘Snitsky.'”
“Hmmm… ‘Snitsky’….”
Just as Kane was about to Pillmanize the jobber’s throat, Lita came to Snitsky’s aid. Big mistake. As Kane argued with the woman he had raped, forced to marry, and still dragged to ringside for all his matches despite her having cost him key victories, Snitsky grabbed the chair and smashed Kane in the back, dropping him onto Lita. The match ended in a no contest as Lita was attended to by paramedics and road agents, including her former stalker Dean Malenko.
Word then came from the doctors (conveniently, the following Monday between the hours of 9 and 11 PM) that Lita had lost her baby. Yet from this awful and morbid storyline came some of the most unintentionally comedic segments in WWE history. First, there was Kane’s melodramatic reaction in the hospital upon learning that he had lost the child for whom he had put so much effort and rape to conceive.
Then, there was Gene Snitsky’s new catchphrase, “It wasn’t my fault!“, which would carry him all the way to the Wrestlemania 21 commercials (though he wouldn’t make a Mania appearance until the following year, licking Mae Young’s feet backstage). As far as he was concerned, it was just a freak accident and he didn’t owe anyone an apology, although he would end up gloating over it in the weeks to come. Sadly, he and Brad Paisley would not release a duet called “Accidental Abortionist.”
Finally, “Mean” Gene Snitsky (and no, I’m not making that up; he used that nickname before he came to WWE. If you want to get more Snitsky scoops, just call his hotline!) confronted Lita on “The Highlight Reel” with a baby doll in hand. He taunted Lita with the death of her unborn child, asking if he had a name (“Steroids!” suggested one fan picked up by the microphone) before punting the doll clear out of the ring and into the audience. This was supposed to be shocking, but at least one fan in the front row was elated to catch a piece of Wrestlecrap history. Hey, RD, you need to track that doll down on eBay to go along with your Katie Vick outfit!
Some time ago, WWE stopped pretending that the macabre spectacle was anything but hilarious, as you can tell from their recent DVD of “OMG moments.”
Still, Lita and Kane, unlike most people, found nothing funny about the ordeal, leading to a match between Kane and Snitsky at the first ever Taboo Tuesday. For some cheap heat, Snitsky vowed that Kane would lose his match just like Lita had lost her baby (presumably by having his uterus crushed by a wrestler).
For the first time ever, fans were given the meaningless choice of what weapon could legally be used in the match (a chain), but despite the democratic involvement of the viewers and the announcers’ sympathy for the grieving rapist and newly-turned babyface Kane, Snitsky picked up a surprise victory against the Big Red Machine. Snitsky won the match through heavy use of a steel chair, Pillmanizing Kane’s throat, putting him out of action temporarily, and rendering the entire voting entirely pointless. I guess WWE really wanted the fans to vote for “steel chair” as the legal weapon for the match.
The power couple finally got their revenge when Kane beat Snitsky at the first-ever New Years’ Revolution event, seemingly ending a feud so emotional and intense that it could only be settled at experimental third-tier pay-per-views.
But no, it wasn’t over yet. Kane would further retaliate by chokeslamming Snitsky off the entrance ramp, but Gene appeared to be having the time of his life, perhaps still chuckling over punting that baby into the audience.
Snitsky was finally defeated once and for all in a cage match and would years later pay tribute to Kane by shaving off all of his hair, perhaps to resemble Kane’s unborn fetus.
Kane and Lita would continue on as a unit, with the fan-favorite pair viewed as an odd couple rather than a clear case of Stockholm Syndrome.
Nothing lasts forever in wrestling, though, and that goes for marriages as well as pregnancies. Lita and Kane would split up in 2005 in yet another chapter of the Wrestlecrap-worthy storyline that Will. Not. Die!