Kane Recalls His Christmas Creature Gimmick In USWA, How The WWE Locker Room Ribbed Him For It
Long before Glenn Jacobs became mayor or was Kane in WWE, he was a part of the United States Wrestling Association which is where he got his pro wrestling start. One of his early gimmicks was a bit of foreshadowing of his future monster gimmicks as Kane portrayed the "Christmas Creature" for a time in USWA.
The Christmas Creature competed in a green onesie adorned with candy cane stripes, flashing lights and a mask. It turns out that the decorative costume wasn't created by the USWA but rather by Kane's mother instead.
"I don't have the outfit anymore. My mom made that," Jacobs said to WBIR. "It's in the attic someplace, but I don't know exactly. It's somewhere at my folks' house."
It would be three more years before Kane would get his first taste of WWE action but he was actually under consideration for a run before that. At Survivor Series 1993, Bret Hart and the Hart Family took on Shawn Michaels and three knights and Kane was considered for the role as one of the masked knights.
But as Bruce Prichard tells it, Kane's inexperience led to WWE looking elsewhere. However, the locker room did catch a glimpse of Kane's Christmas Creature gimmick and it would become a running gag for years.
"Glenn was greener than grass. Glenn was greener than the Christmas tree outfit that he wore as the Christmas Menace, or Christmas Creature from Tennessee, which was hilarious. Every time that picture would surface we would put it up around the dressing room for the Christmas Creature, which was a green unitard, from head to toe with a tensile and balls hanging down from it. He was just very green. Jerry Jarrett had promoted him as the second coming of Sid Vicious. He took him in because he had a great look, but he was not ready for prime time," Prichard said.
"We had to get him some more experience before we can get him in, but we liked the size and there was potential. Plus, he was a super nice guy. There was something there, but we didn't have a developmental; we didn't have a school, so we just sent him to Memphis [USWA] where he had an opportunity to work every day. Glenn was going to be one of the knights under the mask. He didn't become a knight because he was too green. Way too green. Not even a year in the business at the time. We brought him up there because we needed bodies, put it that way, but we just didn't know. We didn't know how green he was at the point."
Glenn Jacobs would eventually join WWE in 1995 where he competed as Unabomb, Isaac Yankem and Fake Diesel before finding his groove as Kane.