Violence & Brawls ·
The Knockout That Upended Steve Williams’s WWF Hopes
Bart Gunn’s legitimate Brawl for All victory in 1998 left Williams injured and disrupted his anticipated WWF run. Mick Foley and Bruce Prichard later differed on whether the injury was to his knee or hamstring.
In 1998, Bart Gunn knocked out “Dr. Death” Steve Williams in the WWF’s Brawl for All, a tournament that put professional wrestlers into legitimate fights. Gunn understood Williams to be management’s preferred winner. Instead, Williams left the bout injured, and two men who saw him afterward later described the defeat as a blow to his anticipated WWF run.
Gunn knew the expectations before he entered the ring. Recalling the episode on Something to Wrestle in 2021, Bruce Prichard said Gunn called him the week before the fight with a question: Would he be fired if he knocked Williams out? “I know you guys want him to win this,” Gunn said, in Prichard’s account. Prichard told him the contest was supposed to be a “shoot”—a real fight—and encouraged him to go ahead. “At this point, we’re doing it, so to me, that would be great TV,” Prichard recalled saying.
The conversation captured the contradiction around the bout: Williams was the expected winner, but Gunn was told to fight to win. The opportunity envisioned for Williams depended on the outcome of genuine competition. Gunn knocked him out.
Prichard remembered Williams as someone whose toughness did not require advertisement. “He didn’t have to tell people how tough he was,” he said. Williams’s distress afterward, Prichard recalled, was not simply about losing: He had been seriously hurt and was dejected. Prichard identified the injury as a damaged hamstring, saying Williams had “ripped his hamstring off.”
Mick Foley remembered the injury differently. Speaking on Foley is Pod in 2023, he said Williams hurt his knee in the backward fall from the knockout. Foley also placed himself beside Williams afterward: “I was there with Doc in the dressing room.” The later accounts agree that Williams was hurt but differ on whether the injury was to his knee or hamstring.
For Foley, the intended upside had been “the making of a new star” in Williams. For Prichard, the defeat and injury ended what “could’ve been a great run” in the WWF. Those were their retrospective judgments about a career opportunity, not evidence of a guaranteed tournament result or finalized storyline.
Foley’s strongest memory was of trying to help Williams in the dressing room. “The physical rebuilding of ‘Dr. Death’ would be a lot easier than the emotional rebuilding,” he said. “It was like he was shattered, and I was there trying to pick up the pieces for him.”