On July 14th 2005, current WWE RAW Superstar Tommaso Ciampa portrayed Muhammad Hassan’s lawyer Thomas Whitney on SmackDown, where he was confronted by The Undertaker after reading a statement from Hassan.
In real life, Muhammad Hassan was already written off television because of the infamous segment from the previous week’s episode, in which (kayfabe) terrorists came out and attacked The Undertaker.
The problem was that between the day it was taped (Tuesday) and the day the episode aired (Thursday), a legitimate terrorist attack occurred in London, England on Wednesday.
Both TV-Channels, UPN (SmackDown) nor Spike TV (RAW) wanted Hassan on their channel anymore from that point onwards, so he was fired after only one more match, in which he lost to The Undertaker at the Great American Bash 2005 pay-per-view on July 24th.
During a recent interview with Chris Van Vliet, Tommaso Ciampa spoke about the statement he was reading back then and revealed that it was basically him apologizing on behalf of WWE on live TV.
Here’s what Ciampa said about this segment:
“Yeah, he disappeared after this, but they were like you have to do an apology for his actions last week. And it has to come off as sincere and real because we’re actually apologizing to the network on live TV, because that’s what they requested.
And it was just bizarre because in my head at this point, I’m like, with Jamie the promoter. I’m like, why didn’t they just hire an actor? Why didn’t they hire somebody professional? And I was like, this is so bizarre.
But I was a promo guy, I’ve always been a promo guy, he’s like it’s just like your penmanship promo, just go do whatever your penmanship problems. I’m like, Thank God, I have this script. I can read it and like they were like, you’re reading it. You don’t have to memorize it. So I was like, okay, and then I did. I did an in-ring rehearsal with Undertaker, with Hunter, Steph and Vince and everybody watching me.”
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