- 8,916
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- Joined
- Oct 26, 2009
Speaking of..
Here's a little more from his book.
-Tough Enough
I wasn’t in a program on TV and was just putting people over, so they found a use for me as one of the trainers on the second season of the WWE reality show Tough Enough. Hunter apparently didn’t like the show because he felt the business shouldn’t be exposed any more than it already was. Hunter doesn’t like anything that doesn’t benefit Hunter. Reality TV was starting to go everywhere and our business had already been exposed as a work, so what else was there to expose? The whole concept was to find some new talent, put them under the same roof, and take them through an intense training process that would turn them into WWF superstars. They all were different personalities and it was a really interesting show.
My old friend Al Snow was the head coach on the series and I thought we worked well together. I work rough and he works light. We have two totally different styles but I think he’s great. He did good cop, I did bad cop. Tough Enough 2 was the highest rated show on MTV until the Osbournes came along, so we must have been doing something right. Doing that series was a wonderful experience. All of the trainers were good; we knew what we were doing. We had Chavo Guerrero and Ivory as trainers too. Ivory wasn’t the greatest wrestler but she could work decently enough. She would get in the ring and roll around with the girls, showing them first hand what to do. I feel like she got a bit of a raw deal with WWE and they dicked her around, pushing people who couldn’t work at her expense. She was always positive and upbeat — I don’t think I’ve ever been around somebody who had so much energy.
The biggest problem with the show was that MTV wanted to control it. Each week, when we sat down to determine who was going to be eliminated, the MTV producers would try to intervene and tell us to keep certain people because they were “good for the show.” We had to keep telling them that it was a competition to find the best fit for the wrestling business, not the best fit for the next week of their show. Of course we wanted good ratings but we weren’t about to keep somebody who was useless just because they brought some drama to the show.
Out of everyone from season two, Matt Morgan went on to do the most in wrestling. During filming he tweaked his shoulder and had to quit, feeling he couldn’t carry on. He got signed to a contract anyway and was later put on TV. He didn’t get over. In his mind, he thought he was the best big man, above Kane, above ’Taker, above the Big Show. I didn’t think he was any good, and if he had been, WWE would have kept him. They love big men. He looked good but he couldn’t work and he couldn’t get over. That’s the bottom line. The fact that he quit Tough Enough because he got hurt just went to show he didn’t have enough heart for the business.
Jackie Gayda blew out her knee during filming but she sucked it up and got on with it. She finished the show, she was one of the two winners, and she got signed to a contract. I liked her; she was a good sport. The other winner of Tough Enough 2 was Linda Miles. During the show, she was a great personality and a really nice person but once they put her on TV and started giving her a push, you couldn’t find a door big enough for her head to get through. She thought she was the whole show. We’d be on a tour overseas, three or four days in, and she would complain to anybody who would listen that she was worn out.
She was so dramatic about it all. She had double standards in the ring too — she wouldn’t hold back on anybody but complained loudly if anybody was the slightest bit rough with her. Her downfall came at an airport one day, waiting for our bags to come around the carousel. We hadn’t been on the road long on this particular tour, but she already looked like she was about to pass out. When her bags came around, she told one of the newer guys to get them for her. He was told, mind you; she didn’t ask. The guy asked her why he should get them and she snapped, “I’m too tired to get them, so you get my bags for me now.” All the boys turned around and looked at her as if to say, “Who the **** do you think you are?” The guy rightly refused and she got seriously pissed. Word got back to the office about all of this. Combined with her continual whining and diva-like behavior, they decided to get rid of her. She thought she was a huge star who deserved more than what she was getting. Nobody is bigger than the company, least of all Linda ******g Miles!
When Tough Enough got picked up for a third season, I asked to be a coach again but they told me they had plans for a storyline involving me, so I wouldn’t be able to do it. They didn’t tell me anything else about this storyline so I suspected they were lying to me. Meanwhile, they kept using me to help the new guys along. I was fine with that because I enjoyed it. I can lead somebody and I can help them learn. Being a coach on Tough Enough had showed me I was very good in that role.
After I’d been booked for the neck surgery, I got a call from the office, saying that they needed me to fly to L.A. to do a cameo on Tough Enough 3.
I was supposed to give the show’s trainees some advice on the wrestling business, how the locker room is, and how to make it as a professional. I’d done some talking and given them some advice, and towards the end of the day I watched these guys in the ring. They were doing a round-robin thing where they would tag in, do some spots in the ring, and then tag out. They were laughing and joking around — that was it. I started to get pissed off with these wannabes. Wrestling is supposed to be serious! People can get hurt and these guys didn’t have a clue what was going on. By this point, they should have understood that whenever you’ve got an audience, you’ve got to be serious. This was going out on TV and they were clowning around! I told Big that I wanted to get in the ring, so they stopped the whole thing and said to the cast, “We’re going to do Bob, Al Snow, and Bill Demott in there against you guys — you all tag in and out against these three.”
Since they hadn’t listened to what I’d said earlier, I felt I needed to educate these kids physically. There’s a time and a place for kidding around and having a good time, and it’s not when you’re in front of a television camera. I take wrestling seriously and wasn’t about to let these little ******* act like goofballs. When I got in there, I’m sure they could see in my eyes that I was not fixing to laugh and have a good time. I was there to work and teach these guys what the wrestling business is all about.
Matt Cappotelli happened to be in there when I got in. I knocked him down in the corner and started stomping on him — as I’ve said a million times already, I work stiff but I don’t set out to hurt people. But he was flailing around and trying to move. I wanted him to stay down but he was not following my lead. Anybody who wrestles knows that if you are in the ring with someone more experienced than you, you go where he puts you and he controls what happens. Cappotelli should have known it too, but he still squirmed and tried to get up. He ended up getting a boot in the mouth, which busted him open. The producers from MTV wanted Big to step in and stop the match but he told them not to be stupid — it was part of wrestling! I guess reality got too real for MTV.
Sure, I got rough with him, I’ll admit it — but I’m rough with everybody! I took it upon myself to teach him what wrestling is like. Wrestling is a rough business. I didn’t bust his nose or do anything to him that hasn’t been done to me — or that wouldn’t be done to him at some point in his career. Big understood what was going on. Bill DeMott sided with me. Al didn’t like it but he was the mother hen of the series — he coddled those guys. Whenever they were hurt, they went to him and he would nurse them back to health and make sure they were okay. That’s not how wrestling works and Al wasn’t doing them any favors. I was trying to introduce them to the real wrestling business because it’s not laughing and kidding around. It’s serious.
The next day, they filmed Matt Cappotelli crying like a little ******g girl, saying he wanted to go home because he’d been roughed up a little bit. He had a black eye and a busted lip.
I can’t tell you how many black eyes and busted lips I’ve had and not once did I ever complain about it. Here was this kid on a show called Tough Enough and he was ready to go home because he got a little hurt. They ended up talking him into staying — they should have let him quit, as far as I’m concerned. If he was going to go on TV and cry about me being rough with him, he had no business in wrestling. Years later, he ended up with a brain tumor and I felt really bad for him, but he would never have made it in the business.
>I knew it because of the way he carried on after his run-in with me. He didn’t think getting hurt was part of the business. Are you kidding me? I was there with cracked vertebrae and a shattered disc in my neck, about to go into surgery the next day, and I was in there teaching him how to work, getting on with it. He got his lip busted open and he wanted to quit the business? Wrestling was definitely not for him.
To be completely honest, I was not much rougher on Matt than I was with anybody else. I’m pretty much the same with everybody. When I’m a little bit rougher with somebody now and then, it’s to test them, to see if they can take it. I’d seen Matt in training earlier that day, and I thought he was decent enough for what skills he had, good enough to make it. My whole perspective on him changed when I saw him whining on TV. I lost all respect for him right there. I felt like saying, “Come on, grow up. This isn’t ******g kindergarten . . .”
>The only other guy who impressed me that season was John Morrison. He and Matt were the best guys by a mile. It’s funny, but when John started for real with WWE after he and Matt won Tough Enough, he was wary of me, but after a couple of years in the business, he came up to me and said, “Bob, now I understand why you did what you did back then. I get it now. You didn’t do anything wrong.” He said he appreciated my help in training him and making him understand how wrestling was. He got it.
My old friend Al Snow was the head coach on the series and I thought we worked well together. I work rough and he works light. We have two totally different styles but I think he’s great. He did good cop, I did bad cop. Tough Enough 2 was the highest rated show on MTV until the Osbournes came along, so we must have been doing something right. Doing that series was a wonderful experience. All of the trainers were good; we knew what we were doing. We had Chavo Guerrero and Ivory as trainers too. Ivory wasn’t the greatest wrestler but she could work decently enough. She would get in the ring and roll around with the girls, showing them first hand what to do. I feel like she got a bit of a raw deal with WWE and they dicked her around, pushing people who couldn’t work at her expense. She was always positive and upbeat — I don’t think I’ve ever been around somebody who had so much energy.
The biggest problem with the show was that MTV wanted to control it. Each week, when we sat down to determine who was going to be eliminated, the MTV producers would try to intervene and tell us to keep certain people because they were “good for the show.” We had to keep telling them that it was a competition to find the best fit for the wrestling business, not the best fit for the next week of their show. Of course we wanted good ratings but we weren’t about to keep somebody who was useless just because they brought some drama to the show.
Out of everyone from season two, Matt Morgan went on to do the most in wrestling. During filming he tweaked his shoulder and had to quit, feeling he couldn’t carry on. He got signed to a contract anyway and was later put on TV. He didn’t get over. In his mind, he thought he was the best big man, above Kane, above ’Taker, above the Big Show. I didn’t think he was any good, and if he had been, WWE would have kept him. They love big men. He looked good but he couldn’t work and he couldn’t get over. That’s the bottom line. The fact that he quit Tough Enough because he got hurt just went to show he didn’t have enough heart for the business.
Jackie Gayda blew out her knee during filming but she sucked it up and got on with it. She finished the show, she was one of the two winners, and she got signed to a contract. I liked her; she was a good sport. The other winner of Tough Enough 2 was Linda Miles. During the show, she was a great personality and a really nice person but once they put her on TV and started giving her a push, you couldn’t find a door big enough for her head to get through. She thought she was the whole show. We’d be on a tour overseas, three or four days in, and she would complain to anybody who would listen that she was worn out.
She was so dramatic about it all. She had double standards in the ring too — she wouldn’t hold back on anybody but complained loudly if anybody was the slightest bit rough with her. Her downfall came at an airport one day, waiting for our bags to come around the carousel. We hadn’t been on the road long on this particular tour, but she already looked like she was about to pass out. When her bags came around, she told one of the newer guys to get them for her. He was told, mind you; she didn’t ask. The guy asked her why he should get them and she snapped, “I’m too tired to get them, so you get my bags for me now.” All the boys turned around and looked at her as if to say, “Who the **** do you think you are?” The guy rightly refused and she got seriously pissed. Word got back to the office about all of this. Combined with her continual whining and diva-like behavior, they decided to get rid of her. She thought she was a huge star who deserved more than what she was getting. Nobody is bigger than the company, least of all Linda ******g Miles!
When Tough Enough got picked up for a third season, I asked to be a coach again but they told me they had plans for a storyline involving me, so I wouldn’t be able to do it. They didn’t tell me anything else about this storyline so I suspected they were lying to me. Meanwhile, they kept using me to help the new guys along. I was fine with that because I enjoyed it. I can lead somebody and I can help them learn. Being a coach on Tough Enough had showed me I was very good in that role.
After I’d been booked for the neck surgery, I got a call from the office, saying that they needed me to fly to L.A. to do a cameo on Tough Enough 3.
I was supposed to give the show’s trainees some advice on the wrestling business, how the locker room is, and how to make it as a professional. I’d done some talking and given them some advice, and towards the end of the day I watched these guys in the ring. They were doing a round-robin thing where they would tag in, do some spots in the ring, and then tag out. They were laughing and joking around — that was it. I started to get pissed off with these wannabes. Wrestling is supposed to be serious! People can get hurt and these guys didn’t have a clue what was going on. By this point, they should have understood that whenever you’ve got an audience, you’ve got to be serious. This was going out on TV and they were clowning around! I told Big that I wanted to get in the ring, so they stopped the whole thing and said to the cast, “We’re going to do Bob, Al Snow, and Bill Demott in there against you guys — you all tag in and out against these three.”
Since they hadn’t listened to what I’d said earlier, I felt I needed to educate these kids physically. There’s a time and a place for kidding around and having a good time, and it’s not when you’re in front of a television camera. I take wrestling seriously and wasn’t about to let these little ******* act like goofballs. When I got in there, I’m sure they could see in my eyes that I was not fixing to laugh and have a good time. I was there to work and teach these guys what the wrestling business is all about.
Matt Cappotelli happened to be in there when I got in. I knocked him down in the corner and started stomping on him — as I’ve said a million times already, I work stiff but I don’t set out to hurt people. But he was flailing around and trying to move. I wanted him to stay down but he was not following my lead. Anybody who wrestles knows that if you are in the ring with someone more experienced than you, you go where he puts you and he controls what happens. Cappotelli should have known it too, but he still squirmed and tried to get up. He ended up getting a boot in the mouth, which busted him open. The producers from MTV wanted Big to step in and stop the match but he told them not to be stupid — it was part of wrestling! I guess reality got too real for MTV.
Sure, I got rough with him, I’ll admit it — but I’m rough with everybody! I took it upon myself to teach him what wrestling is like. Wrestling is a rough business. I didn’t bust his nose or do anything to him that hasn’t been done to me — or that wouldn’t be done to him at some point in his career. Big understood what was going on. Bill DeMott sided with me. Al didn’t like it but he was the mother hen of the series — he coddled those guys. Whenever they were hurt, they went to him and he would nurse them back to health and make sure they were okay. That’s not how wrestling works and Al wasn’t doing them any favors. I was trying to introduce them to the real wrestling business because it’s not laughing and kidding around. It’s serious.
The next day, they filmed Matt Cappotelli crying like a little ******g girl, saying he wanted to go home because he’d been roughed up a little bit. He had a black eye and a busted lip.
I can’t tell you how many black eyes and busted lips I’ve had and not once did I ever complain about it. Here was this kid on a show called Tough Enough and he was ready to go home because he got a little hurt. They ended up talking him into staying — they should have let him quit, as far as I’m concerned. If he was going to go on TV and cry about me being rough with him, he had no business in wrestling. Years later, he ended up with a brain tumor and I felt really bad for him, but he would never have made it in the business.
>I knew it because of the way he carried on after his run-in with me. He didn’t think getting hurt was part of the business. Are you kidding me? I was there with cracked vertebrae and a shattered disc in my neck, about to go into surgery the next day, and I was in there teaching him how to work, getting on with it. He got his lip busted open and he wanted to quit the business? Wrestling was definitely not for him.
To be completely honest, I was not much rougher on Matt than I was with anybody else. I’m pretty much the same with everybody. When I’m a little bit rougher with somebody now and then, it’s to test them, to see if they can take it. I’d seen Matt in training earlier that day, and I thought he was decent enough for what skills he had, good enough to make it. My whole perspective on him changed when I saw him whining on TV. I lost all respect for him right there. I felt like saying, “Come on, grow up. This isn’t ******g kindergarten . . .”
>The only other guy who impressed me that season was John Morrison. He and Matt were the best guys by a mile. It’s funny, but when John started for real with WWE after he and Matt won Tough Enough, he was wary of me, but after a couple of years in the business, he came up to me and said, “Bob, now I understand why you did what you did back then. I get it now. You didn’t do anything wrong.” He said he appreciated my help in training him and making him understand how wrestling was. He got it.
Luger, WCW, & More Jeff Jarrett
Jumping to WCW became a very realistic possibility for the boys who weren’t happy. I remember flying back home the week after SummerSlam ’95. I was in first class, sitting next to Lex Luger, and we were talking about working out. Lex had been traveling by himself but it sounded like we had a pretty similar schedule, so I said I’d like to work out with him in the future. He gave me his number so that when we started back on the road we could travel together and work out together. The next thing I knew, he showed up live on WCW Nitro. I called him but his cell phone number had changed already.
We’d talked for hours on the plane and he hadn’t said a word about jumping ship. I guess he’d had enough of being ignored in favor of Shawn and his gang. Still, no matter how I felt about the Clique, I felt like Luger was a traitor. None of the boys could believe it. Vince had invested huge money in Luger, paid him well, and given him every chance to be the biggest star in wrestling, including a highly publicized bus tour around the country to build a fan base. Yet Lex just upped and left. Where’s the loyalty? I’ve always felt that when someone is good to you, you have to be loyal. And Vince was very good to Luger. I thought that he just never clicked with the WWF audience. He fit in better with WCW because that’s where he started — he seemed like a fish out of water in the WWF. That’s no excuse though. You don’t just up and leave without a word of explanation.
Luger wasn’t the only one who acted like a jerk that year — Jeff Jarrett took his ball and went home too. He was about to work a program with Road Dogg and he didn’t like what they were planning to do, so he decided to walk out on the big company that had made him a star so he could jump to WCW. And he and Road Dogg were good friends — or so Road Dogg thought.
When Jeff wanted to leave the WWF, Road Dogg stuck with him and left too, but when they got to Atlanta, WCW only wanted Jarrett. Jeff didn’t go to bat for Road Dogg; he just took the offer WCW gave him and left his so-called friend behind without a job. Jeff’s a charming guy to your face but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
Chyna had been working with my old friend Jeff Jarrett. Jeff had returned to the WWF after having a poor run in WCW and Vince let him come back in order to humiliate him on TV. Vince is a businessman and signs people because he wants to make money with them but I think he also likes to set them up to humiliate them if they’ve wronged him. This time, Jeff ended up with the upper hand.
Jeff’s contract was coming to an end and Jim Ross was told to sign him to an extension. For whatever reason, it slipped through the cracks and Jeff kept quiet about his contractual status. They had been building a match between Jeff and Chyna for weeks. It was one of the featured matches at the No Mercy pay-per-view and Chyna was going to make history by becoming the first female IC champion. The PPV was on Sunday and it turned out that Jeff’s contract had expired the day before. He walked into the arena for the PPV without his gear and went straight to Vince. Backstage, we all could hear the yelling in Vince’s office. Jeff was demanding that Vince pay him all the money he was owed from previous events and the money for the match he was going to do that night or he wasn’t going to go to the ring. Shane, Vince’s son, was really vocal — he was cussing Jeff out and was ready to beat the **** out of him. Jeff is a mild-mannered guy who wouldn’t fight anybody, so he just sat there and held his ground.
Vince said he’d make sure Jarrett was paid, but Jeff said he wanted the money wired into his account immediately before he brought his bag and the IC belt in. Otherwise he was getting on a plane and going home. I thought it was wrong to do that. I sort of understand where he was coming from because it sometimes took up to six months to get our checks from a PPV. He was owed a lot of money and I guess he was worried that Vince wouldn’t pay him. Even so, you don’t hold somebody up like that. Management had spent so much money building up that match as one of the main events that they couldn’t turn it around. They had to deliver Jarrett vs Chyna, and since Jarrett was the IC champ going in, he had Vince over a barrel. When Jarrett confirmed with his wife that the money — over $300,000 — had arrived in his account, he brought his bag in, got dressed, and stayed away from everybody. Road Dogg, being the loyal friend he is, stayed by Jeff’s side.
Before his match, Jeff took his bag, set it by the door of the arena, and went to the ring. He did his job and put Chyna over in a match that involved lots of household objects, including a big bag of flour. He came back, covered in that flour, walked past everybody, didn’t say a word, grabbed his bag, and was gone. He went straight to the airport looking the way he looked. He got on a plane, flew home, and was back on WCW Nitro the next night.
Even though we had been beating WCW in the ratings wars for a long time, they were still trying to come back and sign people from under Vince’s nose. J.R. was told to secure us all. He almost lost his job over the Jarrett oversight. He got reamed out huge for that.
We’d talked for hours on the plane and he hadn’t said a word about jumping ship. I guess he’d had enough of being ignored in favor of Shawn and his gang. Still, no matter how I felt about the Clique, I felt like Luger was a traitor. None of the boys could believe it. Vince had invested huge money in Luger, paid him well, and given him every chance to be the biggest star in wrestling, including a highly publicized bus tour around the country to build a fan base. Yet Lex just upped and left. Where’s the loyalty? I’ve always felt that when someone is good to you, you have to be loyal. And Vince was very good to Luger. I thought that he just never clicked with the WWF audience. He fit in better with WCW because that’s where he started — he seemed like a fish out of water in the WWF. That’s no excuse though. You don’t just up and leave without a word of explanation.
Luger wasn’t the only one who acted like a jerk that year — Jeff Jarrett took his ball and went home too. He was about to work a program with Road Dogg and he didn’t like what they were planning to do, so he decided to walk out on the big company that had made him a star so he could jump to WCW. And he and Road Dogg were good friends — or so Road Dogg thought.
When Jeff wanted to leave the WWF, Road Dogg stuck with him and left too, but when they got to Atlanta, WCW only wanted Jarrett. Jeff didn’t go to bat for Road Dogg; he just took the offer WCW gave him and left his so-called friend behind without a job. Jeff’s a charming guy to your face but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
Chyna had been working with my old friend Jeff Jarrett. Jeff had returned to the WWF after having a poor run in WCW and Vince let him come back in order to humiliate him on TV. Vince is a businessman and signs people because he wants to make money with them but I think he also likes to set them up to humiliate them if they’ve wronged him. This time, Jeff ended up with the upper hand.
Jeff’s contract was coming to an end and Jim Ross was told to sign him to an extension. For whatever reason, it slipped through the cracks and Jeff kept quiet about his contractual status. They had been building a match between Jeff and Chyna for weeks. It was one of the featured matches at the No Mercy pay-per-view and Chyna was going to make history by becoming the first female IC champion. The PPV was on Sunday and it turned out that Jeff’s contract had expired the day before. He walked into the arena for the PPV without his gear and went straight to Vince. Backstage, we all could hear the yelling in Vince’s office. Jeff was demanding that Vince pay him all the money he was owed from previous events and the money for the match he was going to do that night or he wasn’t going to go to the ring. Shane, Vince’s son, was really vocal — he was cussing Jeff out and was ready to beat the **** out of him. Jeff is a mild-mannered guy who wouldn’t fight anybody, so he just sat there and held his ground.
Vince said he’d make sure Jarrett was paid, but Jeff said he wanted the money wired into his account immediately before he brought his bag and the IC belt in. Otherwise he was getting on a plane and going home. I thought it was wrong to do that. I sort of understand where he was coming from because it sometimes took up to six months to get our checks from a PPV. He was owed a lot of money and I guess he was worried that Vince wouldn’t pay him. Even so, you don’t hold somebody up like that. Management had spent so much money building up that match as one of the main events that they couldn’t turn it around. They had to deliver Jarrett vs Chyna, and since Jarrett was the IC champ going in, he had Vince over a barrel. When Jarrett confirmed with his wife that the money — over $300,000 — had arrived in his account, he brought his bag in, got dressed, and stayed away from everybody. Road Dogg, being the loyal friend he is, stayed by Jeff’s side.
Before his match, Jeff took his bag, set it by the door of the arena, and went to the ring. He did his job and put Chyna over in a match that involved lots of household objects, including a big bag of flour. He came back, covered in that flour, walked past everybody, didn’t say a word, grabbed his bag, and was gone. He went straight to the airport looking the way he looked. He got on a plane, flew home, and was back on WCW Nitro the next night.
Even though we had been beating WCW in the ratings wars for a long time, they were still trying to come back and sign people from under Vince’s nose. J.R. was told to secure us all. He almost lost his job over the Jarrett oversight. He got reamed out huge for that.
Bam Bam Story & More Kliq Stories
My job continued to be making other people look good, and one of the people who needed to look very good in the lead up to WrestleMania was Bam Bam. He was going to be in the main event with Lawrence Taylor, so he needed to get as much momentum as possible. I worked with him several times, putting him over. Everything seemed fine and he was pleasant and easy to work with. But one day, without warning, he threw me under the bus. I was really shocked. Somebody came up to me backstage and said, “Hey Bob, I heard you didn’t want to put Bam Bam over last night?” Everyone was apparently saying that I hadn’t wanted to do the job for Bam Bam. That was ******** and I said so — I never refused to do a job in my career. I had suggested that we used a different finish to our match the previous night. We had been doing the exact same finish in all of our matches, so I thought it would be good to switch it up (but still have Bam Bam win). He agreed to go with the different finish. I was trying to make him look versatile and I guess I shouldn’t have bothered.
Anyway, I asked around and found out that Bam Bam had told one of the agents that I didn’t want to lose to him. I confronted Bam Bam in the locker room in front of everybody and asked why he had said that I didn’t want to put him over. He said, “I didn’t say that . . .” I demanded, “So what did you say?” and he responded, “All I said is that you wanted to change the finish. . . .” He didn’t tell them that I’d only suggested altering the finish but not the result, and he didn’t explain that it was only because we were using the same finish all the time. He just didn’t say anything. I told him that it was a chicken**** thing to do. He apologized and said that he was having a bad day, he took it wrong, he didn’t mean to make me look bad and everything. I couldn’t believe it. Hell, that “misunderstanding” could have cost me my job! That was my first lesson in not trusting anybody. I didn’t want to get a reputation as a troublemaker. You don’t want that reputation in wrestling.
I made sure to talk to Pat Patterson about it and explain what really happened. Pat was understanding and said it was fine. I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any heat with the office. I learned from the situation and I didn’t let any more trouble happen with Bam Bam after that. Whenever I worked with him, I kept it simple. I said he should just tell me what he wanted to do and I would do it. That way, he couldn’t go back and say that I wasn’t cooperating.
Bam Bam wasn’t happy about a lot of things at that point, so I guess that’s why he was acting out. He knew he was going to be losing to the football player at WrestleMania in front of a huge audience and he didn’t like it one bit. I agreed with him — I thought he had every right to complain. They were bringing in a guy from outside our world and having him beat a professional wrestler. If somebody from the outside comes in, they shouldn’t be able to beat us at what we do. It would have been one thing if Lawrence Taylor had been fighting a nobody who lost to all the wrestlers. You wouldn’t expect a wrestler to beat Tiger Woods in a game of golf, for example, so why should a wrestler be expected to potentially sacrifice all the credibility he’s built up over the years in order to put over somebody who isn’t even in the industry?
Bam Bam was your consummate tough-guy wrestler, well over 300 pounds and feared in the wrestling world, and now he was going to lose to a retired football player? That didn’t seem right to me. I didn’t like the match either — Bam Bam just about killed himself to get L.T. over and had to lead him through everything. L.T. had no idea what he was doing and Bam Bam was pretty much holding his hand through the whole thing and sacrificing himself. He main-evented WrestleMania, something everyone in wrestling aspires to do, but he wasn’t happy about how it went down.
They tried to keep Bam Bam happy afterwards and gave him a huge payout for the match. I heard it was something like a quarter of a million dollars. They promised that they’d turn him babyface after ’Mania and give him a big push to get him to the top of the card in order to rebuild his credibility. That didn’t work out. Shawn and Kevin were deep in Vince’s ear by this point and made sure that most of the attention was on them, so Bam Bam didn’t really have a chance to get over as a babyface. Not happy with the way things were going, he left the company later that year. He main-evented WrestleMania in April, received the most mainstream publicity of any wrestler in the world at that point, and was gone by November. That’s ****** up. But that’s how things were once the Clique took over.
By this point, Kevin Nash (as Diesel) was the WWF champion, and Shawn and Razor (Scott Hall) were working on top too. Even though Nash was drawing nothing as champion and business was down, they had a lot of stroke and they were damn sure using it. The only other guys who were getting anything were Bret and ’Taker because they were already at the top when the Clique got there. I was convinced that Shawn had something over Vince. I had no idea what, but there was something there. How else could Shawn have had so much power? Vince allowed the Clique to manipulate everything, the way every storyline went, the way every talent was used. They dictated everything.
It was a shame to see Shawn acting up, because he was such a talented worker that he didn’t need to resort to politics and being a jerk. He was messed up all the time too — always drinking, always doing something. A lot of the boys were frustrated with his behavior but they didn’t say anything. Everybody knew how much the Clique had Vince’s ear and that, if they didn’t like you, they’d bury you in a heartbeat. Take Shane Douglas, for example — Shane was getting over. He had great promos, he was a good worker, and he knew how to get heat. I thought he was going to be one of the top guys because he was damn good. Shane didn’t act like he thought he was a big star or anything but Shawn and his buddies didn’t like him, so they shoved him right out the door. They did the same with “Sycho” Sid Eudy.
It seemed to me like they were just afraid somebody was going to get over more than them, so they held everyone else down. They were making a ton of money and I didn’t get why they had a problem with someone else making money too. After all, the more people we have making money for the company, the more we all get paid. But all Shawn wanted to do was work with his buddies. It was clear that Bret didn’t like the way things were going either — Vince was the owner of the company but you had these two guys, Shawn and Kevin, who were dictating how everything went and who was going to do what.
The Clique just kept on ******g with people and wanting to work only with each other, hogging all the money. Anybody who looked like he could get over and make some money was put in his place. The prime example of that was Sid Eudy — Kevin and Shawn didn’t like him. Sid is misunderstood; he’s very humorous, in a sarcastic way, and people take it wrong. He was always good to me. When we traveled together, he knew I wasn’t making a lot so he paid for our rental car, the hotel, a lot of my meals. I wouldn’t have made it without him — I owe him a lot. I think I helped him out a lot too, by keeping him sane!
Sid wasn’t a good worker but he cut a great promo and he had a great look. He was over huge, so of course Vince was going to use him to draw. I guess Kevin and Shawn didn’t like the thought of someone else getting a piece of the action so they stepped in. Nash, especially, felt threatened by him because they were both big men, but Sid was over and Nash just hadn’t worked out as champion. They butted heads a lot when they were going over matches. Sid was set in his ways and wasn’t about to back down to anybody. He wouldn’t let upper management or the other boys push him around or abuse his character.
After the Clique pushed Sid out of the main event picture, they kept sticking it to him — I guess to prove a point or something. In January 1996, they pushed it too far. He and I traveled to the arena together. Sid came up to me a while after we’d arrived and said, “How do you want to beat me?” “You’re ******g with me, right?” I replied.“No,” he said, “we’re wrestling tonight and they want you over.” I asked him if he was mad at me. “**** no,” he said, “It’s them . . . they’re ******g with me. **** this place. I’m done after tonight.”
I wasn’t offended that he was mad at having to lose to me — it was an insult to him. Here you have me, who loses to everyone all the time, and there you have Sid, this big monster, and he had to put me over clean? I was very uncomfortable. He was pitching an absolute fit backstage and I was caught in the middle of it. We did the match and it was fine — I won with a cross-body off the top or something like that. The whole time we were out there, though, I felt so bad for him. It wasn’t right, what Kevin and Shawn were doing to him. But what could I do? I did what I was told or I found another job; it was as simple as that.
Afterwards, Sid came backstage and was selling that he got injured. He said he hurt his neck. He was lying about that — since we had been traveling together, I knew the truth. He just didn’t want to deal with all the politics anymore so he left. Long before WrestleMania that year, Sid was gone.
As much as they claimed to be tight, the Clique’s members were a bunch of cowards who wouldn’t go to bat for each other when things got rough. At one point, when we were overseas on a tour, we heard about an incident that happened back in the States. The agent report was phoned through to us the day after the other crew had done a show in Madison Square Garden. Shawn had been smarting off — as usual — to the boys earlier in the day. He’d made the mistake of smarting off one too many times to Ronnie Harris. You don’t **** with either of the Harris Twins.
By now, Shawn and Kid didn’t change with the rest of the boys; they’d got themselves their own private dressing room. The Harris boys paid them a visit. Donnie stood outside the door to make sure nobody got in. Ronnie went inside, propped a chair up against the door, and put a table in the way to make sure nobody got out. He grabbed Shawn by the throat and slammed him up against the wall, then slammed him on the table and started choking him out. He was practically killing him and Kid just stood there and watched. Didn’t say a thing, didn’t do a thing. Now, if I were to see my friend getting choked out, regardless of whether he had it coming or not, I would intervene. I never understood why Sean didn’t.
When the agent explained what had happened, I was sitting at the back of the bus playing trump with Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, and Yokozuna. Nash was furious. Being the tough guy he is, he said, “If I was there, that wouldn’t have happened. I ought to go to Ronnie Harris’s house, knock on his door, and beat his ***.” Nobody else said anything until I said, “That’s exactly what you need to do, Kevin. You need to go beat his ***.” Nash just looked at me and didn’t say a word. He didn’t say a word to Ronnie Harris either when he saw him next. That was Kevin — he was always talking tough.
Whenever stuff went down between Shawn and Bret, Kevin said he would kick Bret’s ***. Nash is the biggest seven-foot-tall ***** I’ve ever seen in my life and Bret Hart would have eaten him for lunch. I’d tell Nash that to his face too — because he wouldn’t do jack**** to me.
Being a bunch of jackasses, they couldn’t just leave the company without doing something stupid too. I got back from (another) tour in Europe and Jerry Brisco told me what had happened at Madison Square Garden on Kevin and Scott’s last night with the company. Shawn and Kevin worked together, Shawn as the babyface, Kevin as the heel. After the match was over, Kevin got up and they started hugging and saying goodbye in front of the fans, despite the fact that they’d been fighting in a cage match just minutes before. Then Scott — another babyface — went out and joined in. Hunter was standing in Gorilla with Vince and Jerry and said, “Should I go out there and join them?” He knew that Jerry would have wanted to stop him, so he was looking to Vince for approval. Maybe it was because Shawn was his golden boy and he didn’t want to piss him off, but apparently Vince looked at Hunter and didn’t say a thing. Hunter went off and joined his buddies in the ring. Hunter was a heel and had fought Scott earlier in the night. Suddenly all of these guys were in front of the audience shaking hands and hugging and doing their little Clique hand sign like a bunch of ******g idiots. Jerry wanted to rip Hunter apart. He and Vince were both pissed.
Management couldn’t do anything to Hall and Nash because they were leaving. They wouldn’t do anything to Shawn because he was over, making the company a lot of money, and I’m sure there was something going on behind closed doors with Vince too. Hunter took the fall. He was scheduled to win the King of the Ring tournament so they took that away from him and made him do jobs for a couple of months. Steve Austin ended up winning the King of the Ring that year and took off.
I don’t think the punishment fit the crime for Hunter. Sure, he lost a bunch of matches for a while but he didn’t do a job to me or any of the other guys who could have gained from it. If he’d been made to do a job to me, that would have made a statement — especially since I’d busted my *** putting him over so much the summer before. After a couple of months, they figured he’d paid his dues and they gave him the Intercontinental title. That sure showed him.
Anyway, I asked around and found out that Bam Bam had told one of the agents that I didn’t want to lose to him. I confronted Bam Bam in the locker room in front of everybody and asked why he had said that I didn’t want to put him over. He said, “I didn’t say that . . .” I demanded, “So what did you say?” and he responded, “All I said is that you wanted to change the finish. . . .” He didn’t tell them that I’d only suggested altering the finish but not the result, and he didn’t explain that it was only because we were using the same finish all the time. He just didn’t say anything. I told him that it was a chicken**** thing to do. He apologized and said that he was having a bad day, he took it wrong, he didn’t mean to make me look bad and everything. I couldn’t believe it. Hell, that “misunderstanding” could have cost me my job! That was my first lesson in not trusting anybody. I didn’t want to get a reputation as a troublemaker. You don’t want that reputation in wrestling.
I made sure to talk to Pat Patterson about it and explain what really happened. Pat was understanding and said it was fine. I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any heat with the office. I learned from the situation and I didn’t let any more trouble happen with Bam Bam after that. Whenever I worked with him, I kept it simple. I said he should just tell me what he wanted to do and I would do it. That way, he couldn’t go back and say that I wasn’t cooperating.
Bam Bam wasn’t happy about a lot of things at that point, so I guess that’s why he was acting out. He knew he was going to be losing to the football player at WrestleMania in front of a huge audience and he didn’t like it one bit. I agreed with him — I thought he had every right to complain. They were bringing in a guy from outside our world and having him beat a professional wrestler. If somebody from the outside comes in, they shouldn’t be able to beat us at what we do. It would have been one thing if Lawrence Taylor had been fighting a nobody who lost to all the wrestlers. You wouldn’t expect a wrestler to beat Tiger Woods in a game of golf, for example, so why should a wrestler be expected to potentially sacrifice all the credibility he’s built up over the years in order to put over somebody who isn’t even in the industry?
Bam Bam was your consummate tough-guy wrestler, well over 300 pounds and feared in the wrestling world, and now he was going to lose to a retired football player? That didn’t seem right to me. I didn’t like the match either — Bam Bam just about killed himself to get L.T. over and had to lead him through everything. L.T. had no idea what he was doing and Bam Bam was pretty much holding his hand through the whole thing and sacrificing himself. He main-evented WrestleMania, something everyone in wrestling aspires to do, but he wasn’t happy about how it went down.
They tried to keep Bam Bam happy afterwards and gave him a huge payout for the match. I heard it was something like a quarter of a million dollars. They promised that they’d turn him babyface after ’Mania and give him a big push to get him to the top of the card in order to rebuild his credibility. That didn’t work out. Shawn and Kevin were deep in Vince’s ear by this point and made sure that most of the attention was on them, so Bam Bam didn’t really have a chance to get over as a babyface. Not happy with the way things were going, he left the company later that year. He main-evented WrestleMania in April, received the most mainstream publicity of any wrestler in the world at that point, and was gone by November. That’s ****** up. But that’s how things were once the Clique took over.
By this point, Kevin Nash (as Diesel) was the WWF champion, and Shawn and Razor (Scott Hall) were working on top too. Even though Nash was drawing nothing as champion and business was down, they had a lot of stroke and they were damn sure using it. The only other guys who were getting anything were Bret and ’Taker because they were already at the top when the Clique got there. I was convinced that Shawn had something over Vince. I had no idea what, but there was something there. How else could Shawn have had so much power? Vince allowed the Clique to manipulate everything, the way every storyline went, the way every talent was used. They dictated everything.
It was a shame to see Shawn acting up, because he was such a talented worker that he didn’t need to resort to politics and being a jerk. He was messed up all the time too — always drinking, always doing something. A lot of the boys were frustrated with his behavior but they didn’t say anything. Everybody knew how much the Clique had Vince’s ear and that, if they didn’t like you, they’d bury you in a heartbeat. Take Shane Douglas, for example — Shane was getting over. He had great promos, he was a good worker, and he knew how to get heat. I thought he was going to be one of the top guys because he was damn good. Shane didn’t act like he thought he was a big star or anything but Shawn and his buddies didn’t like him, so they shoved him right out the door. They did the same with “Sycho” Sid Eudy.
It seemed to me like they were just afraid somebody was going to get over more than them, so they held everyone else down. They were making a ton of money and I didn’t get why they had a problem with someone else making money too. After all, the more people we have making money for the company, the more we all get paid. But all Shawn wanted to do was work with his buddies. It was clear that Bret didn’t like the way things were going either — Vince was the owner of the company but you had these two guys, Shawn and Kevin, who were dictating how everything went and who was going to do what.
The Clique just kept on ******g with people and wanting to work only with each other, hogging all the money. Anybody who looked like he could get over and make some money was put in his place. The prime example of that was Sid Eudy — Kevin and Shawn didn’t like him. Sid is misunderstood; he’s very humorous, in a sarcastic way, and people take it wrong. He was always good to me. When we traveled together, he knew I wasn’t making a lot so he paid for our rental car, the hotel, a lot of my meals. I wouldn’t have made it without him — I owe him a lot. I think I helped him out a lot too, by keeping him sane!
Sid wasn’t a good worker but he cut a great promo and he had a great look. He was over huge, so of course Vince was going to use him to draw. I guess Kevin and Shawn didn’t like the thought of someone else getting a piece of the action so they stepped in. Nash, especially, felt threatened by him because they were both big men, but Sid was over and Nash just hadn’t worked out as champion. They butted heads a lot when they were going over matches. Sid was set in his ways and wasn’t about to back down to anybody. He wouldn’t let upper management or the other boys push him around or abuse his character.
After the Clique pushed Sid out of the main event picture, they kept sticking it to him — I guess to prove a point or something. In January 1996, they pushed it too far. He and I traveled to the arena together. Sid came up to me a while after we’d arrived and said, “How do you want to beat me?” “You’re ******g with me, right?” I replied.“No,” he said, “we’re wrestling tonight and they want you over.” I asked him if he was mad at me. “**** no,” he said, “It’s them . . . they’re ******g with me. **** this place. I’m done after tonight.”
I wasn’t offended that he was mad at having to lose to me — it was an insult to him. Here you have me, who loses to everyone all the time, and there you have Sid, this big monster, and he had to put me over clean? I was very uncomfortable. He was pitching an absolute fit backstage and I was caught in the middle of it. We did the match and it was fine — I won with a cross-body off the top or something like that. The whole time we were out there, though, I felt so bad for him. It wasn’t right, what Kevin and Shawn were doing to him. But what could I do? I did what I was told or I found another job; it was as simple as that.
Afterwards, Sid came backstage and was selling that he got injured. He said he hurt his neck. He was lying about that — since we had been traveling together, I knew the truth. He just didn’t want to deal with all the politics anymore so he left. Long before WrestleMania that year, Sid was gone.
As much as they claimed to be tight, the Clique’s members were a bunch of cowards who wouldn’t go to bat for each other when things got rough. At one point, when we were overseas on a tour, we heard about an incident that happened back in the States. The agent report was phoned through to us the day after the other crew had done a show in Madison Square Garden. Shawn had been smarting off — as usual — to the boys earlier in the day. He’d made the mistake of smarting off one too many times to Ronnie Harris. You don’t **** with either of the Harris Twins.
By now, Shawn and Kid didn’t change with the rest of the boys; they’d got themselves their own private dressing room. The Harris boys paid them a visit. Donnie stood outside the door to make sure nobody got in. Ronnie went inside, propped a chair up against the door, and put a table in the way to make sure nobody got out. He grabbed Shawn by the throat and slammed him up against the wall, then slammed him on the table and started choking him out. He was practically killing him and Kid just stood there and watched. Didn’t say a thing, didn’t do a thing. Now, if I were to see my friend getting choked out, regardless of whether he had it coming or not, I would intervene. I never understood why Sean didn’t.
When the agent explained what had happened, I was sitting at the back of the bus playing trump with Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, and Yokozuna. Nash was furious. Being the tough guy he is, he said, “If I was there, that wouldn’t have happened. I ought to go to Ronnie Harris’s house, knock on his door, and beat his ***.” Nobody else said anything until I said, “That’s exactly what you need to do, Kevin. You need to go beat his ***.” Nash just looked at me and didn’t say a word. He didn’t say a word to Ronnie Harris either when he saw him next. That was Kevin — he was always talking tough.
Whenever stuff went down between Shawn and Bret, Kevin said he would kick Bret’s ***. Nash is the biggest seven-foot-tall ***** I’ve ever seen in my life and Bret Hart would have eaten him for lunch. I’d tell Nash that to his face too — because he wouldn’t do jack**** to me.
Being a bunch of jackasses, they couldn’t just leave the company without doing something stupid too. I got back from (another) tour in Europe and Jerry Brisco told me what had happened at Madison Square Garden on Kevin and Scott’s last night with the company. Shawn and Kevin worked together, Shawn as the babyface, Kevin as the heel. After the match was over, Kevin got up and they started hugging and saying goodbye in front of the fans, despite the fact that they’d been fighting in a cage match just minutes before. Then Scott — another babyface — went out and joined in. Hunter was standing in Gorilla with Vince and Jerry and said, “Should I go out there and join them?” He knew that Jerry would have wanted to stop him, so he was looking to Vince for approval. Maybe it was because Shawn was his golden boy and he didn’t want to piss him off, but apparently Vince looked at Hunter and didn’t say a thing. Hunter went off and joined his buddies in the ring. Hunter was a heel and had fought Scott earlier in the night. Suddenly all of these guys were in front of the audience shaking hands and hugging and doing their little Clique hand sign like a bunch of ******g idiots. Jerry wanted to rip Hunter apart. He and Vince were both pissed.
Management couldn’t do anything to Hall and Nash because they were leaving. They wouldn’t do anything to Shawn because he was over, making the company a lot of money, and I’m sure there was something going on behind closed doors with Vince too. Hunter took the fall. He was scheduled to win the King of the Ring tournament so they took that away from him and made him do jobs for a couple of months. Steve Austin ended up winning the King of the Ring that year and took off.
I don’t think the punishment fit the crime for Hunter. Sure, he lost a bunch of matches for a while but he didn’t do a job to me or any of the other guys who could have gained from it. If he’d been made to do a job to me, that would have made a statement — especially since I’d busted my *** putting him over so much the summer before. After a couple of months, they figured he’d paid his dues and they gave him the Intercontinental title. That sure showed him.
"Creating your own push" AKA the Zack Ryder story
One of the things you hear the most in WWE meetings is that “you’ve got to make your own push.” That is such a load of crap. I always used to give them ideas for me and those ideas would get thrown back at me every time. It gets to the point where it’s useless to try and it doesn’t do any good to complain, so you just go out there and do your job. You will go as far as they want you to go. If they get behind you and stay behind you, they will push and push until you get over. If they lose interest, you’re done.
It all comes back to what they want to do with you. They decided I was going to put people over and I was stuck in that role. It didn’t matter how great my ideas were. You can get over by jobbing but only so much. If you get beat week in and week out, people are programmed to expect you to lose, and who is going to support a loser or buy his merchandise? You can’t get over and stay over with three to five minutes of TV time per week when you lose all the time.
Look at Mark Henry — he was basically a nothing guy for 14 years. Then the company figured out how to use him, got behind him, pushed the hell out of him, and he was suddenly World Champion. Good for Mark, but why did it take the company so long to figure it out? Without the machine behind you, you’re going nowhere.
Take the recent example of Zack Ryder. He was sitting at home, not going anywhere, so he came up with an internet show that got him a cult following and forced management’s hand. They put him on the main shows but they still treat him as a joke. Even if you “make your own push,” you’re only going to get as far as management wants to let you get. He’s a good worker too. I remember him from when I spent some time in Deep South Wrestling. He caught lightning in a bottle with that internet show. Back in my day, the internet wasn’t as mainstream; plus, we were on the road so much that we didn’t have time to do stuff like that! There are only so many different ways of trying to get over, and most of the time, WWE doesn’t like it if you think outside the box.
I did ask Vince what I needed to do but the thing you have to understand about him is that you have to come at him with ideas. I asked what I could do better and he told me, “You have all the skills, you just have to come up with ideas.” So I went away, came up with ideas for angles, programs, and catchphrases and they would either throw them away or use those ideas for other people.
I took an idea for a shirt to the merchandising team once, something that Shelton Benjamin came up with for me. He couldn’t use it for himself but he thought it fit my character perfectly. Undeniably, it would have sold. The merchandise guys agreed it was great, put together three different versions, and ran them past Vince. He shot the idea down, saying I wasn’t one of the guys they were pushing and they only had so much space in the merchandise catalog. When that next catalog came out, there were three new Chris Jericho shirts. There’s a lot of money to be made with merchandising but if they won’t give you anything, you can’t make any money.
It gets to the point where you just resign yourself to the fact that they’ll only push you if they want to, no matter what you do. Meanwhile, you do your job, you cash your check, and you go about your business.
It all comes back to what they want to do with you. They decided I was going to put people over and I was stuck in that role. It didn’t matter how great my ideas were. You can get over by jobbing but only so much. If you get beat week in and week out, people are programmed to expect you to lose, and who is going to support a loser or buy his merchandise? You can’t get over and stay over with three to five minutes of TV time per week when you lose all the time.
Look at Mark Henry — he was basically a nothing guy for 14 years. Then the company figured out how to use him, got behind him, pushed the hell out of him, and he was suddenly World Champion. Good for Mark, but why did it take the company so long to figure it out? Without the machine behind you, you’re going nowhere.
Take the recent example of Zack Ryder. He was sitting at home, not going anywhere, so he came up with an internet show that got him a cult following and forced management’s hand. They put him on the main shows but they still treat him as a joke. Even if you “make your own push,” you’re only going to get as far as management wants to let you get. He’s a good worker too. I remember him from when I spent some time in Deep South Wrestling. He caught lightning in a bottle with that internet show. Back in my day, the internet wasn’t as mainstream; plus, we were on the road so much that we didn’t have time to do stuff like that! There are only so many different ways of trying to get over, and most of the time, WWE doesn’t like it if you think outside the box.
I did ask Vince what I needed to do but the thing you have to understand about him is that you have to come at him with ideas. I asked what I could do better and he told me, “You have all the skills, you just have to come up with ideas.” So I went away, came up with ideas for angles, programs, and catchphrases and they would either throw them away or use those ideas for other people.
I took an idea for a shirt to the merchandising team once, something that Shelton Benjamin came up with for me. He couldn’t use it for himself but he thought it fit my character perfectly. Undeniably, it would have sold. The merchandise guys agreed it was great, put together three different versions, and ran them past Vince. He shot the idea down, saying I wasn’t one of the guys they were pushing and they only had so much space in the merchandise catalog. When that next catalog came out, there were three new Chris Jericho shirts. There’s a lot of money to be made with merchandising but if they won’t give you anything, you can’t make any money.
It gets to the point where you just resign yourself to the fact that they’ll only push you if they want to, no matter what you do. Meanwhile, you do your job, you cash your check, and you go about your business.
Brawl for All AKA the $100k payday for winning shoot fights.
There was a load of the mid-card guys floating around doing nothing. Then somebody had an idea about a shoot fighting competition, which ended up becoming the Brawl for All.
They decided to take 16 of the guys who weren’t doing anything and put them in a tough-man tournament. They were going to have us go out there, on a live-TV wrestling show, and fight for real in an attempt to get some ratings. It was also an attempt to get a wrestler by the name of “Dr. Death” Steve Williams over. Jim Ross, who was in charge of talent, had been lobbying to bring his buddy Steve in for a long time but Creative didn’t know how to do it. Steve had wrestled in Japan for the majority of his career and had a reputation as a genuine badass, so they figured they would introduce him in the Brawl for All, he’d walk through everybody, and boom, they’d have a credible guy they could leapfrog over everybody else to put up against Austin in the main events. Everybody backstage thought it was a bunch of ********. >J.R. was shoving Steve down everybody’s throats, saying he was going to destroy everybody. Nobody had a problem with Steve before, but J.R. was putting him over so often that the boys resented him and hoped he’d get knocked out.
They got together their group of 16 mid-card wrestlers who they figured were the tough guys. They put Bart in the tournament but I wasn’t included. They didn’t think that Sparky Plugg could fight. That pissed me off. Obviously, they didn’t know that Ol’ Sparky was a tough ************! Most of the people they had in there were pretty tough. Some of them talked a good fight but couldn’t back it up. Tiger Ali Singh had been bragging that he was a shoot fighter and a bare-knuckle champion and could do this and that, but when it came to it, he chickened out and said he wouldn’t do it.
They needed a replacement and Bradshaw told Bruce Prichard, who was one of the guys in charge of organizing the whole thing, “Bob may not look like anything much but he’ll surprise you. . . .” Bruce gave me a call to ask if I wanted in. I said, “Hell yeah, I don’t know why you didn’t ask me in the first place!” I was pretty excited because I figured I could make some decent money and I’d have a chance to show them how tough I actually was.
They explained the rules to us. Three rounds, one minute a round. We would get points for takedowns and knockdowns. A knockout would end it. We were told the winner would get $100,000 and that each time we fought, we would get five grand whether we won or lost. Sure, I thought — they’re not going to pay us $5,000 each match for doing this! But they genuinely did.
As soon as Steve Blackman found out he was in the tournament, he started training for it. He was dead serious about hurting people, planning to take people’s knees out to win that hundred grand. In the meeting when the rules were explained, they told us that it was anything goes. Steve said, “So that means that if I want to take somebody’s knee out with a kick, I can do it, right?” Right about then they decided they needed to make some rules. I think they got worried that Steve might kill people and you know what? He probably could have. There is nobody more dangerous than Steve Blackman, period. He knows every element of the fighting game; he’s strong, he’s smart, he’s lightning quick — he’s a well-rounded fighter. Unfortunately for him but fortunately for the rest of us, Steve hurt himself training against a 300 pound guy who rolled on Steve’s leg and blew out his knee. If that hadn’t happened, Steve would have won the whole thing, hands down.
My first match turned out to be against my tag partner, Bart Gunn. Because Bart and I were riding together, we had a chance to talk before the fight. We agreed that whatever happened, happened. I knew that Bart used to do tough-man contests too, so I had my work cut out for me. Even though he’d never wrestled a bear, he was 6'5" and 260 pounds and I was 6'1" and about 220. That’s a heck of a size difference but I wasn’t about to back down from anybody. We went out there and laid into each other. It was brutal. He hit me so ******g hard, I ended up on the other side of the ring. I have no idea how I got there but he didn’t knock me out. We went all three rounds and the judges gave the points win to Bart. It turned out to be one of the best fights in the tournament. We were still friends afterwards — we’d cleaned each other’s clocks pretty good but neither of us was mad at the other. He told me, “I hit you with some good shots — it shocked me when you didn’t go down.” I had a black eye for a solid week after that fight but he never knocked me out. I got my five grand and I opened a lot of eyes in the back by showing that I was tougher than anybody had given me credit for.
Someone who wasn’t as tough as they thought was J.R.’s boy, Steve Williams. I saw him fighting Pierre Ouellette in his first round match and he didn’t look good. They were just swinging at each other and Steve barely survived. He didn’t knock out Pierre, so it went to points and it was so clear they had gimmicked the score so it looked like Steve had dominated. I thought, “They’re going to fix the whole thing and make it a work.” I knew that if they didn’t, Steve wasn’t going to win.
Even so, Steve was up against Bart in the second round and I knew for sure Bart was going to knock him out. I’d just fought the guy and felt his punches. Steve was in trouble and he didn’t know it. Earlier, when Bart and I were driving to a show, I told him, “You know they want Steve to win — you’re fixing to throw a wrench in their whole plan.” Bart said, “Yep, I’m going to knock him out.” Later during the same journey, Bart decided to call Bruce Prichard to say, “Get ready to make that check out to me because I’m going to knock J.R.’s boy out.” Bruce said, “That’s great, man — if you do, you do.” Bart knew Bruce wasn’t taking him seriously. He said, “You think I’m kidding? I promise you, I’m going to knock him out . . .”
The night of the fight came. We were in Anaheim at the Arrowhead Pond and the TV monitor backstage was sold out. You could not get near that monitor; there was no room to move. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Steve and Bart started fighting — it was pretty even, punch for punch. I was counting the takedowns and it became clear that they weren’t going to do it legit. Steve and Bart were even but the scoring onscreen had Steve with more takedowns.
In the second round, Steve started gassing. Bart was outpunching him, staying on him and taking him down. Bart owned Steve in the second round but the scorecards came up and they still had Steve ahead. All the boys in the back were getting pissed. The third round was just like the second — Bart was kicking Steve’s *** but we all knew that he was going to lose unless he knocked Steve out. With the fight nearly over, Steve was still in there and then, out of nowhere, Bart nailed him with a left hand and Steve just ******g dropped. Everybody in the back popped huge. The 60 or so people watching the monitor blew the roof off that place.
Terry Funk actually got upset with that because he felt the boys were disrespecting Steve, who is considered a god in wrestling, especially in Japan, but nobody popped because they hated Steve or wanted to see him hurt. They popped because they knew the judges had been ******g with the scorecards and the wrong man would have won. The feeling was, “**** you, you’re not going to screw Bart out of this.” There was no disrespect meant to Steve, just hostility towards the office for sending us all out there, telling us the whole thing was a shoot, and then trying to fix the outcome to suit their plans.
If I ever wanted any proof that I was right on this one, I got it that night. I was getting changed near the trainers’ area. They had dragged Steve from the ring to the back and were checking him over. Steve’s jaw was dislocated and his hamstring was torn. I heard Steve say to the guys who were working on him, “I don’t know what they’re going to do now . . . they already paid me the money to win this thing.” Jim Ross was absolutely furious. For weeks, he’d been telling everybody that Steve was going to walk all over the competition, and now I had found out they’d paid him the prize money before he’d even won the tournament. I couldn’t believe it.
Bart was up against the Godfather next. Godfather was a big, tough ************ but I knew Bart would take him. I was watching the fight backstage and ’Taker was there, sitting in a chair in front of the monitor. A lot of people were watching again and I said out loud, “This is gonna be interesting.” ’Taker turned around, looked at me, and said, “That’s your boy, isn’t it?” I said, “You’re damn right it is.” He said, “Fifty bucks?”We shook on it.
’Taker thought Godfather would take Bart out no problem. Bart ended up knocking his *** out in the third round. ’Taker didn’t say a word; he just got up and walked off. I thought he was pissed but he came back later that day and handed me a fifty. Easy money. Bart went on to the final against Bradshaw and knocked him out colder than a well digger’s ***. There were rumors that, after Bart knocked out Steve Williams, they told Godfather and Bradshaw to take a dive. Why would anybody drop their hands to get knocked out, especially when there’s a lot of money on the line? Bart just knocks ************* out; end of story.
In the office, they wanted Bart to get his *** kicked. J.R. was being vindictive because Bart ****** their plan up and ****** his buddy up. They paid Bart the prize money, they’d already paid the same amount to Steve Williams, and they had to pay everyone else for their matches, so the whole thing must have cost them $350,000 in payouts, without giving them the result they wanted. Steve couldn’t work with Austin now and they couldn’t put Bart in his place. Bart had been around for six years as an underneath guy that nobody was going to buy against Austin no matter what management did. Even though J.R. was wrong about just “knowing” that Steve would walk through everybody, he didn’t get any heat for it; Bart did. J.R. said he didn’t have hard feelings towards Bart but he did for damn sure. The next thing you know, they’d talked Bart into fighting Butterbean at WrestleMania.
Butterbean was this huge, fat boxer who threw too strong a punch for anyone in the WWF to go toe to toe with (except Blackman — Blackman would have killed him). This guy was a pro boxer. I don’t care who you are, you don’t play someone else’s game. None of us should have tried to box him but they got into Bart’s head and brainwashed him into thinking that he could beat Butterbean in a straight-up boxing match. Bart bought into the hype. He didn’t change as a person but he did start overestimating himself. If Bart had gone into it like a regular street fight, he would have shot in there and taken him down because Bart’s a good amateur wrestler. If he was going to stand there and box the guy, he had no chance. Boxing is about angles. Fighting has no rules. Butterbean said that he didn’t want fighting — just boxing. That was the deal for him to come in. The WWF still promoted the match as under Brawl for All rules but Bart was told it had to be a straight-up boxing match. They sent him off for 10 weeks to train with Danny Hodge in New York. Bart lost weight and got into awesome shape, but I don’t care who you are, 10 weeks of training won’t prepare you to beat a professional boxer. The whole deal was set up purely to humiliate Bart because he had humiliated Jim Ross’s boy “Dr Death.” The office knew he didn’t have a chance. Even if Bart had beaten Butterbean, they would have found another way to screw with him.
When the fight rolled around at WrestleMania XV, everybody was watching the monitor backstage. The match only lasted 35 seconds and Butterbean nearly took Bart’s head off. It looked like he broke his neck. Everybody’s jaw was on the floor backstage. It was un-******g-believable. I thought Bart was dead, Butterbean hit him that hard. The trainers brought him back around when he was in the ring. When they walked him to the back, nobody said a word. You could hear a pin drop.
That was basically the end of Bart’s WWF career on TV. In reality, his career with the WWF had ended the moment he had knocked Steve Williams out. He didn’t know the repercussions would be that big, and neither did I. We knew they thought Steve was going to win but we didn’t know they’d planned a whole storyline based on his win, we didn’t know they had paid him off already — nobody told anybody what the plan was. If they had sat us all down and said, “We need to make this a work but we want it to look like a shoot,” that would have been fine. But because J.R. was so convinced that nobody could beat Steve Williams, he had everybody else in the office thinking it was a done deal too. The whole Brawl for All idea was a bad way to get a wrestler over. Wrestling is a work. If you want someone to get over in order to put him against the top guy, you better make sure everything is a work before he gets to that top guy. If you’re going to make it a real shoot, you’ve got to be prepared to go with what happens. You can’t guarantee a result from a shoot.
Steve Williams had no idea what he was letting himself in for; he didn’t know Bart. I spoke to Steve about it later in the year and even he said it was a really bad way to do business. If the boys are told that they are going to go out there and fight for money for real, they’re going to do what it takes to win. If management wanted a specific result, they should have told us what they wanted. Instead, they basically wasted nearly half a million dollars and ended the careers of both Bart and Steve Williams. A lot of the other guys got injured during the Brawl for All too, and it really didn’t do anything for ratings. It just wasn’t worth it. Everybody thought the whole thing was a very bad idea. The WWF learned from that and never tried it again.
Since they were now dead set on crushing Bart, they ended the New Midnight Express. That didn’t bother me because we were going nowhere fast. I went to Creative after Bart won the Brawl for All and suggested that he and I do a rematch at a pay-per-view and base the build-up on the fact that he hadn’t knocked me out. I thought it would draw a little interest because this guy had knocked out fighters who weighed 300 pounds or more, but he couldn’t finish me off when I was only 220. I could have gone out and done promos talking about how the scorecards were a poor indicator and that, until one of us knocked the other one out, we had unfinished business. Then we could have gone out and done a shoot fight. I’m not saying you could have sold a pay-per-view on the match, but it would have been something to add to the presentation and help draw some money. It was definitely better than doing nothing with either of us — but doing nothing was the thing they went with and they pissed on my idea. They didn’t have any plans for me and Bart.
They decided to take 16 of the guys who weren’t doing anything and put them in a tough-man tournament. They were going to have us go out there, on a live-TV wrestling show, and fight for real in an attempt to get some ratings. It was also an attempt to get a wrestler by the name of “Dr. Death” Steve Williams over. Jim Ross, who was in charge of talent, had been lobbying to bring his buddy Steve in for a long time but Creative didn’t know how to do it. Steve had wrestled in Japan for the majority of his career and had a reputation as a genuine badass, so they figured they would introduce him in the Brawl for All, he’d walk through everybody, and boom, they’d have a credible guy they could leapfrog over everybody else to put up against Austin in the main events. Everybody backstage thought it was a bunch of ********. >J.R. was shoving Steve down everybody’s throats, saying he was going to destroy everybody. Nobody had a problem with Steve before, but J.R. was putting him over so often that the boys resented him and hoped he’d get knocked out.
They got together their group of 16 mid-card wrestlers who they figured were the tough guys. They put Bart in the tournament but I wasn’t included. They didn’t think that Sparky Plugg could fight. That pissed me off. Obviously, they didn’t know that Ol’ Sparky was a tough ************! Most of the people they had in there were pretty tough. Some of them talked a good fight but couldn’t back it up. Tiger Ali Singh had been bragging that he was a shoot fighter and a bare-knuckle champion and could do this and that, but when it came to it, he chickened out and said he wouldn’t do it.
They needed a replacement and Bradshaw told Bruce Prichard, who was one of the guys in charge of organizing the whole thing, “Bob may not look like anything much but he’ll surprise you. . . .” Bruce gave me a call to ask if I wanted in. I said, “Hell yeah, I don’t know why you didn’t ask me in the first place!” I was pretty excited because I figured I could make some decent money and I’d have a chance to show them how tough I actually was.
They explained the rules to us. Three rounds, one minute a round. We would get points for takedowns and knockdowns. A knockout would end it. We were told the winner would get $100,000 and that each time we fought, we would get five grand whether we won or lost. Sure, I thought — they’re not going to pay us $5,000 each match for doing this! But they genuinely did.
As soon as Steve Blackman found out he was in the tournament, he started training for it. He was dead serious about hurting people, planning to take people’s knees out to win that hundred grand. In the meeting when the rules were explained, they told us that it was anything goes. Steve said, “So that means that if I want to take somebody’s knee out with a kick, I can do it, right?” Right about then they decided they needed to make some rules. I think they got worried that Steve might kill people and you know what? He probably could have. There is nobody more dangerous than Steve Blackman, period. He knows every element of the fighting game; he’s strong, he’s smart, he’s lightning quick — he’s a well-rounded fighter. Unfortunately for him but fortunately for the rest of us, Steve hurt himself training against a 300 pound guy who rolled on Steve’s leg and blew out his knee. If that hadn’t happened, Steve would have won the whole thing, hands down.
My first match turned out to be against my tag partner, Bart Gunn. Because Bart and I were riding together, we had a chance to talk before the fight. We agreed that whatever happened, happened. I knew that Bart used to do tough-man contests too, so I had my work cut out for me. Even though he’d never wrestled a bear, he was 6'5" and 260 pounds and I was 6'1" and about 220. That’s a heck of a size difference but I wasn’t about to back down from anybody. We went out there and laid into each other. It was brutal. He hit me so ******g hard, I ended up on the other side of the ring. I have no idea how I got there but he didn’t knock me out. We went all three rounds and the judges gave the points win to Bart. It turned out to be one of the best fights in the tournament. We were still friends afterwards — we’d cleaned each other’s clocks pretty good but neither of us was mad at the other. He told me, “I hit you with some good shots — it shocked me when you didn’t go down.” I had a black eye for a solid week after that fight but he never knocked me out. I got my five grand and I opened a lot of eyes in the back by showing that I was tougher than anybody had given me credit for.
Someone who wasn’t as tough as they thought was J.R.’s boy, Steve Williams. I saw him fighting Pierre Ouellette in his first round match and he didn’t look good. They were just swinging at each other and Steve barely survived. He didn’t knock out Pierre, so it went to points and it was so clear they had gimmicked the score so it looked like Steve had dominated. I thought, “They’re going to fix the whole thing and make it a work.” I knew that if they didn’t, Steve wasn’t going to win.
Even so, Steve was up against Bart in the second round and I knew for sure Bart was going to knock him out. I’d just fought the guy and felt his punches. Steve was in trouble and he didn’t know it. Earlier, when Bart and I were driving to a show, I told him, “You know they want Steve to win — you’re fixing to throw a wrench in their whole plan.” Bart said, “Yep, I’m going to knock him out.” Later during the same journey, Bart decided to call Bruce Prichard to say, “Get ready to make that check out to me because I’m going to knock J.R.’s boy out.” Bruce said, “That’s great, man — if you do, you do.” Bart knew Bruce wasn’t taking him seriously. He said, “You think I’m kidding? I promise you, I’m going to knock him out . . .”
The night of the fight came. We were in Anaheim at the Arrowhead Pond and the TV monitor backstage was sold out. You could not get near that monitor; there was no room to move. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Steve and Bart started fighting — it was pretty even, punch for punch. I was counting the takedowns and it became clear that they weren’t going to do it legit. Steve and Bart were even but the scoring onscreen had Steve with more takedowns.
In the second round, Steve started gassing. Bart was outpunching him, staying on him and taking him down. Bart owned Steve in the second round but the scorecards came up and they still had Steve ahead. All the boys in the back were getting pissed. The third round was just like the second — Bart was kicking Steve’s *** but we all knew that he was going to lose unless he knocked Steve out. With the fight nearly over, Steve was still in there and then, out of nowhere, Bart nailed him with a left hand and Steve just ******g dropped. Everybody in the back popped huge. The 60 or so people watching the monitor blew the roof off that place.
Terry Funk actually got upset with that because he felt the boys were disrespecting Steve, who is considered a god in wrestling, especially in Japan, but nobody popped because they hated Steve or wanted to see him hurt. They popped because they knew the judges had been ******g with the scorecards and the wrong man would have won. The feeling was, “**** you, you’re not going to screw Bart out of this.” There was no disrespect meant to Steve, just hostility towards the office for sending us all out there, telling us the whole thing was a shoot, and then trying to fix the outcome to suit their plans.
If I ever wanted any proof that I was right on this one, I got it that night. I was getting changed near the trainers’ area. They had dragged Steve from the ring to the back and were checking him over. Steve’s jaw was dislocated and his hamstring was torn. I heard Steve say to the guys who were working on him, “I don’t know what they’re going to do now . . . they already paid me the money to win this thing.” Jim Ross was absolutely furious. For weeks, he’d been telling everybody that Steve was going to walk all over the competition, and now I had found out they’d paid him the prize money before he’d even won the tournament. I couldn’t believe it.
Bart was up against the Godfather next. Godfather was a big, tough ************ but I knew Bart would take him. I was watching the fight backstage and ’Taker was there, sitting in a chair in front of the monitor. A lot of people were watching again and I said out loud, “This is gonna be interesting.” ’Taker turned around, looked at me, and said, “That’s your boy, isn’t it?” I said, “You’re damn right it is.” He said, “Fifty bucks?”We shook on it.
’Taker thought Godfather would take Bart out no problem. Bart ended up knocking his *** out in the third round. ’Taker didn’t say a word; he just got up and walked off. I thought he was pissed but he came back later that day and handed me a fifty. Easy money. Bart went on to the final against Bradshaw and knocked him out colder than a well digger’s ***. There were rumors that, after Bart knocked out Steve Williams, they told Godfather and Bradshaw to take a dive. Why would anybody drop their hands to get knocked out, especially when there’s a lot of money on the line? Bart just knocks ************* out; end of story.
In the office, they wanted Bart to get his *** kicked. J.R. was being vindictive because Bart ****** their plan up and ****** his buddy up. They paid Bart the prize money, they’d already paid the same amount to Steve Williams, and they had to pay everyone else for their matches, so the whole thing must have cost them $350,000 in payouts, without giving them the result they wanted. Steve couldn’t work with Austin now and they couldn’t put Bart in his place. Bart had been around for six years as an underneath guy that nobody was going to buy against Austin no matter what management did. Even though J.R. was wrong about just “knowing” that Steve would walk through everybody, he didn’t get any heat for it; Bart did. J.R. said he didn’t have hard feelings towards Bart but he did for damn sure. The next thing you know, they’d talked Bart into fighting Butterbean at WrestleMania.
Butterbean was this huge, fat boxer who threw too strong a punch for anyone in the WWF to go toe to toe with (except Blackman — Blackman would have killed him). This guy was a pro boxer. I don’t care who you are, you don’t play someone else’s game. None of us should have tried to box him but they got into Bart’s head and brainwashed him into thinking that he could beat Butterbean in a straight-up boxing match. Bart bought into the hype. He didn’t change as a person but he did start overestimating himself. If Bart had gone into it like a regular street fight, he would have shot in there and taken him down because Bart’s a good amateur wrestler. If he was going to stand there and box the guy, he had no chance. Boxing is about angles. Fighting has no rules. Butterbean said that he didn’t want fighting — just boxing. That was the deal for him to come in. The WWF still promoted the match as under Brawl for All rules but Bart was told it had to be a straight-up boxing match. They sent him off for 10 weeks to train with Danny Hodge in New York. Bart lost weight and got into awesome shape, but I don’t care who you are, 10 weeks of training won’t prepare you to beat a professional boxer. The whole deal was set up purely to humiliate Bart because he had humiliated Jim Ross’s boy “Dr Death.” The office knew he didn’t have a chance. Even if Bart had beaten Butterbean, they would have found another way to screw with him.
When the fight rolled around at WrestleMania XV, everybody was watching the monitor backstage. The match only lasted 35 seconds and Butterbean nearly took Bart’s head off. It looked like he broke his neck. Everybody’s jaw was on the floor backstage. It was un-******g-believable. I thought Bart was dead, Butterbean hit him that hard. The trainers brought him back around when he was in the ring. When they walked him to the back, nobody said a word. You could hear a pin drop.
That was basically the end of Bart’s WWF career on TV. In reality, his career with the WWF had ended the moment he had knocked Steve Williams out. He didn’t know the repercussions would be that big, and neither did I. We knew they thought Steve was going to win but we didn’t know they’d planned a whole storyline based on his win, we didn’t know they had paid him off already — nobody told anybody what the plan was. If they had sat us all down and said, “We need to make this a work but we want it to look like a shoot,” that would have been fine. But because J.R. was so convinced that nobody could beat Steve Williams, he had everybody else in the office thinking it was a done deal too. The whole Brawl for All idea was a bad way to get a wrestler over. Wrestling is a work. If you want someone to get over in order to put him against the top guy, you better make sure everything is a work before he gets to that top guy. If you’re going to make it a real shoot, you’ve got to be prepared to go with what happens. You can’t guarantee a result from a shoot.
Steve Williams had no idea what he was letting himself in for; he didn’t know Bart. I spoke to Steve about it later in the year and even he said it was a really bad way to do business. If the boys are told that they are going to go out there and fight for money for real, they’re going to do what it takes to win. If management wanted a specific result, they should have told us what they wanted. Instead, they basically wasted nearly half a million dollars and ended the careers of both Bart and Steve Williams. A lot of the other guys got injured during the Brawl for All too, and it really didn’t do anything for ratings. It just wasn’t worth it. Everybody thought the whole thing was a very bad idea. The WWF learned from that and never tried it again.
Since they were now dead set on crushing Bart, they ended the New Midnight Express. That didn’t bother me because we were going nowhere fast. I went to Creative after Bart won the Brawl for All and suggested that he and I do a rematch at a pay-per-view and base the build-up on the fact that he hadn’t knocked me out. I thought it would draw a little interest because this guy had knocked out fighters who weighed 300 pounds or more, but he couldn’t finish me off when I was only 220. I could have gone out and done promos talking about how the scorecards were a poor indicator and that, until one of us knocked the other one out, we had unfinished business. Then we could have gone out and done a shoot fight. I’m not saying you could have sold a pay-per-view on the match, but it would have been something to add to the presentation and help draw some money. It was definitely better than doing nothing with either of us — but doing nothing was the thing they went with and they pissed on my idea. They didn’t have any plans for me and Bart.
! Thought for sure he would a lifer in the company.
thanks homie
