The Oral History of WrestleMania — Part Five: The New Generation
The following is a continued oral history of unsourced (sorry) quotes from numerous interviews over the years about WrestleManias of the mid-90’s “new generation” era, assembled by Wrestling Club with Darren & Brett, part of the non-profit radio station, WFMU.
Read Part 1: The Granddaddy of ’Em All
Read Part 2: Bigger. Better. Badder.
Read Part 3: What The World Is Watching
Read Part 4: Hulk Still Rules
A NEW ERA BEGINS
DAVID BIXENSPAN (journalist)
“Hulkamania was seemingly restored, and Yokozuna was the first monstrous opponent on his dance card. The two titans feuded on until the King of the Ring event. There, Hogan and Yoko battled, and in parallel to WrestleMania, the hero seemed poised to win. And again, it wasn’t to be: A Japanese ‘photographer’ situated outside the ring leaned in for a shot, and the camera exploded in Hogan’s face. The Hulkster was disoriented, and once again Yokozuna pulled out a victory — and regained the championship — thanks to Mr. Fuji’s conniving.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART (wrestler)
“Throughout that summer of 1993, Yokozuna was the man. He sat in his first-class seat stuffing his face like Henry VIII. Lex Luger was in first-class too, a perk left over from his old World Bodybuilding Federation contract. Back in coach, I tried not to let it bother me, but it did. I put Lex over without complaint. Although he was a mechanical worker who stuck to the basics and stayed there, he was a pro — safe, agreeable and easy to work with. I hoped maybe Vince would change his mind and put the belt back on me, but Lex was the one who got the SummerSlam match with Yoko.”
BRUCE PRICHARD (executive, manager)
“Vince McMahon tried to have that replacement for Hulk Hogan. He was looking for so many years where we thought; ‘what would you do if it were Hulk Hogan?’ Lex Luger was the anointed one, especially during this time.”
LEX LUGER (wrestler)
“I looked at Vince and said, ‘Vince, I know you’re really good at this, but how does a guy that’s been posing in mirrors as The Narcissist turn into an all-American good guy in one clean swoop?’ He said, ‘Lex, trust me. The people are going to love it.’”
JIM ROSS (commentator, executive)
“In one of my most unique assignments in WWE, I did a news feature on the deck of the aircraft carrier Intrepid on July 4, 1993, to begin the storyline pitting Luger vs. Yoko in a body slam challenge. WWE had a long-term plan to attempt to establish Luger as its “next big thing,” and to groom him to eventually become champion — in essence, the next Hogan. The “Lex Express” never quite finished the race but it certainly was no fault of WWE as it did all it could to recreate the magic of the Hulkster, but to no avail.”
DAVID BIXENSPAN
“That culminated in a newly heroic Lex Luger arriving via helicopter and slamming the sumo giant, thus igniting Yoko’s next feud.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“He just wasn’t living up to the potential. He wasn’t drawing people. They weren’t clamoring to see more of Lex Luger. They weren’t cheering him and going bananas when he came out, so it was Vince McMahon wanting to show us, and we just kept pushing Lex.”
LEX LUGER
To this day, people constantly bring it up. The youngsters from then are now in their late twenties and early thirties and they act like little kids when they talk to me. “Man, I saw you at a shopping mall on your Lex Express tour!” It definitely has an impact to this day and it was great to be a part of it.”
JERRY “THE KING” LAWLER (wrestler, commentator)
“When I got up to New York, Vince said, ‘we’re still going to use you [as a pro wrestler]’ and they did…Bret had this whole big family, all his brothers and sisters. And I go out there and say, ‘Stu and Helen Hart produced more tragedies than Shakespeare.’ That would piss Bret off, you know?”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“The WWF took another hit when Jerry Lawler was charged with having sex with an underaged girl. My entire Survivor Series match was centered around Lawler and his constant jabs at my family; without him, the match would mean nothing. Lawler was hastily edited out of the weekend TV show, with no explanation given to the fans, and Shawn was thrown in to replace him at Survivor Series.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“Bruce Hart had written a letter to Vince about an angle between him and Bret. The angle was pretty good. Bret didn’t want to do the angle with Bruce Hart, he wanted to do the angle with Owen.”
BRUCE HART (wrestler)
“Bret’s a bit of a mark for himself.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“As badly as Bruce needed a shot in the arm, Owen was a better worker, and he really deserved this chance.”
JIM ROSS
“It was a jealousy angle, and it revitalized him.”
KOFI KINGSTON (wrestler)
“Everything about Bret and Owen Hart was a situation anybody with siblings could identify with.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Vince had invited my brothers to have a brawl at the Survivor Series against three masked wrestlers and Shawn, with Stu managing from the floor. Owen was highlighted throughout the match, but midway through the match, as planned, he ‘inadvertently’ collided with me on the apron and ended up being the only Hart brother eliminated. After throwing a tantrum he left the ring, only to come out afterward when we were all celebrating.”
JIM ROSS
“People were surprised that Owen could play such a good heel. He’d seen so many good workers that he was very adaptive. He understood psychology from both sides.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“A week later Owen and I cut promos saying we’d patched everything up and were teaming up at the Royal Rumble to defeat the current WWF tag champs, The Quebecers. The storyline called for The Quebecers to badly injure my knee, and then the referee, Earl Hebner, would abruptly stop the match, declaring The Quebecers the winners. Owen acted like he was furious because I hadn’t tagged him in. As I struggled to my feet, Owen booted me hard in my injured knee, sending me crashing to the mat. The incensed crowd booed him out of the building because it looked to them like I wouldn’t be able to take part in the Rumble.”
JIM ROSS
“The winner of the Royal Rumble match earned a title match at WrestleMania and for the first time in Rumble history there were co-winners.”.
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“I limped out second to last, to a huge pop, and Lex and I eliminated the last two heels before facing off in a buildup that the fans had been waiting to see. After a flurry of punches, Lex picked me up with his back to the ropes and attempted to dump me out. I fought to free myself, but the two of us toppled backward over the top rope. It was critical to the storyline leading into WrestleMania X that our feet touched the ground at the exact same second. Vince’s popularity contest culminated in this moment. Pumping my fist in the air it was obvious to me the crowd was mine — though the refs declared it a draw.”
LEX LUGER
“It added a lot of interest going into WrestleMania X.”
HALL OF FAME 1994 INDUCTEES: ARNOLD SKAALAND, BOBO BRAZIL, BUDDY ROGERS, CHIEF JAY STRONGBOW, “CLASSY” FREDDIE BLASSIE, GORILLA MONSOON, JAMES DUDLEY
DAVE MELTZER
“The Hall started off as a joke, more of a friends and cronies Hall of Fame at first, combined with a few early Northeast legends like Argentina Rocca and Buddy Rogers. In the early years, there was no consideration of inducting people like Lou Thesz, Bruno Sammartino, Hulk Hogan, Bob Backlund, Verne Gagne, or anyone who wasn’t in favor of the McMahon family.”
WRESTLEMANIA X
VAUGHN JOHNSON (writer)
“This was the second time WrestleMania emanated from Madison Square Garden since the very first one back in 1985.”
VINCE RUSSO (writer, executive)
“WrestleMania X was memorable for me for many reasons, for starters, Linda McMahon scolded me for chewing gum at the FanFest. She said it didn’t look professional, and she was right. At the time I thought it was hysterical. To me, I was just a kid from Long Island, living the dream, working for the juggernaut of professional wrestling, and trying to keep my breath minty-fresh as I put over the WWF to nausea to anybody with a set of ears.”
DAVE MELTZER
“The reason Burt Reynolds had his hand in a cast is because he decked someone who tried to mug him two days earlier in San Diego, which is why he said how glad he was to be there.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“We considered doing something with Tonya Harding and bringing her in and her getting her ass kicked. She wasn’t interested.”
DAVE MELTZER
The lookalike Bill Clinton idea and two vignettes were really lame, even by Wrestlemania standards.”
VINCE RUSSO
“[Jennie Garth] was a special guest that night because 90210 was red-hot at the time, but she made it clear to everybody that she didn’t want to be there and was only there in body to collect the cash. She wouldn’t even look at anybody, all this was so below her. I can remember Burt Reynolds even being pissed by Jenny’s holier-than-thou attitude.”
DAVE MELTZER
“Wrestlemania X opened with a Little Richard lip-synch rendition of “America the Beautiful” complete with entourage by the Stamford, CT Baptist Church. Reportedly after the show there was heat in that Richard got out of the building after doing his thing and wouldn’t sign autographs for the guys backstage.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART vs OWEN HART
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“My Wrestlemania X match with Owen was a really special match we put together that day. Too many people today don’t realize how hard it is to put together a match like that — and even though we were brothers, it was the first time we ever wrestled each other in a singles match.”
NATALYA
“By then I was 12, and I remember thinking it was the coolest thing to see my uncles performing for the entire world, facing each other no less.”
OWEN HART (wrestler)
“That was my first real big match. Everyone figured, this is a joke, Owen’s going to get squashed.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“He played the nasty little brother, cheating viciously at every turn, and I kept outsmarting him, but never in a way that made me look overconfident or cocky.”
OWEN HART
“Some guys can do more talking in the ring, other guys do posing, body building, whatever the hell they do in the ring. But I don’t have the big body, and I’m not the big smooth talker, but I can get in the ring and wrestle.”
CESARO (wrestler)
“As a kid, I was a big Owen Hart fan, and I was on Owen’s side leading up to the match. As a wrestling nerd, I appreciated the technical aspects of the match and the great storytelling that went along with it.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“He dragged me to the middle of the ring, twisting me into the sharpshooter. The fans suddenly realized that Stu must have taught it to both of us! Nobody had ever got out of the sharpshooter, there was no known escape!”
OWEN HART
“And then when I beat him, it blew everyone away.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“With the crowd hanging on every move, he charged me in the corner, and I caught him square on the chin with a boot, spinning him completely around. I climbed up on his shoulders and dove forward for a victory roll, but in a split second, Owen collapsed in a squat, on top of me, pinning my shoulders to the mat for the one . . . two . . . three!”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“Without a doubt, the greatest opening WrestleMania match ever. It could have closed the show and not a single person would have been disappointed.”
JIM ROSS
“Owen upset Bret, which added additional intrigue to the brotherly rivalry. This outcome provided Bret, who would win the title later in the evening, with a viable, opponent in his brother, Owen.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“I think that match set the stage better than anything and gave Owen bragging rights. Which we found out later on, you give Owen Hart an inch, he’s gonna take a mile when it comes to whatever you give him.”
JIM CORNETTE (manager, promoter)
“Owen showed that he was a main event guy,”
MIXED TAG MATCH: DOINK & DINK vs BAM BAM BIGELOW & LUNA VACHON
LUNA VACHON
“I grew up wanting to be a part of this business so badly. My family discouraged me at first. My aunt Vivian was a wrestler, so they knew the kind of toll that wrestling could take on a woman’s body. I didn’t let that stop me though. It was in my blood, and all I wanted to do was become a wrestler. Definitely a heel is more fun. If a guy is willing to throw his nice two dollar beer at me then I know I did well. Not that I want things thrown at me, of course, but to see the audience react to you is the best feeling in the world.”
RAY APOLLO (wrestler)
The first Doink the Clown was Matt Borne. I didn’t get involved in other people’s business, so I don’t know for sure why they made the change. I just know they wanted to go a different direction with Doink.”
BAM BAM BIGELOW (wrestler)
We had a lot of fun with the goofy matches.
DINK THE CLOWN (wrestler)
“I’m very quick in the ring, so I had no trouble keeping up with Luna Vachon and Bam Bam. Playing Dink wasn’t difficult, but there was a lot of jealousy from the other wrestlers when the fans liked me.”
FALLS COUNT ANYWHERE MATCH: “MACHO MAN” RANDY SAVAGE vs CRUSH
“MACHO MAN” RANDY SAVAGE
“Vince McMahon was going for younger wrestlers at the time, you know, he was going with the ‘new generation’ theme, nothing more than that. I was doing announcing for him over there, and I just wanted to be participating in the ring.”
LANNY POFFO (wrestler)
“Randy was getting the bug back. So he thought that he could possibly start a little something with Shawn Michaels, and then have a two-year program, then have the showdown at WrestleMania. His intention was to have a Hair vs. Career match, where Shawn Michaels would shave his head or Randy would give up his career and go to the announcing booth.”
SHAWN MICHAELS (wrestler)
“I think there’s so much I could have learned and would have learned. But I have to say that’s one of those things that’s been news to me. I guess all these years later you think, “Oh, that’s nice to know.”
JIM ROSS
“The thing about Crush. He kept getting these opportunities because back in the locker room area, behind the curtain, he was one of the most popular guys on the roster. Savage was one of the ones that was solidly in the corner of Crush. That helped Crush extend the opportunities. Again, if he looked like an ordinary athlete, an ordinary pro wrestler, he probably would have been unbooked already. But, because of his look and the potential of what we thought he could do, he kept getting chances.”
WWF WOMEN’S CHAMPIONSHIP: ALUNDRA BLAYZE vs LEILANI KAI
DAVE MELTZER
“Vince’s big attempts to push women’s wrestling, which ultimately failed every time, were a result of seeing what big business women’s wrestling in Japan had become.”
ALUNDRA BLAYZE (wrestler)
“Greg Valentine kept telling me that he had to give Pat Patterson a call, because the Women’s title was sitting in dormant for a long time, for about 10 years. Sure enough, they took a look and said, wow, and I flew in and was hired. We did the tournament, and I said right away that I was going to bring my style and put that Japanese twist in American wrestling.”
LEILANI KAI (wrestler)
“It was a great honor to return to WrestleMania; something that I’ll never forget. She was a very good wrestler. She worked very hard and it was great to compete against her at WrestleMania. I’ve watched the match many times. When I am teaching my wrestling classes now, I show it.”
ALUNDRA BLAYZE
“I wanted to prove that a woman could look good, be athletic, kick ass and still be taken seriously.”
WWF CHAMPIONSHIP: LEX LUGER vs YOKOZUNA (SPECIAL REFEREE: MR. PERFECT)
JIM CORNETTE
“I was a fan of wrestling when I was a kid, I would watch it on television and I finally talked my mother into taking me all the way downtown when I was 12-years-old to see a Battle Royal. I became a ringside photographer and then as a teenager, I would fill in as a ring announcer and I was too young to drive so my mother would drive me to the shows and that is where ‘Mama Cornette’ came to be known to the wrestling promoters and they would suggest it as a gimmick. When growing up I was drawn to it and have molded myself to it in some form ever since.”
JEFF JARRETT (wrestler)
“And Jim is a student of the game, incredible passion for the industry.”
JIM CORNETTE
“Looking back, it’s fairly incredible that the first time I ever walked into Madison Square Garden, I was managing the WWF Champion at Wrestlemania X. At the time, I was the “American Spokesperson” for Yoko and his full time manager Mr. Fuji, and we were to defend the WWF Title twice that night. My Heavenly Bodies, Dr. Tom Prichard and Jimmy Del Ray, had defeated the Bushwhackers in the “dark” match that evening, so I worked my first Mania three times, too.”
LEX LUGER
“I think that Yokozuna was one of the greatest champions ever. When he walked into the building and came down the aisle, we used to call him the showstopper.”
JIM CORNETTE
“In the Luger match, while Lex had been anointed the next champ by Vince the previous summer, while trying to draw it out to Wrestlemania “the chairman” had cooled on that idea — permanently, as it turned out.”
LEX LUGER
“Contrary to what is said, Vince never promised me the belt. He never made me any promises at WrestleMania between Bret, or I, or Yoko. Nor did I expect him to make any. Why would he? I was thrilled to be a part of WrestleMania.”
VINCE RUSSO
“At that time, the New York Daily News had a weekly wrestling column in its paper, penned by a guy who called himself ‘The Slammer’, who was really a writer by the name of Hank Winnikki. That Sunday in the Daily News, Slammer reported what the finish of that night’s WrestleMania X main event was going to be coming out of a somewhat convoluted storyline involving Bret Hart, Yokzouna and Lex Luger. Somebody had stooged it off to them in advance. I clearly can remember Pat Patterson running around in the back with the Daily News in hand…and he wasn’t happy.”
VAUGHN JOHNSON
“The special guest referee, Mr. Perfect, suddenly seemed so flustered by the fact that both Cornette and Mr. Fuji were laid out in the ring and didn’t do anything.”
JIM CORNETTE
“I flew in over the top, landed in a heap, staggered up to take a mighty punch and fly like a bird for it — and he punched me kind of half-heartedly on the left bicep. Ready to take the Mania bump for the ages, I still flew, so it either looked like shit or made Luger look like Superman, one or the other. You can decide, it’s on the Network, where the suit I wore has been getting rave reviews.”
VAUGHN JOHNSON
“Luger got upset by Mr. Perfect’s stalling and shoved. Mr. Perfect then acted very quickly in disqualifying Luger.”
WWF INTERCONTINENTAL CHAMPIONSHIP LADDER MATCH: RAZOR RAMON vs SHAWN MICHAELS
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“I felt totally ripped off. I had told Vince the idea since the very first day that I got there that I’ve got this idea about a ladder match that we been doing up in Calgary. Everytime I sat down with Vince I would always say, I’ve got this idea for a match but you’ve got to promise me you won’t do it with anybody else.”
MATT CARDONA (wrestler)
“Up to that point, there had been only one other Ladder Match, and it had been on Coliseum Home Video.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“We kinda just went out there and did a dry run just to show Vince what the match was, it wasn’t the greatest ladder match, nor was it intended to be. But it was a match to show the bare bones of it to Vince. I remember when it was over I knocked on Vince’s door, and he said he missed it. Scott Hall saw the match, of course. So they went to Vince without my permission, and stole my idea.”
VINCE RUSSO
“Up until that point, you had never seen spectacles quite like that in the World Wrestling Federation. Twenty-one years ago, the ladder match was new and innovative, and the performers were still trying to feel their way around the steel rungs. If that match would have bombed that night might we had never seen another? Who knows?”
JIM ROSS
“Both men entered MSG claiming to be the Intercontinental champion, which added to the depth of the storyline.”
MATT CARDONA
“Razor Ramon was my favorite at the time. But I had just started to like Shawn and root for the bad guys. I didn’t know who I wanted to win.”
JIM ROSS
“Two of wrestling’s brightest minds were essentially left to their own devices in deciding how the match would be executed and they nailed it.”
SCOTT HALL (wrestler)
“We didn’t have a backup ladder. The match was new to wrestling, so there wasn’t even a backup. If we’d have bent the ladder and it broke, we’d still be standing in Madison Square Garden trying to get the belt back.”
KEVIN ECK
“The two competitors were quite creative in finding ways to use the ladder as a weapon, and Michaels, in particular, delivered an outstanding performance. After nearly 20 minutes of intense action, though, it was Ramon who scaled the ladder to win the match and retain his title.”
MATT CARDONA
“If you watch it back now, it still holds up like a great movie. It’s very innovative and not dated at all. They do stuff in that match that’s never been replicated. It stands the test of time.”
MATT CARDONA
“The moment when Razor climbed up and grabbed both titles became such an iconic moment, especially for me as a kid, because I was there.”
JIM ROSS
“That match, they just had spots laid out, they meaning Shawn and Razor. They wanted to get them in, they thought the spots that were building to the end of the match were imperative. So with that said, they torpedoed and steered the course and they went long.”
SEAN WALTMAN (wrestler)
“That was my first WrestleMania. Shawn and Razor’s Ladder Match went way over the time, but it needed that much time. We found out our match was cut when we were all on deck.”
RICK MARTEL (wrestler)
“I was disappointed, of course. But I was more disappointed for the other guys, because I remember that there were a lot of rookies in the match, and some of them had their families there to see them in Madison Square Garden. It was their first Wrestlemania, and they were excited to the max. I was disappointed to a point, but I had been in a few Wrestlemanias. I wanted to be in there for sure, but I didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
SCOTT HALL
“I came back through [the curtain] and [Randy Savage] was like a leader of the locker room. I came back through, [and] he goes, and all the boys were there, he goes, ‘first of all, I want to say congratulations on a great match. Second of all, I want to say you’re very, very selfish’ because we went longer than was allotted to us. So he said, ‘great match’ and ‘you’re selfish’ and I said, ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re right.’”
SEAN WALTMAN
“We did it the next night on Raw, but that’s like getting Rice-A-Roni as a concession prize on a game show [laughs].”
BRET HART
They had a great match at WrestleMania X but it wasn’t the wrestlers that were great, it was the match that was great.”
MATT HARDY (wrestler)
“Obviously that was very influential in my career, and it was instrumental in motivating us to start doing Ladder Matches.”
SCOTT HALL
“It paid for my first house. I’m glad that it’s up there with the great matches in wrestling.”
WWF TAG TEAM CHAMPIONSHIP: MEN ON A MISSION vs THE QUEBECERS
JACQUES ROUGEAU (wrestler)
“I took a year off and came back a year and a half later with Carl Ouellet as The Quebecers with the same suit and our music was “We’re not the Mounties”. So I think Vince wanted to get back at [the Canadian Mounties] in a way.”
PIERRE CARL OUELLET (wrestler)
“Jacques Rougeau and I were wrestling against Men on a Mission and it marked the debut of our feud, that would end six months later with Jacques’ retirement match in Montreal.”
OSCAR (manager)
“The first match I saw M.O.M. take part in, I couldn’t believe the things I saw him doing. As tall as he was and as big as he was, that man moved in the ring like he was one hundred pounds.”
MABEL (wrestler)
“There was tremendous pressure. Not only being a big young guy, but also being a young black guy. There are more black Superstars in WWE today than there were when I came up. It was pretty difficult, but it was an experience.”
MO (wrestler)
“When you look at the wrestling books, as far as Tag Team Champs, my name is there. So as far as that experience, I’m grateful or whatever. But some of the people that I had to work with, and the management I had to deal with on a daily basis drove me to almost commit suicide. Oscar got tortured. I’m talking physically abused.”
EARTHQUAKE vs ADAM BOMB
BRYAN CLARK (wrestler)
“[Vince McMahon] had a couple of ideas. They offered me either the ‘Ringmaster’ or Adam Bomb, and I chose Adam Bomb…We toured in Europe and had a good match worked out, but due to time restraints the match had to be shortened. I was told that the Ladder Match needed more time, but I was happy that I got a paycheck.”
THE MAIN EVENT: WWF CHAMPIONSHIP: BRET “THE HITMAN” HART vs YOKOZUNA
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Yoko was walking around like he was on death row. It was just dawning on him that he was about to lose the top money spot. I knew how it felt; like all ex-champions, he was immediately uncertain of his future.”
JIM CORNETTE
“In the match with Bret, at least I got to halfway redeem myself by getting KO’d by Piper as well, and it looked better, so all-in-all I’d rather have saved the spot for Roddy to begin with. Madison Square Garden was sold out with over 18,000 fans and another 4,000 plus watching closed circuit in the [adjoining] Felt Forum, plus the pay-per-view audience, so it was a thrill.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Yoko and I enacted our usual David and Goliath story. Soon I was dragged to a corner so Yoko could squash me like a grape for his finish. He climbed up on the second rope, then slipped and toppled backward. I was quick to move out of the way, because if he landed on me for real he’d most certainly kill me! I was on him like a monkey on a beach ball, hooking his big leg to reclaim the WWF World Heavyweight title! The rafters shook when guest referee Roddy Piper proudly raised my arm in victory. The ring filled up with wrestlers — Lex, Tatanka, Razor, Kid — and then I saw Gorilla, Pat, Vince and even Burt Reynolds in the ring! Macho Man charged out and gave me a hug. He had tears in his eyes when he said, ‘I’m proud of you, brother! You deserve it!’ Then Roddy and Randy, two legends, told all the boys to pick me up.”
VAUGHN JOHNSON
“There was a great visual of Owen Hart standing in the aisle looking at his brother with envy, as he was once again in his brother’s shadow. There was some great storytelling here.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“This was one of the greatest nights of my life, arguably the highlight of my career.”
A CHANGING LANDSCAPE
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“There was a lot of doom and gloom at WWF headquarters. Vince had to pay out two huge settlements: one to Jesse Ventura for $810,000 in back royalties and a staggering $26.7 million to Chad Austin, the jobber paralyzed by The Rockers. Not to mention that Vince’s trial was fast approaching.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“It seemed every day we were hit with what’s next, another bombshell, another bombshell, well this one’s coming down the pike, these guy’s suing you for this, these guy’s suing you for that, this one’s doing this.”
JEFF JARRETT (wrestler)
“WWF was coming out of a down period with the steroid scandal and the Government scandal. I got to give credit to that nucleus which was Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, Diesel, Yokozuna and Razor Ramon.”
DAVE MELTZER
“This is the bad period of wrestling, I would say.”
ERIC BISCHOFF (executive)
“You have to put yourself back in 1994 and 95. In the U.S. at that time, wrestlers were being presented as psychotic dentists, IRS agents, clowns, and all kinds of goofy ass kiddie characters. WCW was no different by the way. We had the ding dongs and all kinds of silly horse shit that everybody else was doing. What I did do is spend a lot of time in Japan and studied the difference in the way the Japanese promoters treated and presented the product with how it was in the United States. They were putting 100,000 people in Tokyo Dome for the big shows and here in the United States, WWF at the time, WWE, and WCW, were having a hard time in the live event side of things.”
GREG GAGNE (wrestler)
“[WCW booker Bill Watts] comes walking in and says, ‘Hey guys. I’m all done, Eric Bischoff is the Executive Producer and he’s in charge.’”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“It was a long process, from working on camera to becoming president of the company was a several year process but with every step in that process I learned more about the business side of the wrestling industry and took on more responsibilities. By the time I became president of the company I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to make WCW the number one wrestling company in the world.”
GREG GAGNE
“[We’re in the car riding to Atlanta], and Bischoff says, ‘How do we turn this thing around?’ I said, ‘First of all, you guys are trying to do the same thing that McMahon is doing. You have to have a different approach to it. And the only way, if you want impact, is we gotta get Hogan in here.’”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“Right from the very beginning, from the earliest part of the negotiations, it was made clear by Hulk that he wanted a limited agreement. He left WWE when he did in large part involving the issues surrounding the steroid trial and all that controversy and then there were creative issues — the whole Ultimate Warrior thing and creative and political issues. But I think the primary thing that caused Hulk to leave was the schedule. He wanted to pursue movies and television. And you can do neither while you’re working the kind of schedule Hulk worked in WWE, and he didn’t want to end up in the same type of schedule in WCW.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“[Vince] was hurt, and he was hurt not just from a business standpoint, he was hurt from a personal standpoint, because through those building years, there were no two closer people in the business than Vince and Hulk, that helped develop all those aspects of Hulkamania along the way. So there was a personal bond and a personal friendship that had been built that now, Hulk going, he can say it was business, it was personal. I think Vince really took it personally and I think he was hurt. It was like a really bad divorce.”
HULK HOGAN
“When I went back to work [in WCW], everything clicked. It just worked. I beat Flair for the belt, and then we get to a point where things flattened off after a couple months.”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“After the new car smell wore off, you began to hear more and more of the anti-Hulk Hogan responses. Some of it was a bit of a blowback to the steroid trials. Hulk had himself in a couple of tight spots. I think there was a measurable part of the audience that knew he was a WWF guy, and we’re WCW. I also think there was a small percentage that just said, ‘been there, done that.’”
“MACHO MAN” RANDY SAVAGE
“[WWF] had a vision in where they were going. But at the same time, it didn’t work for me at that time. And I’m glad I made the move that I did, looking back, because I just wasn’t ready to [retire]. I have to do things because I want to, not because I have to.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Jack Lanza told me how Randy Savage called Vince at four in the morning, drunk, to tell him he’d signed to WCW: ‘Randy never even gave Vince a chance to make him a counteroffer.’ I found Vince in his office, and I could see he was shaken.”
The KLIQ
SHAWN MICHAELS
“I was the Intercontinental Champion at the time, looking really good, but we were really having a lot of disqualification finishes. You can only do that for so long. And I started thinking, ‘Well, gosh, if I could have somebody help me to win, that might help and get me heat.’ Vince was asking, ‘Well, of the existing roster, who would you see doing that?’ I was like, ‘I can’t see anybody that we have right now.’ I just happened to mention, ‘Hey, there’s this dude in WCW’ and he said, ‘Oh, we can’t touch those guys.’ I said, ‘Alright, well there’s this dude named Vinnie Vegas and he wouldn’t be the same old stereotypical bodyguard who is quiet and just stands there. The dude is dynamic as hell.’”
KEVIN NASH (wrestler)
“Meeting Vince McMahon was like meeting [Former New York Yankees Owner] George Steinbrenner when you played baseball,” Nash said. “Hair was like Werewolf of London, his hair was perfect. He said, ‘Hey, big man, the guys are out back.’ I’m sitting around the pool with Vince, and he’s just like, ‘Oh, by the way, my driver is going to take you to Albany and you’re going to screw Marty Jannetty. You’re gonna be with Shawn Michaels.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“I do recall letting him know that I had seen him and he was incredibly cool, but he should know not a lot of people here like me and that may rub off on you a little bit.”
BRYAN CLARK
“Shawn, fuck, couldn’t stand him. Still don’t like him. He’s another guy that’s a fuckin’ joke. I know all the cruiserweights around the world, that’s their big hero, man, but if they knew the real Shawn Michaels… Now he’s a Christian and he’s turned his life around and all that stuff, but man, he was just an asshole. You know, just a bad person.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“Diesel was a character. Kevin Nash was a person. The audience was in love with the character. They didn’t know the person. They thought Diesel was cool and kicked people’s asses.”
KEVIN NASH
“[Vince] says, ‘What do you think about me putting the belt on you?’ I said, ‘I just had the IC belt.’ ‘No, no, no, no, the World Championship.’ He says, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna do it at The Garden, you’re gonna do it at a house show because we don’t ever change anything up. I think it’ll help bring attendance up. I think you’re ready. I think you’re ready for that spot right now. With the right people around you, I think you can do it.’”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“To the serious fans, he’d had a short climb to the top and it was damn near impossible for him to get anything close to sympathy, being a giant bad-ass trucker.”
KEVIN NASH
“When I became the World Champion, I guarantee you that I had less than 150 matches. I was green, and this was also the period of time where we were being drug tested. The government was really down our throat. You were not allowed to use anything. Period. A guy like me now could probably get away with being on hormone replacement, but back then there was no leeway. As everybody whittled down during the time of the trial, I was still 315 pounds. I was the same size, and that had a lot to do with me getting the push.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“There was another new arrival from WCW, Paul Levesque, a hook-nosed bodybuilder who came out of Killer Kowalski’s wrestling school. He was a decent worker who was quick to cozy up to his old pal Kevin Nash.”
TRIPLE H
“They brought me to Columbus, to TV, just so I could meet everybody and get to know all the guys a little bit. They had asked me to think up a bunch of names to give some input on it and I had a whole bunch of names in mind…and J.J. [Dillon] called me in the room and said, ‘We’ve got your name. You’re going to be Reginald DuPont Helmsley’ and I was like, ‘Holy cow! Here I am in the bad name category again!’ The next thing I heard, J.J. called me up and said, ‘Hey, we went with a little bit of your suggestions and you’re going to be Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Three H’s.’ and I was like, ‘Okay…I can work with that a little bit.’ So, we went with that and then Shawn (Michaels) started calling me ‘Triple H’ from day one.”
SEAN WALTMAN
“[Triple H] was riding with Killer Kowalski every night, who was his teacher. He was trying to be cool to Walter [Kowalski]. We were like, ‘You gotta drop Walter. You’re coming with us.’ We needed a designated driver anyway.”
SCOTT HALL
“Plus, everyone else hated us.”
TRIPLE H
“I’d been on the road and ridden with other guys in WCW. I hated it. I wanted to think about the business, what I did wrong at the show and what I was going to do tomorrow. There were guys who wanted to talk about everything else but wrestling. With the Kliq? Scott would start the car ride by saying, Let’s not talk about business tonight. Let’s just have some personal time, but I did notice that…’ and that would start the conversation. It was the same thing every day, and that’s all we’d talk about-the business, constantly, every day.”
PIERRE CARL OUELLET (wrestler)
“They were all about themselves. They pretty much had control of the company. If Diesel wasn’t World Champ then he and Shawn were the Tag Team Champs and then Razor Ramon was the Intercontinental Champ.”
VINCE RUSSO
“Whoa, bro, they had a lot of heat. They had a lot of heat in the locker room with a lot of the boys.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“They were literally a cancer in the dressing room, all of them. I don’t doubt that Shawn Michaels is sorry for a lot of that kind of behavior. Kevin Nash was a great wrestler and a good guy, but I don’t think he could be that proud of that association. It was a cancerous environment in the dressing room with those guys and they certainly did more negative than positive to the business.”
BAM BAM BIGELOW
“Everything is strength in numbers…and [The Kliq] had the numbers. You know, you had Diesel, you had Michaels and Helmsley — or Triple H, whatever the hell his [name is now], Scott Hall…this group of guys that were actually telling Vince McMahon what to do. A terrible, terrible time. It hurt a lot of people. To them, it became a joke because they had control, so it was like, ‘Okay, let’s fuck with this guy now…okay, well we got him out, now let’s go to this guy and let’s ruin his life and get him fired. Okay — now let’s go to this guy…’ And that’s what they did — just toyed with people’s emotions and livelihoods…”
PIERRE CARL OUELLET
“I felt Vince didn’t have control of the company anymore. The Kliq had control of the company.”
WRESTLEMANIA XI
DAVEY BOY SMITH JR.
“It was WrestleMania 11, in Hartford, the Civic Center. They had sort of a Fan Axxess — it was called something different then, of course. They had this deal where you jump into these big, huge sumo suits and you wrestle around with the other guy. They had me and Dallas both wearing those, and we had a little sumo competition. I think it’s actually in one of the old magazines. They show a picture of me flexing; I’ve got the little fake WrestleMania tattoo on my arm.”
LEX LUGER & BRITISH BULLDOG vs ELI & JACOB BLU
KEVIN OWENS (wrestler)
“My dad rented WrestleMania 11 at the video store when I was 11 years old. My first memory is actually the first match. I remember the British Bulldog being awesome.”
VAUGHN JOHNSON
“WWE decided that it was necessary to shoot off fireworks when Lex Luger and the British Bulldog defeated Eli and Jacob Blu. There were so many things wrong with this. Firstly, it was the opening match. There’s never an opening match worthy of shooting off fireworks afterward. Secondly, Luger and Bulldog didn’t even win anything. They beat a jobber tag team in the opening match.”
WWF INTERCONTINENTAL CHAMPIONSHIP: RAZOR RAMON vs JEFF JARRETT
JEFF JARRETT
“My grandmother got into the business back in the 1940s, so I’m third-generation in the wrestling business. She got into the business as a second job, then she worked her way up…it’s sort of a family trait…I came on WWF television as “Double J” Jeff Jarrett and I was a heel. I was the bad guy. That was the first time I had ever been a heel in my entire life. It was a drastic change from the transition of working the weekly territory to going on a national and global stage of the WWF and working from the good guy side to the bad guy side. Completely different.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“[Jeff’s father, Jerry Jarrett] kept pitching, ‘Jeff has to have an entourage! He’s got secretary, he’s got an agent, he’s got a manager, he’s got a roadie — he’s got an entourage!’”
ROAD DOGG (wrestler)
“What I loved about being with Jeff Jarrett [as ‘The Roadie’] was I learned so much, being that close to him as I was very new to the business.”
JEFF JARRETT
The Jeff Jarrett — Razor Ramon relationship was pretty deep and I travelled a lot of miles with him…I think to this day for him not to have been a World Champion, to me is sort of a head-scratcher.”
THE UNDERTAKER vs KING KONG BUNDY
TED DIBIASE (wrestler, manager)
“As a manager, it’s a lot easier to work with the mechanics of the match. Timing is very important. The role of the manager is to be the weasel; the mouthpiece. And you get to take the cheap shots. I got to play along with the mystique of The Undertaker. I was able to brag and boast, only to have it all blow up in my face.”
LARRY YOUNG (umpire, Major League Baseball)
“I was assigned to that match by [WWE head office employee] JJ Dillon. I had worked a couple matches before that. One was in Times Square. I did a couple of tryout matches there, and then went on the road for a while,” Young said. “I may be a little different than most of the so-called celebrity participants. I don’t even consider myself a celebrity, but I had a real respect for the business. I think a lot of people were just there because of their status, but I really wanted to be there and be part of it.”
KING KONG BUNDY
“I remember being disappointed how small the payoff was!”
WWF TAG TEAM CHAMPIONSHIP: THE SMOKING GUNNS vs OWEN HART & YOKOZUNA
BILLY GUNN
“Back then, whenever you saw cowboys, or I guess the “Texas Roughneck Guy” on TV, they always had black hats and would spit stuff and was just nasty; that was what Vince’s vision was for me and Bart. Our thing was, he never had any kind of like nice, good guy, Cowboy characters, so when he saw us, of course we went out and bought everything new from hat to shoes, those were all his vision. It took some people a little while to accept us other than the South.”
DAVID BIXENSPAN
“Yokozuna retuned to the spotlight later as half of an odd-couple tag team with Owen Hart. By now, Yoko was heavier than ever — purportedly over 700 pounds — and much like Andre the Giant at the end of his career, his primary role was to stand on the ring apron looking ominous (and enormous) while Owen did most of the in-ring work.”
“I QUIT” MATCH: BRET “THE HITMAN” HART vs BOB BACKLUND
JIM ROSS
“An ‘I Quit’ match between Bret Hart and Bob Backlund with Roddy Piper as the special referee was memorable as Bombastic Bob was completely over the top as a somewhat newly minted villain. Mr. Backlund actually made the incomparable Hot Rod look sane.”
BOB BACKLUND
“Vince wanted me to do an All-American Boy promo, and I don’t know if they were good or not but that’s what they were. Some people in the business made fun of me because of those promos. I was just doing my job. When I became Mr. Backlund, those laughs were silenced because people found out that I could do a promo. As Mr. Backlund, I truly believed in what I was saying. I believed in every word that I said. I believed that society had fallen off a cliff morally compared to the ’80s. I believed that people should be held responsible for their own actions. And I believed that hard work and dedication paid off. I also felt that it was all right to have people have to recite the Presidents of the United States to me because it would encourage them to study and to remember important things. It may have come out in a weird way but I was honestly trying to help society. There were a lot of changes with society and a lot of the good guys in the WWF at the time were lying, cheating and swearing. So I thought, let me be the bad guy by being good…”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“When I marched out to face Bob, I got a huge pop, but from the moment the bell rang the match went downhill. Roddy Piper was the guest referee and kept sticking a live mic in our faces, asking, ‘What do ya say?’ which only sounded comical and made the crowd laugh. I cringed, thinking nobody laughs during my matches unless I want them to! As hard as Bob and I tried, the match deteriorated into a farce. Finally, Bob went for his chicken wing, and I slipped under and reversed it, hooking his hold on him, falling backward to the mat. Bob was finding out, as I had, that the hold hurt like hell, so bad that as Roddy stuck the mic in Bob’s face and asked, ‘Do you give?’ Bob could only manage to scream, ‘Yes!’ Bob was specifically supposed to say ‘I quit,’ but with the painful hold cutting off his air, Roddy finally had no choice but to ring the bell and declare me the winner. This was, without a doubt, my worst pay-per-view match ever.”
WWF CHAMPIONSHIP: DIESEL vs SHAWN MICHAELS
DUTCH MANTELL (manager)
Pamela Anderson was there. That did get a lot of eyeballs.
VAUGHN JOHNSON
“Celebrities Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy accompanied Diesel and Michaels to the ring respectively. The other celebs featured during the event were Nicholas Torturro from NYPD Blue, Jonathan Taylor Thomas from Home Improvement and the music group Salt-n-Pepa. They weren’t the most star-studded group, but it was the best WWE could put together at the time.”
JIM ROSS
“The LT vs. Bam Bam match would go on last at WrestleMania XI, which made Diesel and his opponent Michaels none too happy. Even though WWE garnered immense publicity by using Taylor, I can’t argue the fact that the title bout should have closed the show, especially since the new, 7-foot champion was a fan favorite and was going to defeat his villainous challenger and former mentor, HBK.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“Vince kind of had a soft spot for Sid and thought, ‘Well, yeah, that could work. We’ll bring him back [as Shawn Michaels’s bodyguard]and see how the reaction is. We’re not gonna put him back in the ring right away. We’ll put him with Shawn Michaels and let’s see how this dynamic works and we’ll take it step by step.’ The funny thing was the relationship with Shawn. It was a very interesting dynamic between Shawn and Sid because here you got this big monster Sid and I remember him fixing Shawn’s hair when Shawn would get the coat on and fluff his hair out. He would help Shawn tie his tie and put him all together. It was just interesting. Here’s this big nasty looking bastard taking care of Shawn. He really looked after him, which was kind of funny in itself, but they kind of clicked together, they really did.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Diesel had a good match with Shawn, in which they both worked hard, but Shawn went out of his way to outshine the champion, reminding me of a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs outsmarted a ferocious, but clueless, bull.”
KEVIN OWENS
“Shawn Michaels stole the show. It made me realize that if the smallest guy on that show can be the best, then me — at the time I was really scrawny — then maybe I could do this. I realized I could be a wrestler, and here we are now.”
THE MAIN EVENT: LAWRENCE TAYLOR vs BAM BAM BIGELOW
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Shawn won the [Royal Rumble] which set up his main event spot facing Diesel at WrestleMania XI. But NFL all-star defensive linebacker Lawrence Taylor was sitting in the front row and ended up stealing the show right out from under Shawn and Diesel when he got pie-faced by an irate Bam Bam Bigelow.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“The stuff with LT I thought was played to perfection. Especially on LT’s part, laughing at Bigelow and then being real, like, ‘Hey man, come on. You know, we’re professionals and put ‘er here, dude. I’m just fucking with you. Appreciate your shit.’ And the shove, Bam Bam shoved the living shit out of him. And he went through Deano and everybody all the way back to the third row. It was great shit. LT had just retired and he was still a big name in football and everybody knew who the fuck LT was. And it was gonna be a big deal in that New York market when we replayed that everywhere.”
LAWRENCE TAYLOR (football player)
“I thought about it and then when I met Bam Bam, I decided, ‘yeah, I can do this.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“[Bigelow was] somebody that was big and impressive that you could put in the press and be able to hold his own with the New York press, and a formidable opponent. Someone who could look big and nasty, look the part. That you feel in a fight with LT would probably kick LT’s ass. LT had a reputation for being a badass. And so did Bigelow. It was, he looked the part. A different look with the bald head and the flames and everything. So the New York media’s gonna eat that shit up. And it just worked, and also felt that Bam Bam was a good enough worker that he could carry LT to a good match.”
JIM ROSS
“Bigelow — one of the business’ great, super heavyweights at 350-plus pounds — spent hours in a secluded warehouse practicing with LT to get the former New York Giant and first ballot NFL Hall of Famer ready for their pressure-packed WrestleMania Moment. I attended these workout sessions nightly as LT worked diligently to earn a sizable and much-needed pay day.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
And LT rolled into the ring and laid on the mat, and got up and just kind of played. And it was like, ‘Holy shit. He’s home.’ He felt at home in the ring the very first time he ever got in. And that’s when you know, ‘Okay, he’s gonna be okay.’”
VINCE MCMAHON (executive)
“It was very risky putting a non-WWE star in the main event. At the same time, Lawrence Taylor’s athleticism is world class. And competing with Bam Bam Bigelow, whose athleticism is world class.”
LAWRENCE TAYLOR
“It was so different and it was exciting. The atmosphere we had, Salt-N-Pepa singing, and everything. It was just a great atmosphere.”
JIM ROSS
“In all my years in the business, I’ve never seen anyone from outside the pro wrestling business do better in their debut match than Taylor. LT showed why John Madden said that Taylor changed the way defense was played in the NFL by willing himself to respectability inside the squared circle and doing better than anyone could have possibly predicted. Taylor defeated the veteran Bigelow, who made LT look much better than#56 actually was.”
JIM CORNETTE
“I got to personally witness NFL Football great Lawrence Taylor turn pale and be helped to a chair after completely gassing out against Bam Bam Bigelow.”
THE MONDAY NIGHT WARS
ERIC BISCHOFF
“The media called our conflict the Monday Night Wars.”
TRIPLE H
“I felt like the first time I saw Raw, I watched that first episode and I felt like it was a game-changer. It was what the name said, it was raw, right? ‘Uncut, Uncooked, Uncensored.’ It was. Everything in the business at that point in time was sort of these packaged, pre-taped shows, whether that was WCW or WWE. It was just kind of announcers going to matches and then going to interviews and going back to matches. It’s funny because you can look at those shows and… it almost felt like, in some way, a little bit of the start of an ‘Attitude’ kind of feel within the vibe of it, yet you still had the Doink The Clowns and all the other things. It hadn’t morphed yet, but it was a game-changer for me in the excitement level.”
“MEAN” GENE OKERLUND
“[Raw] would do live to tape on that same night for that week or even two weeks at times.”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“For nearly three years, my company World Championship Wrestling, kicked Vince McMahon’s ass. Nitro — WCW’s flagship show — revolutionized wrestling.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“What Eric was doing was extolling the virtues of, ‘Over here on Nitro, we’re live. Anything can happen, and I’m going to promise you that it will happen. The guys on the other [show]? They taped their shit weeks ago. Let me tell you what’s gonna happen tonight. And the fucker was right.”
“MEAN” GENE OKERLUND
“I thought it might have been a little tacky. The old school guys would say, ‘What the hell is this guy thinking?!’ It was already out there. It was in the dirt sheets.”
VINCE MCMAHON
“I was really concerned about going out of business competing with Ted Turner. And we came close to it…”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“Vince McMahon tried to convince everybody that ‘big, bad, billionaire’ Ted [Turner] tried to put everybody out of business. He was trying to make himself the babyface; trying to galvanize the loyalty for his brand.”
BRET HART
“On September 4, WCW launched a Monday night show called Monday Nitro to go head to head with Monday Night Raw. The centerpiece of their debut show was a surprise appearance by Lex Luger, who, like Randy, had read the writing on the wall and left the WWF before it was too late.”
LEX LUGER
“I was just having a casual conversation with Sting on the phone and mentioned that my contract had expired with the WWF and we were trying to work out a long-term agreement for me to stay there. He said, so you are on their television and you are working their house shows and you are not under contract?”
KEVIN NASH
“[WCW] had ‘Taker close. That Deadman wasn’t going to f*ckin’ come to WCW. He would have been the biker character and gone by Mark Calaway.”
THE UNDERTAKER
“At the time, I was very frustrated with our creative. I thought our creative was way too soft, way too kid-friendly...WCW had told me I would never draw money. No one would ever pay money to see me wrestle. That was always in the back of my head.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“The Road Warriors and Miss Elizabeth had shown up in WCW, and word was that Diesel and Razor were considering jumping too. This was a shock to everybody, especially Shawn, who looked anxious at the thought of being left behind.”
KEVIN NASH
All along, I was trying to get guys money, I was trying to get guys paid. And what happened was Vince started giving huge guarantees to the Shawns and Undertakers and those guys and said, ‘I can’t lose my core guys.’”
THE UNDERTAKER
“Ted Turner and that group — it was just a way of making money or spending money or whatever they wanted to do. I knew in the long term, Vince was gonna prevail and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to struggle and I wanted to help turn the thing around.”
EDDIE GUERRERO (wrestler)
“At that time, the wrestling business was changing. The fans were becoming more knowledgeable about wrestling. They knew there was more going on out there than just the WWF and WCW. They would trade bootleg tapes from New Japan and AAA and ECW.”
DAVE MELTZER
“I never thought Shawn was the best wrestler in the world, because I saw Kenta Kobashi.”
GEDO (wrestler, booker)
“Characters are different in the United States than they are in Japan. Skill and fighting spirit are most important, much more than character, in Japan.”
EDDIE KINGSTON (wrestler)
“I bought the ‘Best of ’95 Matches from Japan.’ I saw this guy dressed in orange, I saw this guy dressed in black and yellow, and I saw a match that changed my life. I did not see that [kind of physicality] where I was watching then.”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“I had so many heavyweights… If everything is the same then nothing is unique. And that’s why I created the cruiserweight division.”
JUSHIN THUNDER LIGER (wrestler)
“Dean Malenko, Chris Benoit, and Eddie Guerrero worked in New Japan Pro Wrestling, so they knew the style very well.”
SONNY ONOO (manager)
“So, if there was an Ultimo Dragon vs. Eddie Guerrero [match], you didn’t need a background, right? I mean, at least I didn’t. I think many of the fans will tell you they didn’t because they know how great these guys are going to perform.”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“My original goal when we launched Nitro was to make it more international, so lucha libre was a big part of that. Others had promoted lucha in the United States, certainly in California, and Paul [Heyman] in ECW, but those were smaller platforms. I jumped on that bandwagon, and giving lucha a national platform and exposing it to a mass audience.”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“We brought them in and allowed them to wrestle their styles and not ask them to wrestle in the American Style. We let them bring a lot of the culture from Lucha Libre into the American product and put it on national television on prime time. Nobody had ever seen that before.”
REY MYSTERIO
“Back in WCW, the stuff we were doing was an eye opener and it was new for the majority of the wrestling fans around the globe, not just in the states. It was definitely something that was being viewed for the very first time. We were given the opportunity to perform on a big stage and at the time, not knowing what we were doing, we were changing the game.”
ERIC BISCHOFF
“I said to them, almost verbatim, ‘You need to be my human car crashes at 9pm.’”
KONNAN
“I thought that luchadors weren’t booked right. Eddie Guerrero, Chris Jericho, Dean Malenko, Ultimo Dragon, had to go to WWE to become stars. That’s the one thing Vince knows how to do, is make stars. Eric had all of those guys and he held them back.”
“STONE COLD” STEVE AUSTIN (wrestler)
“I got fired unceremoniously from WCW with a phone call and a FedEx, so the people there didn’t see much in me.”
VINCE RUSSO
“At the beginning [of his career], Steve was really a mid-card guy for a very, very long time.”
DUSTIN RHODES (wrestler)
“Steve was [in WCW] and we had some tremendous matches working together in the early 1990s. He was Stunning Steve Austin and I was the Natural and man, we tore down some houses. We had wars. We were young, highly motivated, and totally committed to what we were doing. We’d go out and do twenty to twenty-five minutes a night. All we cared about was walking away knowing we had a great match. We knew the fans were pleased with us, but we were also pleased because of the effort and skill we put into those matches.”
PAUL HEYMAN
“It was September 1995 and Steve Austin had just been fired from WCW. ECW was built on the premise of being the anti-WCW.”
BILLY CORGAN (musician, promoter)
“Late one night, I came across ECW at about 1 o’clock in the morning and I remember watching that and thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
PAUL HEYMAN (producer, manager)
“With the industry so tame and so cartoonish, along comes this adult, contemporary product. With profane language, hardcore music and blood and guts and violence — but these were all wrapped around intimate, long-term, deeply personal storylines.”
RAVEN (wrestler)
“They changed the music. They changed the sound. You know what I mean? He borrowed from a lot of places so it wasn’t like he created the whole thing, but he was smart enough to coalesce all these elements where whether it was the cruiserweights he got from Mexico, and then he got the music and stuff from Memphis. He got stuff from FMW [Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling], the violence from Japan in FMW and then he just put it all together into a soup. He picked all the right ingredients and knew how to stir the pot.”
PAUL HEYMAN
“The word ‘Extreme’ was not just about barbed wire, tables, and blood… it was a work ethic… a desire to partake and thrive in an uninhibited creative environment where a performer was challenged and indeed encouraged to push through their limits, take chances, and not be constrained by pre-set parameters imposed by people who didn’t share their vision of themselves. Steve found himself. It didn’t take long. He just needed that one chance, that one time, that one moment to be himself. No scripts from other people’s screwed-up vision of what he should be. No limitations. No preconceived notions of who he was, or what he was capable of.”
“STONE COLD” STEVE AUSTIN
“If I coulda stayed down there for six, eight, nine months, who knows what we coulda done, a year or two, there’s all kinds of stuff we coulda done, but you’re in business to make the money and really, when you’re in the trenches, even when we were in WCW, and we were battling WWF at the time, it wasn’t the Monday Night War, but it was a war, and we kind of felt like we were putting on a better wrestling product, but when you get the call, you knew that the WWE, then F, was the show, it was the big show.”
WRESTLEMANIA XII
JIM ROSS
“This event was unique in that it foreshadowed what were big things to come for WWE, including the Monday Night Wars and some of the key participants who would play major roles in that competition between WWE’s Raw and WCW’s Nitro.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“The original plan was for O.J. Simpson to have a match at WrestleMania against the Hot Rod. I remember calling Roddy and pitching Roddy the idea, which he was for. We had had preliminary talks with O.J. Simpson’s people, who at that point, were looking for anything that had a paycheck attached to it. We floated the idea out there, we did talk to O.J.’s people. Once that started getting out beyond the inner circle of O.J. Simpson’s people and out in Hollywood,” Prichard explained, “the backlash was deafening.” “The people were like, ‘if you do this, you’ll never have another sponsor ‘ Just extremely, extremely negative. So we punted. We thought the end game of O.J. getting the shit kicked out of him would satisfy some people. As those words come out of my mouth, you realize how ridiculous this is today.”
YOKOZUNA, JAKE “THE SNAKE” ROBERTS & AHMED JOHNSON vs OWEN HART, BRITISH BULLDOG & VADER
MICK FOLEY (wrestler)
“Vader, the real-life Leon White, was the greatest monster in the business. Guys were terrified of him. His style was the stiffest in all wrestling. Some guys have a style that looks like they’re hurting guys when they’re not, which is good. Some guys’ stuff looks like crap, but it hurts like hell, which is bad. Vader left no room for error; his stuff looked like it hurt, and believe me, it did.”
HULK HOGAN
“He was one of a kind. When you talk about great big men in the ring, Vader could work with anybody. He could technically wrestle, he could do the high bumps, he could do the high flips, and he could do crazy stuff you’d expect out of a 200 pounder. He was closer to 400 pounds. He was definitely at the top of the ladder for a big man.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Just in time for the Royal Rumble, [Vince] brought in four-hundred-pound Vader, who had quit WCW after being thumped good by Paul Orndorff in a dressing room argument.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“Vince wanted to bring him in and call him The Mastodon for the very reason that WWF would own the name, and he didn’t want to promote Vader because Vader had worked everywhere else as Vader or Big Van Vader, so he wanted to capitalize off of his past success but he wanted to create something underneath that, so he wanted to be known as The Mastodon, and kept calling him The Mastodon, Vader and hoping it would morph into just Mastodon.”
JIM CORNETTE
“I don’t think he was a flop. I just don’t think he did nearly as well as he should’ve.”
AHMED JOHNSON (wrestler)
“I had an accident which crushed my shoulder pretty bad so that kind of ended my football career. Ivan Putski then opened a wrestling school down here in Houston, and myself, Stevie Ray and Booker T all went to his school.”
MARK HENRY (wrestler, weightlifter)
“Ernie Ladd told me on my first day in the business, ‘Henry, don’t mess it up for everyone that looks like you afterwards.’ And I feel like Ahmed didn’t get that memo.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Even Jake “the Snake” had slithered back. He’d left the business to find God, vowing never to return, and when he reappeared in the dressing room, he seemed weathered and humbled.”
JIM ROSS
“Roberts — in one of his last meaningful, in-ring roles in WWE — was the victim of a Vader Bomb in an all-star, six-man tag that featured Yokozuna, Ahmed Johnson and ‘The Snake’ vs. manager Cornette’s trio of Vader, Owen Hart and Davey Boy Smith. What a star-crossed assortment of talent.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“Because Yoko was a big monster, and looking for the two big men to collide to see what happens. It was the immovable force meeting the immovable object. Vader had always beat up smaller guys in WCW so you wanted to see what he can do, and give him something new, something different. What is he going to do against the big giant badass in Yokozuna, that is interesting. Is it that interesting of him to go out and beat up smaller guys again? It’s kind of like, been there, seen that.”
HOLLYWOOD BACKLOT BRAWL: “ROWDY” RODDY PIPER vs GOLDUST
DUSTY RHODES (wrestler, booker)
“Dustin’s stepmom took him out to the training facility while I was on the road seven days a week. Before I knew it, he had already had his first match. It was in his blood, it was in his DNA. He was a natural. An unbelievable kid.”
DUSTIN RHODES
“Me and my dad, we were kind of not on the best of terms at that point. And I had just gotten released from WCW, so it’s like I’m sitting at home and Vince [McMahon] calls and he presents this idea. He kept saying, ‘this is an androgynous character’ and I’m just agreeing with him, but I have no idea what the hell that means, so I’m like, ‘yeah, sure. I’ll give this a try,’ because I really wanted to try to do something on my own other than the Dustin Rhodes name, try to accomplish something that is fresh and new and then go from there and see if I could do that. Opened up the dictionary and looked to see what ‘androgynous’ was and I just shook my head. I’m like, ‘well, I can’t back out now — let’s go and just give it my all.’”
JIM ROSS
“Goldust was the first character we picked to really start pushing the envelope of a new, raunchy product.”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“Vince said, ‘I don’t want to see Dustin. What if you were completely covered in a bodysuit, and you painted your whole head, not just face, but your whole head gold? That’s GOLDUST! And you’d wear gloves, and your entire body would be covered.’”
TERRI RUNNELS (manager)
“My sister had a Bob Mackie Barbie doll and I was looking at it and thought, ‘That is what WWE is missing, that glamour and elegance.’ They gave me a list of names, I forget if Marlena was on that list or if I came up with it. But Marlena Dietrich from old Hollywood — Dustin’s character was androgynous and Marlena Dietrich was the most androgynous female that I could think of in Hollywood, so that is the name I came up with. The cigar worked perfectly. To work with my husband and be able to go home and talk about the business, you got to take work home in a fun away in that regard.”
DUSTIN RHODES
“Savio Vega kept pushing me, pushing me as he was teaching me too, how to be a heel and things. And how to… ‘let’s just try this tonight: just, we’ll lock up, you’ll go behind me, rub up and down my chest.’ And I’m just like, ‘no, man, no.’ I decided to do it in The Garden and I went behind Savio and I rubbed up his chest and down with both of my hands. And he brushed it away from me and he looked at me and I just ran. I scooted out of the ring and the place just erupted, man. And I was like, ‘holy shit! That was easy!’”
JIM ROSS
“I thought the Scott Hall/Goldust match would’ve probably been off the hook because both of them can work like crazy.”
DUSTIN RHODES
“The match was originally supposed to be a Miami Street Fight — me and Razor [Ramon] somewhere on the streets of Miami via satellite during WrestleMania in Anaheim, California. I wasn’t told much more than that. But it never ended up happening. I never really talked to Razor about it.”
DAVE MELTZER
“Hall actually opted out of the program as he didn’t want to job on the way out to a guy who he thought was playing a somewhat gay character. So instead of giving him a new opponent, they pulled him from the card and finished him up by losing to Vader at the next month’s In Your House show.”
DUSTIN RHODES
“It ended up being with Roddy, on a backlot in Universal Studios.”
JIM ROSS
“A Hollywood Backlot Brawl. The idea was that Goldust exemplified how artificial much of showbiz was, whereas Piper had set out from wrestling, a decade earlier, to become a serious actor.”
VAUGHN JOHNSON
“What took place in the backlot was pretty violent comparatively speaking to what WWE was used to presenting at that point.“
DUSTIN RHODES
“I was really wanting to get some juice back then, really badly. Vince did not want it, so I asked Roddy to open me up the hard way. And that was my way of, ‘okay, Goddang it! I’m going to do bleed whether you like it or not because I want to blade. It gets you into it more. And so [Piper] slammed me up on the hood [of the car]. That’s the only thing I told Roddy about this whole thing: ‘please, hit me. Bust me open.’ And you’d think that Roddy being in the [professional wrestling] business for has long as he had, he would know how to do that, right? So he put me on the hood, and he mounts me, and I’m ready for it, man. He’s looking straight at me and he throws his fist straight down, but he hits me square in the forehead and I mean hard. It’s like a brick hitting cement. And I’m just like, ‘what the hell?’ And still in my head, ‘ah, nothing, man.’ He’s still beating me up. ‘Do it again!’ He reaches up and he drills me again and you hear a crack and it’s his hand that breaks on my head.”
JIM ROSS
“Goldust fled, driving off in a gold Cadillac and Piper gave chase in a white Ford Bronco. The gag was they showed footage, supposedly, of Piper racing to the arena to finish off Goldust, but the footage was actually of the televised low-speed police chase that OJ Simpson was involved in.”
DUSTIN RHODES
“Vince took us both to the hospital. He had his hand fixed. I had a concussion. One take. One take.” Goldust added, “I went into that dumpster hard too, but I was fine. It was more Roddy’s hand than anything. And Roddy’s tough, man. They didn’t have a cast on his hand. I don’t think. I can’t recall that. He just tapes. That’s the way they did it back then. Those old school guys, they just tape up and go, man.”
JIM ROSS
“After the Piper-Goldust match, I walked Roddy out to the parking garage, where McMahon told me to give the white Bronco to the Rowdy One, who drove it to his home in Oregon.”
“STONE COLD” STEVE AUSTIN vs SAVIO VEGA
“STONE COLD” STEVE AUSTIN
“I got the phone call, Steve, Vince McMahon. Got an idea for you, pal. Want to bring you in as The Ringmaster. Ted DiBiase as your manager, bringing you in as the Million Dollar Champion. Come in as champion master of the ring. Boy, I’m sitting there like I’m working with Paul E. one day a week in ECW. WCW fired me because they said I wasn’t marketable, and I was never going to amount to a hill of beans over the phone. I heard that gimmick and it sounded like crap. I’m just thinking, hey, man, you know, I’ve got a wife and a kid, and I’ve got a mortgage payment. Yeah, I’m a ring master. I just knew it was my foot in the door. I wasn’t excited about it.”
MICK FOLEY
“That’s a tricky situation, when you’re fairly new in the company, Mr. McMahon has agreed to give you a character change and you’re given a list from creative. The fact that I can rattle off more of Stone Cold’s names than the terrible names that I was given, speaks to just how bad they were… Snowman, Fang McFrost, Cruel Luke, Chilly McFreeze…”
JIM ROSS
“That comes out of a marketing meeting or it comes out of a room filled with people, most of them don’t have product knowledge and are not fans, and they’re tongue-in-cheeking it. It shows you their lack of respect, in general, for the business. Chilly McFreeze… are you sh***ing me?”
JEANIE CLARK (manager, Austin’s ex-wife)
“He would drink hot tea, and he was sitting by the edge of the bed and I just said ‘don’t worry, you’ll think of something. Now drink your tea before it gets stone cold...There it is, there’s your name.’”
SAVIO VEGA (wrestler)
“JJ Dillon and I met and six months later, I was [at WWF]…I feel good that I put something in that company. I worked hard for that position too.”
“STONE COLD” STEVE AUSTIN
“Savio Vega is old school. After two or three months working every night with Savio Vega, he got me in the best shape of my career. If we were in the beginning or in the middle of the card, you had to work your ass off to follow that match because very few people could. I have nothing but the highest of regards and respect for Savio Vega, and I loved working with him.”
SAVIO VEGA
“Steve Austin. As soon as he got his feet in WWF, we were in San Antonio when he got his tryout with WWF. I remember when we were in the back and Pat Patterson came up to me and said, “You two are going to have a match. Let us see what he has. You are going to go over.” I said to Stone Cold, “I don’t know you, you don’t know me. My finish is this.” And that was it. From that moment, we had chemistry, brother. You can see it in the matches we put on. From that day on, they put us together all over the United States. That match at Wrestlemania wasn’t the greatest match I remember. I don’t know what happened, it wasn’t that strong. We had better matches than that. But he was a blast.”
THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR vs HUNTER HEARST-HELMSLEY
TRIPLE H
“I was in my first WrestleMania ever and Vince came to me and said, ‘I would like you to work with one of the biggest stars that’s ever been in this business, the Ultimate Warrior’s going to return and I’d like you to work with him.’”
JIM CORNETTE
“As members of the creative team, myself, Bruce Prichard and Jim Ross received one of Vince’s mandatory invitations to stop over in Phoenix on the way to LA and have lunch with the Warrior, to ‘get inside his head’ and ‘get ideas for how to present him’ based on his ‘concepts.’ We met Warrior at his gym, and had lunch with him. I had never been a fan of his work, and was not alone in that thinking, but he was a big star, so since I had never met him, I could at least give him the benefit of the doubt. All I can say after that lunch is, specifics are impossible to remember because while I know he was speaking English because I recognized the words, I had never heard them in that order before. Past that he takes his position as a sports entertainment icon and paragon of positive thinking very seriously, I’m not sure what the bloody hell his ‘concepts’ were.”
TRIPLE H
“Probably one of the most unprofessional guys I’ve ever stepped in the ring with.”
THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR
“I’m the most unprofessional person you’ve ever stepped into the ring with? Well, now, ain’t that pretty. Because what I remember, Mr. Stephanie McMahon, is that you were only in the ring with me one time — and for less than 5 minutes. Here all these years since leaving the ring and becoming interested in mentoring young people, I often wonder what kind of impact I am having because I take it seriously and it is important to me do it effectively. Well, it sure sounds like I taught you very well in the 5 minutes you had in the ring with me. Because from what I hear you are the biggest unprofessional assholes the business has ever seen. You are welcome.”
TRIPLE H
“It was a mind-boggling situation to me. Knowing where it ended up, with his passing and everything, because we didn’t know each other, and it was an odd beginning. We didn’t get along, necessarily. But when people look back at that, they think that’s a sore spot for me.”
THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR
“Yes, Paul, sorrily, your whole career has been a mission to outdo Ultimate Warrior. But guess what little, puffy man? You failed. Oh, how you failed. I set an iconic standard none of you could reach. And you are bitter about it. So bitter.”
JIM CORNETTE
“[Warrior] would squash HHH in a minute and a half in a classic lack of long term thinking.”
THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR
“Indeed, it is this bitterness that you most have in common with your father-in-law. In fact, he recognized the depth of it in you and knew if something ever happened to him you would continue the mission to fulfill his vendetta. To secure it, he gave you his daughter. But he must be a little concerned, because it seems the only masculinity you can drum up is while you are hanging onto her booking skirt. You know, think about it. If I hadn’t been smitten with my own honey at the time and Vince would have been more sensible, he might have hired me to become his son-in-law. You know, the Original Ultimate Warrior, not a dismal imitation. On second thought, I had strong self confidence and Vince never felt sorry for me as he evidently does for you.”
VAUGHN JOHNSON
“Marc Mero made his WWE debut during an interview segment. His interview was cut because of an angry Helmsley, who was berating his valet Sable, who was married to Mero in real life. Eventually, Mero eventually rescued Sable from the tyrannical Helmsley.”
THE UNDERTAKER vs DIESEL
KEVIN NASH
“[When I was Champion], they brought me up to WWF Headquarters, which was called Titan Tower at the time, and Vince went into this elaborate idea of me fighting Mike Tyson in Central Park. I asked him, ‘How much am I going to get paid?’ Vince said it was for charity, and I said, ‘Fuck. I ain’t fighting Mike Tyson and getting knocked the fuck out for charity.’ Then he told me, ‘By the way, you’re going to drop the strap to Bret at Survivor Series because we’re going to put it on Shawn at WrestleMania.’ It was an incredible smoke-and-mirrors move. So, I asked him, we just went over a bunch of horseshit for an hour to distract me? I didn’t care about losing the belt or getting it back. I’m not a mark. If you want to beat me, beat me — as long as I can turn my character back after I get beat. I didn’t ask for permission [to turn heel]. I told the camera guys, ‘Make sure you get a close-up of my face after I lose the belt.’ After I lost, I said, ‘Motherfucker!’ on camera right after Bret beat me.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“On day six of the India tour, Diesel told me that he and Razor were really going to WCW, for $750,000 a year, which was more than I was making. They had given Vince notice and were down to their last ninety days in the WWF.”
KEVIN NASH
“Because Vince told me when I told him I was leaving, he wanted me to put over Mark [Undertaker] at WrestleMania. I said, ‘A pleasure. I will put Mark over 100 days in a row.’ I have nothing but respect and love for Mark. He’s a man’s man. I saw him work with fuckin’ broken ribs in a flack vest with a face mask and a broken orbital bone. He is a stud.”
IRON MAN MATCH FOR THE WWF CHAMPIONSHIP: SHAWN MICHAELS VS BRET “HIT MAN” HART
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Despite the overall tension between the boys and the clique, Shawn and I had never let on to each other that there were any problems between us. He told me that he hoped Diesel and Razor would stay because after he became champion at WrestleMania XII he figured on working with them. I suggested he had fresh guys to work with, such as Vader and Austin. He nervously chewed on his nail, spit out a piece and shook his head. ‘I think I’d rather work with Hunter and do another little program with The Kid.’ I had spoken up for Owen, Jim and Davey over the years, but I never pushed them to the exclusion of everybody else, as Shawn fully intended to do with his clique. I realized then that The Heartbreak Kid didn’t have the heart to be champion.”
JIM ROSS
“Pat Patterson had been on a break from WWE when he got a phone call from McMahon inviting Pat to attend WrestleMania XII because the main event was going to be ‘special.’ It would feature an idea that Patterson had suggested a few years earlier. Two of Patterson’s favorite in-ring performers of all time, Bret Hart and Michaels, would face off in a 60-minute Iron Man match for the Hitman’s WWE title. The wrestler that earned the most decisions within the time limit would leave with the glory and the title.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“It was Vince who came up with the idea to go with the “boyhood dream” storyline for WrestleMania. He brought me in one day and sasid, ‘I want to tell your whole story. How you wanted to be a wrestler since you were twelve, your dream to be a champion and all the ups and downs of your career to get to this point. There’s nothing better tan that. It’s true, it’s real.’”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“They had filmed Shawn in sunny San Antonio, where he ran the steps at a football stadium, did upside-down sit-ups and pretended to spar with his mentor, Jose Lothario.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“Jose Lothario was a big part of my story, and we decided to bring him in and have him train me for the match. A lot of people didn’t like having Jose there. They thought having him there was corny, that it brought down the coolness of my character. The world had changed, and this was not the time to be a white-meat babyface, but I didn’t care. Jose was a big part if my story. I didn’t care if some people thought it wasn’t cool.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“In late February, Jim Ross and a WWF camera crew flew up to Calgary to get some footage of me training for the big match. I was portrayed as the wily veteran from the dungeon who had every intention of being the champion for a long time. February in Calgary is the coldest time of the year, but they had me jog along Scotsman’s Hill so they could get panoramic views of the city with the Rockies in the background. I don’t think J.R. and the camera crew were trying to be funny, but I couldn’t help but see the humor in the footage they shot. It was so icy that I had to run carefully, so it came across on film like I was running about a mile an hour. Another magic moment taped for the world to see was when they asked me to swim laps in my pool. But the topper was when they filmed Stu stretching me in the dungeon, an eighty-year-old man tying me up in knots with me eagerly tapping out!”
JIM ROSS
“Stu Hart demonstrated a few submission holds on me, much to my chagrin.”
DANIEL BRYAN
“I was a huge wrestling fan but I couldn’t afford the pay-per-views until WrestleMania XII. I was working at McDonald’s making $4.45 an hour so I saved up money because I was so excited to see the Iron Man Match.”
AJ STYLES
“When Shawn Michaels did that crazy entrance coming down on the cable. That was the coolest entrance I’ve seen.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Shawn did make a spectacular entrance, sliding down to the ring from a steel cable strung from the rafters while his ring music thumped ‘I’m just a sexy boy . . .’”
BRUCE PRICHARD
“Vince just wanted to do it, make sure it is safe. I did want to do it but I saw Vince do it. I was like yeah no, I’m good, let the crazy man do it. He never will [do something he wouldn’t do himself]. He will do it, he’ll jump in there and do it and throw caution to the wind every time.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“I got to the Anaheim Pond that day, and Vince goes, ‘You’ve got to try this.’
BRUCE PRICHARD
“The crazy thing about it was they got Vince all harnessed up and when Vince went, what no one accounted for was he was damn near in line for the lighting truss’. I’m sitting up there thinking, motherfuckers, didn’t anybody consider this before he got on this and his weight brought everything down. Shouldn’t a stuntman have done this first? There wasn’t a stunt man to do it.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“I’ve always had to use the bathroom right before I go out. And I had to do it up there. I had to pull the strap off, unbuckle myself and urinated on top of the Anaheim Pond. … Bunch of the insulation stuff was up there. I figured that would soak it all up, and it did. There you have it. Like a sponge.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“He seemed to explode from the ceiling as fireworks went off around the arena. His waist-length blond hair was neatly pulled back, and the words ‘Heartbreak Kid’ were emblazoned on the ass of his white, silver-trimmed tights. The Boy Toy had come to fulfill his lifelong dream. In stark contrast, I marched out with little pomp and circumstance, wearing a new ring coat and a black outfit. I looked every bit the tough ring general, serious and confident, the dutiful torchbearer.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“Bret was a bit worried about going for an hour. His first concern was fitness. He told me that he would let me know how he was feeling during the match by giving me numbers between one and ten. If he said anything below five, it meant he was feeling good. If he said “eight,” we needed to slow down. If he said “ten,” we would grab a rest hold. I was very cool with this system. We wanted to know how the other was feeling so we could make the match as good as possible.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“There were no wasted moves, and the precision in every move, right down to Tony Chimel getting kicked off his chair — I’ve watched it maybe 10 times in the last 10 years — and the beauty of that match was that Shawn and I had put a lot of thought into different aspects of the match.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“With all the differences Bret and I had, they never made their way into the ring.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“Two great wrestlers in their prime, trying to outdo each other under the guise of working together.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“I know this is going to sound offensive coming from me, but Bret was not a great wrestler. He was good-very, very good-but not great. He wasn’t that versatile in the ring. The things he did, he did well, but he didn’t do a lot of exciting stuff.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“It was rather obvious to me that he’d been coached to lean on me as much as he could.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
With Bret, you couldn’t put a twist on the Russian leg sweep, the backbreaker, the drop of the elbow from the second rope and then the Sharpshooter. Once Bret went into his routine, he wouldn’t change it up.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“He did sneaky tricks, such as dragging his heavy, steel-toed motorcycle boots across my face, scraping my lips up, which led to a subtle hour- long potato harvest. At one point while I was on the floor, Shawn climbed up to the top corner and dove out on me. He overshot and was flying head-first toward the railing, if not the front row. If I didn’t catch him, he might seriously hurt himself. I put my own body on the line and quite literally pulled him out of the air, right on top of me, saving him and his lifelong dream of being champion.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“I’ve always believed that the intention was for Shawn to drag me off the mat for the last twenty minutes. But it made for a beautiful story — the lion and the gazelle, or perhaps the wolf and the fox. If fans go back and study this one closely, they’ll see that at times I was stiff, but I was never slow or heavy.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“Wrestling an hour was special, but I thought we could make it even more exciting if we kept it to one fall and ended up going into overtime tied 0–0. I didn’t think Bret and I should be beating each other a bunch. If we were that easy to beat, we shouldn’t be there wrestling for the World Wrestling Federation Championship.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“I remember there was a certain point when I had to be setting up a move with exactly five minutes left in the match. I remember setting up on the second rope and looking at the score clock, and there were exactly four minutes and fifty-nine seconds left in the match. It was those little details where we were exactly on cue, on the second, that made the ‘Iron Man’ match unlike any other live drama.”
PAT PATTERSON
“I was going crazy backstage. It was unbelievable.”
JOHN BRADSHAW LAYFIELD (wrestler)
“I remember watching that match and literally thinking, ‘I don’t belong here.’”
TYSON KIDD (wrestler)
“It was an hour long and I was on the edge of my seat for the entire time. I didn’t want it to end.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“I came up with the idea where he would have me in the Sharpshooter and I’d be hanging on for dear life as regulation time ran down. Some people had a problem with this, saying that it would look like the clock saved me from tapping out and would make me look weak. I just thought it was good drama.”
JIM ROSS
“At the end of regulation, neither Hart nor Michaels had earned a decision. WWE “President” Gorilla Monsoon came to the ring to order the match continued with sudden-death rules, which had not been previously promoted.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“I went for the cover, but couldn’t get to him because I had been in the Sharpshooter for so long. Slowly, he managed to struggle to his feet. I too had recovered a bit, and I ripped him with another superkick and this time made the cover.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“The drama of me staggering back up to my feet, still fighting, then taking the big boot for Shawn’s finish, and the drama, frustration, and emotion my fans must have felt was huge.”
JIM ROSS
“McMahon, who was doing the play-by-play, proclaimed, ‘Shawn Michaels’ boyhood dream has come true!’”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“As I knelt in the ring clutching the belt to my chest, reality started to set in. Winning the World Wrestling Federation Championship did not fulfill my boyhood dream. It had far, far exceeded any dream I ever had as a boy.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“The crowd exploded as Shawn’s music played. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard Shawn angrily tell Earl, ‘Tell him to get the fuck out of the ring! This is my moment!’”
JIM ROSS
“It was very ill timed. And the sensitivities of Bret, Bret took great pride in being the top guy.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“When I made my way back to the dressing room, most of the guys came by and congratulated me. Everyone knew it was a huge moment for me. Pat Patterson, the man who supported me from the first minute Marty and I came in, and had supported me ever since, hugged me. Vince hugged me. Kevin hugged me. It was very emotional, and I was completely spent both physically and mentally. I broke down crying. About the only person I didn’t see was Bret Hart.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“With my head held high, I walked to my waiting Lincoln and burned rubber up the ramp as the credits rolled. That night after the show, the hotel bar was packed with celebrating fans. I chose to hole up in my room with the kids and enjoy the cold bottles of beer that I had chilling in the sink. I let out a long, silent sigh, knowing that I could leave on a good note. As a character I couldn’t be torn down and used up. I was a free agent in a strong position. Go ahead and see if you can carry the company, Shawn.”
SHAWN MICHAELS
“Usually, you shake hands with your opponent after the match and thank each other. I never saw Bret after the match, and he never said a word to me. Bret took off immediately, and I wouldn’t see him for another seven or eight months.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“A third generation of Hart wrestlers — the adolescent Dallas, Matt, T.J. (Tyson Kidd) and Harry (Davey Boy Smith Jr.), along with five- year-old Blade — pulled the mattresses in my hotel room onto the floor to turn them into wrestling mats. The sight of them with their shirts off getting all sweaty meant the world to me. They stayed up until 4 a.m. eating pizza and wrestling. It made me think of my brother Dean and me as kids.”
TYSON KIDD
“Being there live, this was a match that solidified that being in WWE was what I wanted to do as a career and I would do whatever it took to be as good as Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels.”
FINN BALOR (wrestler)
“There are a lot of great matches you can watch in the moment, but that’s the match you can watch ten, fifteen, a hundred times and it still stands the test of time.”
BRET “THE HITMAN” HART
“I think it stands as the best pro wrestling match. Kudos to Shawn, too. We both made that a classic match that will never, ever lose its shine.”
Next:
Back to:
PART ONE: The Grandaddy of ’Em All, PART TWO: Bigger. Badder. Better., PART THREE: What The World Is Watching, PART FOUR: Hulk Still Rules, PART FIVE: The New Generation
Wrestling Club with Darren & Brett is a podcast produced by WFMU.
