You famously slapped Miss Elizabeth after a match, which stood out as shocking at the time. How would you get such a reaction today when crowds have seen every outlandish thing you can think of?
I think it has to do with the characters. We could do the same thing, all of us, but there’s some of us just seem to get through to the people and that goes back to the character. When I did things, people said “Oh my god” and then somebody else could do the same thing and there’s no reaction at all. It’s about the believability of your character. Most guys, they screw themselves, they go out and kill off their character themselves by doing outlandish things and not following them up, or not making them believable. The one thing that I always strive not to do was destroy my own credibility. By that I mean not doing something that makes you be total crap. Giving somebody three or four clotheslines to me is an idiot’s game because you haven’t shown the people anything other than you’re weak and what you’re doing has no effect. Believing in yourself means going out there and doing things that are believable, staying believable and never destroying your own credibility.
The storyline of Randy Savage being so protective of Elizabeth had a lot of reality to it. How did you navigate harnessing that emotion for the story?
Randy was a shoot — he was very protective, he was overprotective. All I had to do was follow it, step on it a little bit but don’t crush it. Needle him but don’t stab him. It’s a game: you want to build your programme, build your storyline. You don’t want to come out and do your biggest thing first because where do you go from there. It would be like me going out and starting a match doing the DDT. Alright, what’s next? Nothing, I’ve done my best thing. That’s where guys today screw up: they do so many things, and they do them all well, but they destroy their credibility because they don’t have any effect on their opponent. I just watch television today and I shake my head.
Could you ever have been persuaded to let somebody kick out of the DDT?
Well, it did [sort of] happen at WrestleMania with Undertaker. I was leaving the company at the time and they wanted that to happen before I left the company. I said well, it’s a little bit too much and the way I handled that was I hit him with the DDT but I didn’t cover him. I let it wait seven or eight seconds before I reached over and put a hand on him. Well, seven or eight seconds in the fans’ mind, that’s enough time for this guy to regain his strength and come out of it. So I wouldn’t destroy my own credibility: I just refused to do that, and I got in a lot of trouble over that!
You had an undersung match with Ricky Steamboat in Boston where the first five minutes of the match were mainly you blocking his chops and working his arm over to stop the chops? Did you ever worry that type of story was too subtle for the live crowd to understand, and how reliant were you on the announcers to explain it to the TV viewers?
You’ve got to trust the announcers there. Some guys are good, some guy’s aren’t. But that match was a phenomenal match, any match with me and Steamboat was phenomenal — it was just crazy how good it was. Ricky’s a tremendous talent, I have all the respect in the world for him, I care about him very much. In fact whenever they wanted me to DDT him on the concrete I refused to do it. He talked me into it and of course it didn’t work out too well for him! Damn near killed him. But doing the chop thing, it was just a natural: block, block, block and then he finally gets it and when he gets it he kicks my ass. That’s the chess game. When you make it in to wrestling like that it’s easy for the fans to follow and you build for that pop. Of course, you do give it to them, but you wait till you’re ready to give it to them. Today they don’t do that, they just go out and try to pop pop pop pop pop, but it doesn’t work and their ratings show it. I get so frustrated when I watch today because I do love wrestling so much. These guys are working their butts off; that’s not the problem. They don’t get the opportunity to learn: these guys start in wrestling school and two years later they’re expected to be main-eventers. Well it doesn’t happen like that, it takes time. What you get is guys going out and doing every damn move in the book and none of them mean anything and nobody believes in them.
When working in Mexico for AAA you famously had so much heat people threw used diapers at you. Did you ever feel the need to cool the crowd down and, if so, how would you do it?
The only way you’re going to cool down the crowd is to give them what they want and that’s pretty easy: I just fed whoever I was wrestling, be that Konnan or whoever. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to cool down a crowd [in the match]: all I’ve ever thought about was my safety in getting out of there and in Mexico it was a true problem. Sensational Sherri and myself were put in danger several times. In Mexico City we had to sit in the locker room till five o’clock in the morning before we could even sneak out of the building. That’s a bit much!
How conscious were you of keeping your character consistent when turning face or heel, but still making the turn clear?
I always tried to stay the same but just redirect on who I was laying out and going for; let the fans turn me, not me turn myself. I’ve always done that. In the beginning, Honky Tonk and I changed places. He hit me with the guitar and it turned him heel and turned me babyface: it’s pretty crazy and lets the fans do it. Once the fans do it, then they’re in control and getting what they want instead of a situation where you’re cramming it down their throat and saying “Believe this!” Once you start doing that you lose the fans and I think you’re seeing that today with Roman Reigns.
I was always a snake. I still kept my character, I was always a loner. I wasn’t a rah-rah guy, high five, all that crap, I was always that loner, that one you weren’t sure about. I always tried to keep that element out there: if I can create that doubt in the fans minds, it just leads to more money.
When you feuded with Andre the Giant he was in a poor physical state. How did you work around those limitations?
For me it was very easy, I just went back to that old thing of ‘never expose your opponent’s weakness’. Always build your opponent. It doesn’t matter if it’s with Andre or a job guy, I tried to build them. That way, if I came out on top, then I beat somebody that was at the top of their game, instead of going out and exposing their weaknesses and knocking him on his ass and he can’t get up: that wouldn’t have helped anything. So I knew that if he needed to go down, he needed to be near a rope so he could pull himself up.
How would you have approached promos today now they are often much longer and more heavily scripted than in your era?
That would be very easy for me: I was always king of the promos and I still am. You’ve got to make it entertaining and you’ve got to keep in character. All you need to know is your major bullet points and other than that you can weave your story around anything, you can talk about peanut butter, you can talk about the colour of the sky: it doesn’t matter as long as you come back to those bullet points. I think if you watch my promos you’ll see all of that.
