What challenges did you find with the German tournament format, where you’d wrestle in front of the same audience every night, but against different opponents?
Some guys couldn’t keep it up, especially Americans. They’d get good heat and then they’d put heel against heel, or babyface against babyface and if you didn’t work it right they’d start booing one of you or cheering one of you, which you didn’t want. Heel on heel, one would maybe turn babyface and start selling. But it didn’t work because the next night people are [still] feeling sorry for you.
What did you learn from taking the English style to the US?
Anybody from England, ‘they were all shooters’. I don’t know why. Let’s face it, most of the guys [in the] US are better wrestlers than we were because they all wrestle in school and college!
In one match I put Sting in a toe and ankle, take the leg for him to spin me out and me take a bump. I’d been doing this a couple of times and he never spun me out. The third time I did this, after the match, he came up to me and said “You keep putting me in them holds and I can’t get out of them.” I said “Fucking hell, it’s for you: just turn over and spin and I take a front bump.” But he said “Yeah, but I don’t know it!” I were trying to make him look good by doing this. I realised to myself, if they don’t know it, it’s hard. So then you start reverting and doing American stuff, or you put a hold on and let go of it yourself.
I were always taught to work and make your opponent look good, and then if you beat him, you look better. If you give your opponent nothing, like a squash match, you beat nobody. But in America it’s all for yourself. The guys try to make themselves look good, but they don’t realise you can’t look good without your opponent. If you don’t sell, you don’t get any heat. But they don’t get that, some babyfaces. They go “We didn’t get any heat.” Well, you didn’t look like you were getting beat! You just looked like you were going to win from the word go, so you don’t get any sympathy.
When you run a training seminar, how much planning of a schedule do you do?
It depends what they know, If you get six [guys], two of them might know nothing, so I don’t plan anything, I just go as it goes. Every day will be different. I don’t go in “Today I’m going to learn you this, this and this”, it just comes. They say “What are you going to teach us today?” and I say “I don’t know, let’s see how it goes. You two, get in here, start to wrestle.” They start to wrestle and then I’m in then. “No no, this is wrong, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.”
I’ve been to one place and they’ve said “Can you show us how to jump off the top rope?” and I’ve said “Yeah, I could, if that’s what you want.” So I had them jumping off the top rope, landing on their heads — they loved it. I said “But what are you going to do in between that. You’ve done a back somersault, you’ve landed on the ground, what are you going to do now?” “Well, I’ll run off and do this.” “Yeah, but what after that?” “Ooh, I don’t know.” “Exactly.” That’s why you need to learn to wrestle, because you cannot do a twenty minute spotfest. And if you do, it looks like shit. And if anybody watches, they know it’s a spotfest, even the fans know it’s a spotfest.
Can you train somebody to fit a particular gimmick?
You can’t teach anybody anything; they’ve got to learn everything. They will find their own thing eventually. Even the top guys, they all started off as something different to what they are now. The writers will look at somebody and go “ooh, right, we want you as the English proper gentleman” and you might start off as that and then suddenly you’re the English tough guy or brawler or whatever. In America they’ve got this thing about the English, we all wear a bowler hat and talk with us fucking noses clamped up and that is what they perceive all of us to be.
There’s not a lot of outright gimmicks now. You can’t go in and tell somebody “you’re going to be the Boogeyman”. Whoever thought of Boogeyman? It were him! And they looked at him and thought “shit, that’s good!”
Down in Orlando now there’ll be seventy guys there, twenty women and fifty men, you couldn’t pick anyone out now and say “We want you do to this as a gimmick.” They all make their own stuff up, they have like promo classes. They put stuff together themselves. It’s all so creative, it’s unbelievable. It’s all taped and they send it up to WWE and the look at it and if it’s any good they try it.
[The writers] don’t know what they want till they see it. You can’t say to them “What do you want? What would you like me to do, because I can do anything you want.” They don’t know. They only know when they see it, if they like it. That’s the truth of how it is, which is very hard.
You’ve mentioned that you think wrestlers should go to as many different trainers as possible. Why is that?
You just pick out bits, the bits you learn off people. If I have you for a week, there might be one thing that you do good. Just do that one thing and then you’ve got something off somebody else, something off somebody else. You can’t be like your trainer. And you’ve got to work with different people to learn different things.
That’s why if you’re learning to wrestle, you’ve got to go to as many different trainers as possible, because that’s the way now. There’s no one person now you’re going to learn everything from. Who like that are you going to work with now in England? Doug Williams, that’s about it, because Doug’s the only one who knows a lot of the stuff.
You might say to yourself “I haven’t learned nothing off you, I’m never going to do any of that stuff you’ve showed me.” Yeah, but you know it in case anybody does it to you. You’ve got to know both ways. You can’t just know how to put a headlock, you’ve got to know how somebody puts a headlock on you.
I once wrestled Shane Helms in Cardiff, me and Regal against Shane Helms and Chavo Guerrero. After the match, about a week later, Helms wrote about it on his site. I felt fantastic when I read what he wrote. He said “You don’t know how good somebody is until you work with them.” It were because he’d go and put me in a hold and I’d know what hold he were going to put me in, so I’d move that way for him to do it. He didn’t have to drag me around: I’m going that way. All these guys now, you’ve got to pull them, you’ve got to drag them, you’ve got to bend their arm to get a hold on. And even then you might not get it on!
I said “yeah, I know what you’re doing and where you’re going,” and he said “but I’ve never worked with anyone like that before! I went for your leg to put a single-leg Boston on and you’re there, you’re in it!”
You’ve got to learn as much as you can from everybody and even if you think “Oh, he’s shit”, there’ll be something he’s told you or something he’s showed you that you’ll use years after. You’re not going to learn it in three months or six months or five years, it’s going to take ten, fifteen years, and then you’ll go “Shit, I’ve got it!” And you might not ever say you’ve got it — I’ve never said “I’ve got it.” You just learn every time you work, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t be in the job because it’s different every day you do it.
[This was just a small portion of a longer interview with Taylor for my career profile of him which is included in my book Have A Good Week… Till Next Week.]
