What’s the biggest factor in making yourself a main event star rather than just another wrestle?
I tell the young people coming up that what makes the difference is: wrestle with your heart, not your head. They’re so busy doing memorisation that they forget that the moves in wrestling are just a way to convey your message to your audience, as words in a book are a way for an author to convey a message to you. It’s what the foundation of wrestling is.
[For example,] if you have a man who’s been working five years, he’s been working really hard, he’s fit, knows all the moves, he can do it, he’s doing great, good for him — you shouldn’t get in the ring until you know all that. And then you take all that and you take a moment before you go to the ring and get it out of your head.
From the time you start walking down that aisle, wrestle with your heart. Whether it’s wrestling or gymnastics or whatever, if you’re putting your heart into it, we can all tell, we’re all human beings. It does two things. One, it compels them to watch you and either root for you or not root for you. Two, it sells tickets and gives you respect as an artist.
How would you advise today’s wrestlers to get over with Vince McMahon?
It changes. WWE’s a public company: a lot of rules have been changed, and lot of rules have been made that were never there. What Daniel Bryan did, very cleverly, he just got one word in, “YES!” He got it onto t-shirts, kept it going, until with Vince McMahon he couldn’t be denied. He was smart enough within the system, without shaking up the sponsorship deals, to get people going “Yes, Yes, Yes” so much that [Vince] couldn’t help but go with it.
You need to get smart, you need to think — guys don’t think. Back in the age of the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs would be driving me. They were brutal. 300 miles talking [about your match], busting your chops, they were slapping you, I mean for years it was the way to learn. Thank god they don’t have to go through that any more. But on the other hand [the setup now] stops independent thinking. So today, the guys have to figure out where they belong in the system, until they get over and then it becomes part of the system.
What was the biggest mistake you made coming up?
One time I went to a promoter and then went back to the dressing room and one of the old-timers slapped me: POW! This promoter, when it was time to get paid, the first thing he’d do is get a roll of quarters, which is ten dollars, in your hands and he’d look at you. And he’d give you another dollar, and then he’d look at you. He might put a five in. But if he saw you smile, he’d stop. I came out the first night with a roll of quarters because I didn’t know better, and this guy in the dressing room just paintbrushed me and said “Don’t you ever smile, he’s a promoter and he doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care whether you live or die.”
That was a running thread through all territories. Once a year all the promoters had a meeting, then they’d have a closed door meeting, meaning if you didn’t own a territory, get out. In that meeting they’d talk about what wrestlers were doing what, where, when… who’s a problem. They’d go away from that meeting with plans to get rid of the ones who were trouble. There was an Illuminati for want of a better word.
I wish that somebody had come along and said “Hey, there’s gotta be a way to get along with them.” I loved [the wrestlers] so much, my biggest mistake was not being intelligent enough to conform my thinking to work with promoters as well.
When you changed back and forth between heel and babyface, you didn’t change your character much. Was that a deliberate decision to make things feel more authentic?
That came from Mad Dog Vachon. I was taught a very clever piece of business: very difficult, but very clever. I was taught to come into a territory as a heel and have a two year run and manipulate it in such a way that they would change me babyface and I’d have another two year run.
When it came to WWE, I was boxing Mr T at Nassau Coliseum and in the second or third round, the entire building started chanting my name. I had been taught to wrestle with that formula [two years heel, two years face] for so long, I had just done that without even really thinking about it. Because then it’s the fans that make up their minds and once they make up their minds, then it’s gold because they know that they made it up.
If you’re a fighter with bagpipes and a kilt and you start changing and putting Mickey Mouse ears on because you’re going to be a good guy and all that, you’re not going to last at all and you lower your real estate value. Once you are what you are, that’s what you are. So make sure that you pick the right things that you are, because you’re stuck with it for life!
One of your most famous matches was with Bret Hart at WrestleMania VIII. Can you talk us through that match and how you adapted to the relatively unusual scenario of babyface vs babyface?
I don’t think I talked to Bret for 10 minutes before the match! I was normally, in a program, mad at somebody and that dictates what you do in the ring, coming to the ring, etc. When you hold a belt, that’s a whole different ball game, that’s a whole different presentation of yourself.
I legitimately had been to Bret’s house and his mother did make me a grilled sandwich and I legitimately did send her a dozen roses: I thought she was the nicest lady I ever met. The promo leading up to it was “I don’t want to fight you. I like you, I like your mom, I like your family. And if I fight you, I’m going to have to hurt you.”
It was built on truth: I love Bret, I love his family, but you know what, I love my family more and we gotta eat. When it came to the ring it was great, because instead of just having the programmed booing and yelling, [the audience] didn’t know what to do, and that’s where the masters come out. We hadn’t talked anything about the match because I don’t know what I’m going to do till I get out there.
I’ll tell you where it paid off, all the promos… Bret was down, and the referee was down, and I grabbed the bell and went to hit him… Holy cow! That crowd with every earnest point in their body was screaming “Don’t do it, Roddy, please.” Not “Look out, Bret,” but “No, don’t let us down Roddy, you don’t need to do it.” That kind of emotion. That’s a hard emotion to get from a crowd that big. When I put the bell down, they cheered. You’ve got whatever number of fans cheering, just because I put the belt down. How many matches do you see that in?!
Then the ending of the match… (laughs.) I put Bret in the sleeper, the referee was down, Bret kicked the turnbuckle, over we went and the ref counted my shoulders to three. I didn’t know where I was going from then [in storyline terms] so I’d built in a safety net: It was the wrong call on the referee’s part.
The sleeper is an offensive move so the first thing he should have done is raise Bret’s arm and if it falls three times I’m the winner, but he didn’t, he counted my shoulders. I wanted to [lose] for Bret because he was worth it. But I always thought to myself, just in case somebody’s jerking around with me, I can play this card and get back in [the storylines]!
You’ve previously spoken to FSM about how you were selective about what you did in your matches, particularly the finish. Do you think you could have been as selective in today’s environment where only having one real major promotion limits your leverage?
Leverage comes from talent, leverage does not come from [how many promotions there are.] There are people who are backstage politicians; I’m not one of them. Leverage was “Ok, you’ve got an idea Vince, give it to me. What’re you trying to do? Yeah, put a microphone there, I’ll give you Piper’s Pit.” And that’s what Vince wanted. So although nothing was scripted, what it was really was is a promoter coming to an expert in his field and kicking around thoughts and if you’re not good enough to get that done, you don’t belong there. What do you need? Let me go think about it, here it is, boom, you got it. That’s the way to work with them. If they’ve got something that they want, make it work with them when they can’t [figure out how to do it]. There’s leverage.
I never held up a promoter for money, I was always taught those kind of things are wrong. I never went out there either and changed anything or did anything on purpose just to make them angry. But I would say “You can talk to me all you want back here, but when that bell rings, I’m the boss.” The reason I say that is because I’m out there and you’re not. I’m feeling those people and I might have to take a left hand turn when you want me to take a right. You give me a “Z” and I have to get there, but how I get there, Mr Promoter, you leave that up to me.
The production of WWE events has changed dramatically over your career with far more cameras involved now. Does that change the way wrestlers should work?
The knowledge of where you’re being shot from is something you put in the back of your mind. Again, wrestle with your heart. If I’m doing something, say I’m doing a Piper’s Pit and at the end of Piper’s Pit I want to raise, I don’t know, CM Punk’s hand… OK, I know where the hard camera is, there you go, boom. Anything else, they’ve got to get around to me. Unless it’s a very specific piece of business that is making up a five second piece of footage that they need here and that they can only get from that camera, then that’s different and they’ve only got to say that once and I’ve got it.
But otherwise, if you start playing to cameras, oh man, then you’re not giving the audience your best. The [handheld cameras should] run around and find me. Say I’ve got an arm bar on somebody and I’m near a rope and there’s a [handheld] there and it’s looking straight at me, am I supposed to look at it and growl? No. I’m meant to be trying to make this guy give up; I shouldn’t give a shit how it looks, that’s not my department. Say a football player scores a touchdown and he does his wobbly dance, does he look for the camera first? Nah, nah. Those camera moments are very few and far between because if you’re told to look at a camera, it’s not going to be honest.
You played a key role in the Hulk Hogan-Andre the Giant build-up. How did you balance taking more of a back seat to build up somebody else’s match while still keeping your own character strong?
First of all, I’m a professional, real deal. You must pick your spots and there comes a time where it’s not all about you. Andre and Hogan: first of all, they were on Piper’s Pit. The ring announcer would say “And now we go over to Piper’s Pit,” so my name’s already out there. They’re in a stage called Piper’s Pit!
It’s my job at that particular point to be the moderator, for lack of a better word. It’s also my job to make sure the stakes get as high as they possibly can. And the way it happened, nobody could have predicted it, Andre got mad and reached over and tore the cross off Hogan and Hogan was down on his knees and I went down on my knees. And the way Andre did it, Hogan was bleeding, his chest was bleeding. So I know my timing, and I knew how many seconds I had left, and I just said “You’re bleeding.” It’s all that needed to be said and that put the stakes exactly where they wanted them. You know, when people talk about the match, they have no idea how much work went into positioning so that match would become great.
How would you advise today’s wrestlers to get good enough with heavily scripted promos that they can become trusted to have the same type of freedom as you used to have?
There’s lots of different ways to do that. If you have a group of words in a sentence, like “Run Spot run.” That’s your sentence. OK. You can go [monotonous voice] “RUN….. SPOT… RUN”.
Or, same verbiage [fast, inspiring voice]: “Run, Spot, run!”
You’re using the same verbiage, but it’s where it’s coming from. You’ve got to be clever enough to use the exact verbiage but convey a whole different message. [It can be as simple as] just wherever you put the pauses. Meanwhile you’ve got all these guys out there going [monotonous voice] “RUN….. SPOT… RUN” and I’m meant to believe they’re going to come and kick my ass?!
If you were starting out today, with one global promotion and the performance centre for development rather than the territories, how would you make yourself a star?
I made sure my character was foolproof. Do you know any other bagpipe-playing wrestlers? Do you know any other bagpipe-playing, kilt-wearing wrestlers that came fifth in the world [at bagpipes]? It’d be easy, I’d just walk in the door and take over, man. There’s just some things that can’t be denied.
But even as I said that, it sounds so vain and I hate that, I hate that about myself. I’m not a vain guy. I suppose there’s a fine line between ego and confidence. But you have to have it: think about it, you’re going in front of 90,000 people stripped down to your underwear and somebody rings a bell and says “Go.” Go where? It’s an unusual job description!
In my case, I had to put in a lot more work than some of the guys are putting into their craft right now. Not all, but some guys. Let me tell you young guys, it got to the point where nobody would drive with me any more. Every night, every night, I would drive 300 miles. I would have all the lights on in the car, I would have… some type of beverage, I would have the radio blaring rock ‘n’ roll, I would drive with my knees, and I would have a yellow legal pad and a pen. I was writing promos all night long.
Next morning, depending on the beverages, I would look and go “What is that? What bullshit is that? Oh, but wait a second, I could use that,” and I’d put that away. Well, you do that a thousand times and you’ve got 200 [usable promos.]
I don’t want to talk to my opponent before a match because I’m running over so many different things in my head. I don’t just walk out there and slob away and it’s some kind of miracle that I can do it. It was a lot of work and I still put the same kind of work in, it’s just I don’t have to put so much into it any more because I can refer to things I’ve already done. You’ve got to put your homework in, guys. I see these guys in the back and I don’t know what they talk about, I don’t know what they do, but you’ve got to put the work in. It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock ‘n’ roll and it’s an even longer way if you want to stay there.
