Hacksaw Jim Duggan recently appeared on Ring Rap Audio discussing his book Hacksaw: The Jim Duggan Story, his career and more. Check out the highlights:
On comparing wrestlers to a sports team: “People a lot of times try to compare us with sports team, but we’re actually more like a rock and roll band than we are a sports team. You know, it’s a year-round job, you travel all over the world, every night’s a party – especially back in the 80s, you know the alcohol, the drugs, the women out on the road, you know there was a lot of temptation out there.”
On working with so many legendary wrestlers: “Any of the second generation guys are just a little more polished, you know Jake (Roberts), Teddy (Dibiase), Curt Hennig, guys that grew up in our profession, just start obviously a little more polished than a guy like myself that didn’t even start wrestling until I was like 25 years old… It took me four or five years just to get the idea of the business, and a lot of guys had to put up with me not knowing what I was doing in the early days.”
On the territory system vs. the developmental system: “You know, when you worked for Mid South, you may wrestle nine times a week in front of people. You’re just not in the ring taking bumps, you’re learning your trade in your interviews, which is a learned art. You don’t one generic interview for Bill Watts, you do an interview for every city that you’re gonna wrestle in, and if he didn’t like the interview, boom, you’d do another one, so the more you do something, the better you get at it, and of course, Mid South and all them other small territories were great training grounds for the talent to go up to New York. But now, with just the one training facility in Florida, even though Steve Keirn is a great trainer and everything, I think the guys are almost kind of homogenized, they’re all kind of alike. You don’t see many variations of not just wrestling styles but also the way they look.”
On whether he prefers working as a babyface or heel: “I really felt more comfortable as a babyface. You know, I think when you first break in our profession, it’s easier to be a heel, especially a big guy. It’s hard to get that sympathy as a babyface when you’re bigger than the heels you’re wrestling. It took me years, you know, I started off as Big Jim Duggan, and then I went as The Convict, then I went as Wildman Duggan, but all that happened in a three or four year period before I found Hacksaw, and that was just kind of an extension of my own personality.”
On the inspiration for the book and the competitive nature of the business: “Well, I think there was so much negative stuff, I think that was the real motivation. So many times people say ‘Oh, well pro-wrestling, well so many guys are dead, and so many guys are in rehab, and so many guys are destitute or degenerates.’ You know, it’s a very tough business, I wouldn’t recommend it and I wouldn’t want my kids in wrestling. The odds of making it are astronomical. I was at an indy show, and I was talking to the kids, and I’m like ‘You know, there’s 1500 NFL Football players, there’s 500 NBA Basketball players, there’s maybe 120 wrestlers on contract. It’s a television show – it’s much more competitive than sports.’ So the odds of getting one of those 100-plus spots are very slim, plus you gotta buck somebody out of his spot to take his spot. It’s a very, very competitive business.”
