Shane “Hurricane” Helms recently appeared on Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast and discussed his backstage incident with Buff Bagwell during the Invasion storyline and more. Her are some hihlights:
On his altercation with Buff Bagwell in the early WWE days: “He said something and I burned him really bad and he got like all offended by it, and he came and hit me in the damn ear. He’s like standing on the floor and he outweighs me by 50 pounds anyway. Everybody in there knows I banged my shoulder up, so then he comes and hits me from behind and I kind of just threw [a water bottle] at him like this and then I jumped out of the ring. And this was just kind of to distract him because now I’m going to go punch him in the face, but he f–king cracked his head open, and he was bleeding all over the place, and I’m like, ‘oh, f–k’. I really didn’t intend for it to do that and I didn’t think it would. I don’t know. I guess the water in it made it harder.”
On the WCW cruiserweight feud being cut short during the Invasion: “[Booker T versus Bagwell on RAW] wasn’t good at all and Booker is the last guy [who should] take the blame for that. It wasn’t anything to do with Booker T. It had nothing to do with him. Everybody knows pretty much what happened. Booker T did everything he could do, but you can’t get blood from a turnip.” Helms added, “I was going to eventually drop the title to Billy Kidman in Atlanta [Georgia], which is where Billy’s from. It was kind of the WCW home base, Atlanta, anyway. And then Billy was going to go on and unify the title with X-Pac, which is what they ended up doing. But that angle got hotshotted because Booker T [and] Bagwell had such a bad match.”
On gaining the locker room’s respect after that: “When I got to WWE TV the next week, The Acolytes, APA, Ron [Simmons] and [John] Bradshaw [Layfield], took my bags and put them on the WWE side. The locker room was really segregated in those days, WWE on one side and WCW on the other. Steve Austin went and pat me on the back.”
