During a recent interview with The Chris Van Vliet Show, Don Callis commented on being offered a job with WWE creative, why he turned it down, and more. You can check out some highlights from the show below:
On his early goals in wrestling and wanting to run WWE: “If you were to look at a couple of promos I did in WWF in ’97, I think I was the first person maybe to come out as a total unknown. I came out in one of the first promos I did on a live RAW, and I was not calling out a wrestler. I called out Vince McMahon. I said I wanted to run the World Wrestling Federation. I wanted to run the wrestling business. People thought, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting kind of bullet point.’ But it was true.
“I never had an interest in being a pro wrestling manager or being a color commentator. I wanted to be the person pulling the strings. I was 29 years old when I said that, and I don’t think the time was right. Vince McMahon was clearly not a guy who was going to allow other people into the tent. They had offered me jobs to move to Stamford on three different occasions, which I turned down. That’s always been the goal. You don’t want to be the person acting in the movie. You probably want to be the person that finances the studio that finances the movies.”
On being offered a job to be part of WWE creative: “As I recall, I was one of the first people ever to… I wrote six weeks of television to Kurrgan to try to get him to a different level, and I wrote it in a week-by-week format. That would be fairly common now. In 1997, it was pretty unheard of for a wrestler to write out creative in a kind of formatting that we do now today when we write episodic TV. That was new and different. They were like, ‘Oh, maybe you should be on creative.’ I did not want to be boxed into working in a cubicle for anyone in any office anywhere doing anything. So, I just kind of pushed back and said, ‘That’s not why I signed here. I signed here to be a wrestler.’ Ultimately, that didn’t work out, but we’re all a product of our time in the business. All of those things I think grow us as people.”
