In an interview with The Retro Wrestling Podcast, Sean Mooney talked about his tryout with WWE, his worst celebrity encounter, and more. Here are highlights:
On how he got hired for WWE: “I knew nothing about wrestling. I didn’t grow up with it, following it, or anything like that. I knew who Hulk Hogan was. A guy that I worked with happened to get a job up in Stamford and Vince [McMahon] saw the show. I got a phone call saying ‘Vince wants to meet you. They put me through this stupid audition. They give you a broom and have you do something with it. It’s just really ridiculous.”
On his first impressions working for WWE: “I remember Hulk came in, the fame had really started to set in with him. I remember the only thing he said to me was, ‘hey did you bring a bag?’ Yeah. ‘Don’t unpack’. That was it. They drove me up there and I remember walking into the backstage area. I remember it being Mr. Fuji and Ax & Smash [Demolition] in full costume playing cribbage. I said, ‘I have joined the circus.’”
On the Event Center: “Gene had started doing this and he wanted no part of it. We customized at one point probably 90+ markets a WEEK. You couldn’t put that into a teleprompter – it was just way too much material. I’d have to ad-lib these. It was a tremendous learning tool for me. It was brutal. Let’s say you get 20 markets in and then Howard [Finkel] would call me, ‘Hey uh, Berzeker hurt something, he’s gonna miss 12 cards’, and I’d already done 10 cities and would have to go back and re-do them all. I look back at this stuff and am like, ‘how in the world would they EVER put me on TV?’ Honest to God, if you look at early stuff, I liken in to the Loud Mouth Frog, because Howard kept telling me ‘you’ve gotta be bigger!’ And finally I said, ‘This is stupid, this is ridiculous. I’m going to do it my way. I can’t keep screaming like this.’ I don’t know why they ever put me on. I was bad.”
On play-by-play: “It was tough. Thank God for Lord Alfred Hayes. If it wasn’t for Alfred, there’s no way I would’ve been able to do it. But really it just came down to – they didn’t have anybody else. I certainly had no business doing it. I never considered myself a play-by-play guy.”
On being accepted: “I was one of the outside guys. You talk about hazing periods and trying to fit in. Alfred, after a few months, figured out I was OK and we started to become friends and he took me under his wing. So did Gorilla. You had to earn it with those people. It didn’t just happen. I was always very respectful, I really respected what they did. I learned how to put them over, and after a while they respected what I did. I never tried to ‘cross over’”
On Bobby Heenan: “Off-camera, on-camera, Bobby was always on. He could have been a comedian. No question about it. Bobby is one of the funniest human beings I’ve ever known in my life, and always treated me really well.”
On Vince McMahon: “It was a love-hate relationship. If it wasn’t for Vince McMahon, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve gotten to do.”
On Gorilla Monsoon: “He was a prince. He was unbelievable, I’m not kidding. He was so much more than a wrestler. I think Bobby and Gorilla are the best announce team I’ve ever heard.”
On leaving WWE: “It was at a point where I was ready to do something else and the company was in a different place then and didn’t know where it was going to go. I felt like… maybe it’s time to go do something else. People thought that I wanted to get away from it or whatever, that wasn’t it at all.”
On meeting Donald Trump at Wrestlemania V: “My worst celebrity encounter. I was so green and so nervous. I couldn’t get his name out.”
On backstage interviewers: “There’s Mean Gene, and then there’s the rest of us. Those announcers now, they’re basically controlled. That’s why I don’t fault these backstage guys now, I don’t think it’s because necessarily that they don’t have talent. It’s just a different format.”
On ‘Betty Mooney’: “You know, to put another rumor to rest: there was NEVER a Betty Mooney. I’ve always gotten a kick out of the Wikipedia stuff.”