WWE star The Big Show was recently a guest on Hall Of Famer Steve Austin’s “Broken Skull Sessions” to talk about several professional wrestling topics.
Here are the highlights:
Dealing with the politics in WCW:
Everybody I was working with were my heroes and I’m not going to tell Ric Flair what to do. I’m not going to say ‘no’ to Hulk Hogan giving me a bodyslam. It’s a very difficult place to be in. [Turning down a big star’s idea] has to come from a place of respect and you have to have a valid reason that makes sense in a psychological way in the match of why you shouldn’t do it right then or why you shouldn’t do it at all.
When you’re green, you don’t have that skillset. You don’t have that skillset to politick, you don’t have the experience to hold your ground, and if there is a good top guy that’s working with you, that’s concerned about you, they’ll listen, ‘yeah, maybe you’re right.’ If it’s a top guy that [thinks], ‘ha, screw this kid – I’m going to get over,’ well, it doesn’t happen.
Advice he received from Randy Savage during his days in WCW:
Knowledge seeped in, but it took a while for me to process it and put it in the right place. Like, I listened to everything everybody said. But, again, everybody is giving me all these numbers and equations, but no one has taught me how to do math yet. So I got everything, and once I got the formula, I put it all together and knocked it out. But Randy was always really big on, [imitating Savage] ‘less is more, brother. Less is more.’
And, ‘if you think you’re going too fast, slow down.’ What was the other one? ‘Don’t try to run with the Joneses. Keep that credit card in your wallet. If Hulkster wants to pay, let him pay’ because I used to always get upset. We’d be eating, and Hulk would always pay, and I would try to carry my own weight because, ‘hey, I’m not a freeloader,’ but Randy would [say], ‘keep that credit card in your pocket. Don’t spend it. Don’t run with the Joneses. Let Hogan pay.’ Years later, I found out that Randy still held onto his communion money.
nWo:
The nWo is going into the Hall Of Fame for WWE this year and that’s great. I’m happy for those guys, but the nWo, now that I’m older, I want to give them a double ‘Stone Cold’ salute. I mean, and this is me personally talking, great faction in the Attitude Era, but if you look at what the nWo did business-wise, it kept the Attitude Era hot – all that stuff – I join the nWo because they beat me, and threw a party on me, and then they didn’t want to give me a return, so they didn’t want the comeuppance back, so the best way [around it], ‘yeah, brother, come on, too sweet.’
I was young and naive. Those guys weren’t naive, Scott [Hall], Kevin [Nash], and [Hogan]. They weren’t naive. ‘We’ll put this big guy on our side’ because I was green and I was easily pushed along. It should have been, ‘yeah, I’ll drop the title, but one of y’all is going to have to feed me eventually.’
His dealings with Eric Bischoff:
Good, I mean, I think Bischoff, at the time, working with me, saw a lot of potential with me and what we were doing, but I think, at the same time, it was a hard position for Bischoff to be in because he had a lot on his plate that he wasn’t prepared to handle, in a lot of ways because he was young then too.
And, Eric, I felt like, at the time, was very influenced by who was sitting next to him, whether he was sitting next to [Hogan] or whether he was sitting next to Scott and Kevin. And those guys are the greatest [at] making you feel like the most important guy in the room. And he was like a pendulum swinging left, swinging right, swinging left, swinging right.
Also Read: The Big Show Says Randy Orton and Seth Rollins Are the “Two Best in the Business”
H/T Wrestling Inc. for the transcriptions
