During a recent appearance on the “Insight” podcast, Ken Anderson (formerly Mr. Kennedy in WWE) discussed his future in wrestling and the possibility of returning to WWE.
Anderson was released by WWE in 2009 and has since competed in TNA and the NWA.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On when he plans to retire: “You know, it’s funny. When I was in TNA, I had a really bad attitude about the business. I had sort of soured on it, and somebody asked me in an interview, and I was like, ‘If I’m still doing this in five years, somebody shoot me.’ I kind of look back on that, and I just like, I can’t believe I said something like that. I don’t know how long, but I’m going to go until the wheels fall off. I mean, not like, ‘Hey, you should have retired 15 years ago…’ wheels fall off, but I still feel like I have some juice.”
On meeting Tiffany Stratton: “So she was friends with Greg Gagne. Greg is a family friend, and Greg reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this girl, she’s a power lifter and she does gymnastics and stuff. She’s a super athlete, really good look, and I want to train her. Can we come?’ So she started coming and, right away, day one, she’s one of those people. I was saying earlier, we take our time to get to the flip bumps and stuff like that. But Alex Findley and Tiffany Stratton, day one, they’re doing perfect flip bumps, landing perfectly. Gable Steveson, show him how to get up, bump, and then get up a certain way. He did it. I said, get up this way, and he started getting up the wrong way. I said uh uh, then he reversed himself, back down, and got up perfectly the right way. But yeah, Tiffany, day one, there’s some stuff people just have instincts for. I think she’s one of those people. However, the funny thing was, I don’t mean this in a negative way, she didn’t have any charisma as far as she just did the work. She didn’t have the character stuff down. I have her first promo. I’ll have to ask her someday for her permission to put it out there, right? Because it’s not good.”
On if he’d return to WWE: “I didn’t want to, I swear to God, I had no desire. I think that I never wanted to blow the bridge up completely. But I really had no desire. When I was at TNA, I was like, I’ll never go back there. I’ll never work for them again. Now it’s changed. I would definitely [go back] now.”
On the animosity he felt at the time and letting it go: “Yeah. And I think the animosity was, instead of looking at myself, I was looking at this person did this, and that person did that, and they screwed me. Then at some point I realized I played a hand, a huge hand, in all that. I don’t exactly know what it was. But it was like well, you know those guys who went to Vince and said, ‘Hey, we can’t work with this guy anymore.’ Had I been doing all the right things up until that point, that conversation would have gone differently. The fact was that that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Vince was tired of [it all]. There was a lot of negativity around things that I was doing, my attitude, and then that, like, get rid of him.”
On being one of the biggest ‘What Ifs’ in wrestling: “I guess there’s a ton of mistakes that were made along the way. And the one thing, I can’t go back, can’t change any of that. I can just move forward. And what I can do is hopefully show my students, hey, don’t do this. To some degree, we all think that about our kids too. I’m just gonna tell my kid not to do it, and he’s gonna listen to me, right? Don’t touch the stove. They gotta touch this stove at some point, but hopefully they don’t have to put their own hand on it.”
On being TNA Champion: “I’ve said this before. Like you just said, it’s not exactly the same, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t proud of that. At the end of the day, it’s a prop, if you don’t understand that, The Rock just put out the tweet and said it’s a complete work. It always is. It’s fiction. If you don’t understand that. So I didn’t really win anything, but at some point it’s like all these people felt that you could carry the [company].”
