During a recent appearance on “The Snake Pit” podcast, Ted Arcidi discussed how he gained Vince McMahon’s attention and landed a job with WWE in the mid-1980s.
Arcidi set a world bench press record of 700 pounds in Hawaii in 1985, which received widespread media coverage.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On his meeting with Vince McMahon: “He knew of me already because I used to go with a mutual friend to watch Ken Patera. As you know, he was a great Olympic lifter, a silver medalist, the first guy to clean and jerk 500 pounds over his head, which is still phenomenal still. And I used to shoot the s**t with him, so I think he put the bug in Vince’s ear. And you know Vince, he loves big, f**king muscular guys, so that worked out perfectly. I got invited down to his place. I brought my magazine, and he said, ‘I’ve already seen this. I just want to talk to you.’ We had a very informal talk in his office, and he’s just a regular guy, a good guy.”
On his role was to fill a void left by another WWE strongman: “I asked him, ‘What do I have to do? I really want to take this thing up. I want to put the work into it.’ And he goes, ‘We’re going to send you to the camp. You can live down here in Connecticut,’ because that’s where the camp was at the time. I think their place was in Stamford or even Greenwich, the headquarters. And they were going to train me and get me on TV as soon as they could, because poor Kenny [Patera] was in the f**king can, remember that?”
On being the first world strongman in WWE: “But yeah, I was like the interim strongman. And legit strongman. I’m very, very, very fortunate to this day that I was the first world strongest man in the WWF.”
