Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Ladies and gentlemen, Are you ready, it's about to hit
the fan. Welcome to on Sanction Thursdays Wrestling with Fready Well, sir,
it's time for some bonus content. On Wednesday's episode, we
talked about the importance of writing and then we even
(00:27):
got into some acting, and I feel like we could
have done a whole episode just on the acting. We
had to cut some of that short. And like you said,
more women are starting to get into it. Actors are
acting all over the place. We're podcasting about it. Mister Jeff,
Welcome to bonus content. How are you, sir? Feeling good?
Feeling right?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Excited to talk to you and all the federation, the.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Friend of ration Federation. Yeah, I get a few little
terms for it, that's right. We got all kinds of nicknames.
We were talking about wrestlers that can act. I think
you're right with Rohnda and Hulk. They're not actors, so
I can't put either one on the list. They're just
kind of them and are hired because of them and
what they are, not what they would bring to the
(01:07):
table as far as delivering lines and things like that.
So maybe I was a bit unfair and the Andre
the giant one. I think I have to move way
up because he's so tender and sweet in The Princess
Bride and just kills that so much. And I know
from like interviews and stuff and documentaries that he was
in a lot of pain during that and coming off
(01:27):
charming and acting while you're in constant pain is borderline impossible.
When I was before I had my spine surgery, my
wife would damn near about to leave my ass. I
was such an angry prick all the time. I can't
imagine having to act with that as well. I think
I have to move him higher up the list. And
I will say this, when Alexa Bliss books a role
in something, she's going to do well with it because
(01:49):
she's one of the stronger actors. With all that crazy
circus stuff they made her do, even after Bray left,
she was able to commit and even if you didn't
like it, her acting was still clear and honest and
you could tell that she put in the work. So
that's another one I wanted to throw in there.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Any others you think we might have missed, No, but
I do think that we've talked about it briefly before,
and it's hard and now this is a reach. That's
why I'm doing it. Last is that bray Wyatt I
think might be the best actor in wrestling. He just
hasn't been like in movies. So it's like I think
I could see him.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I could see him in movies without being the gimmick,
right Like Jesse the Body Venture is another one we forgot.
But Jesse is Jesse, whether he's Captain Freedom in The
Running Man or whether he's was his name in Predator
Blaine Blaine. I don't know what his name was, but
he was awesome in Predator Blaine. I think it was Blaine.
I got that right, I'm awesome. But he was Jesse
(02:42):
the Body of Venture. He didn't have any range, he
didn't do anything that you saw Differently. Batista, I'm telling you,
is the sleeper standout from all of them, because I
don't think anybody thought he was going to be the
actor he became when he walked away from professional wrestling.
I think people thought he would just be a bond villain,
which he was, and that would be as far as
(03:04):
it goes. And instead he's just like, Nope, I'm never
going to show you the same thing twice, and I'm
gonna keep getting better. You can tell he's an artist
and he's hungry to learn. He's hungry to get better.
I know him a little bit, but my wife met
him on this like European tour and she was like
he was the nicest, most professional dude, Like she just
she loved him. He's gonna be struck on.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
He's gonna be stuck on a tough spot too, where
he's kind of like the Rock, where like every role
you're gonna have to justify his size, like like what
is this guy? You know?
Speaker 1 (03:32):
But he has lost a lot of weight, Like he
has lost a lot, and they show the Rock in
every role.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
It's like, well, almost every role he plays an ex
football player, he's a scorpion king, or he's a military guy.
The only one that didn't make sense was in Rampage,
he plays like a scientist, Like what is this scientist
working out four times a day?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Like like how yeah that was like when Denise Richards
was a scientist and a James Bond movie and you're like,
hold up, man, yeah, maybe scientist.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I could foresee Bautista having to do that same thing.
In the Knock of the Cabin, they made him like
a he's a he's a gym teacher, and so that
you know, that's why he's all jacked.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
But my gym teacher was a woman that looked like
a man. She looked a lot like so she did. Man.
Her name was Miss Forrester. We were scared of her. Man.
She was mean, angry, She kind of had growth on
her face that she wouldn't last like. She just wore it.
She wore it defiantly, and she was she really liked running.
(04:29):
So she made us run, boy, and we hated it. Yeah, Forester,
Miss Forrester, daughter of Bautista, maybe the mother of Batista.
I don't know she was. I had trying to talk trash.
She was mean, man, she deserves a little heat. Yeah,
she made you run a bunch of screw. Dude, my
meanest teacher and then I want to talk Jeff Hardy stuff.
(04:50):
But my meanest teacher was this guy named mister mckechran,
no mister O'Malley sorry, And he was from Ireland and
still had the Irish brogue accent. And I was in
the sixth grade at Sandia Prep Middle School in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, and I got a D on my math test.
I'm so stupid with math, Like I can barely do
(05:12):
the tip on a on a check. I always have
to like make sure I'm not stiff in the guy
or giving the guy the greatest tip of his slide.
I'm trying to do twenty to twenty five percent. He
comes up to me, he goes, mister Prinz and yeah,
he goes, Yeah, A disgrace to your family, A disgrace
to you. And he's just calling me a disgrace, disgrace, disgrace, discraple.
(05:33):
I'm twelve years old, man. This hit me so hard.
I got asked a question about like the first time
I got in trouble or something, and it was at
that school, and it was on the Tonight Show, and
I told them the mister O'Malley story, and I said,
I'd like to say hi to that son of a
bitch right now because he said out amount to be nothing,
and now I'm on the Tonight shows. Fuck you. I
(05:55):
said it more politely than that, but I was pissed.
It's still I was still mad in my twenties about it.
Shure me so much.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I still hold on to my worst teacher. My worst
teacher's lady made Miss Noreen and I got any interesting
stories about her. She was just real mean to me
all the time, didn't like anything I was doing. She
was very bullysh I hated it.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I was fortunate enough in my career to get a
writing job with the WWE under weird random circumstances, but
I was very excited to go there. And it took
me a while to figure to figure out how to
write period for wrestlers because, and I still feel strongly
to this to this day, if a promo works, then
(06:41):
all credit is due to the wrestler, and if a
promo doesn't work, then all blame is on the writer.
And that may sound hardcore and extreme, but that's just
the way I feel. Your sole function as a writer
is to help the wrestler get over. And I screwed
up a lot in the beginning because I wrote some
of the best shit I've ever written in my life,
(07:03):
as far as like a monologue in a script would go.
Only they call them promos, but if they're not suited
for the talent, then it's a shit promo. And I
screwed up. And I failed that dude, or I failed
that chick, and believe me. I had failures. I had
promos that I knew were money and they just died
in the ring. And that's not the talent's fault. I
(07:24):
just didn't write it for them. I wrote it because
I just thought it sounded sick, and it was lines
that I always wanted to say that I wasn't allowed to.
But I finally got it right when they handed me
Jeff Hardy and the storyline and the way it came
about was Michael Hayes, who brought both Hardy boys in.
He was from the Fabulous Freebirds. He always supported them,
(07:47):
and I had gotten a little bit of love from
some other smaller storylines that I had written or taken
over for other people, like you would get assigned certain promos.
And I was a better writer than pretty much everyone
and everyone there because I had more experience writing than
anyone there minus a couple of dudes whose work I
respect still to this day. So they were giving me
a lot of stuff to like fix it and punch
(08:09):
it up and things like that. And so Michael said,
We're going to pitch a story, and I got really
nervous because I'm not good at booking. And he goes
I'll book it and you just fill in all the
blanks with all your monologue bullshit, that's what you called it.
So I wrote this series of promos for Jeff that
we stuck into this pitch.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
It was like a long form story. And if you
go on YouTube and take them separately and edit them
all together, you'll see it all kind of forms one
long poem, right, but nothing rhymed. But yeah, Jeff Hardy,
it's all poems metaphore. Yeah. But I loved writing this
because I had a a lot of freedom. No, Vince
didn't change It was the only time he didn't change
(08:47):
anything I wrote. I hated when he would rewrite my
stuff because it wasn't good. I told him that to
his face. I would tell him that today and we
would argue about I go, this is not good, man, Like,
I'm not very you guys, you're damn right. You're bringing
that to him, and it's better than that piece of
shit you wrote. I was like, what am I arguing
with here? So they gave us a lot of freedom
(09:08):
with that. And the reason the story worked was because
of the obstacles that Jeff had to deal with. And
I think it's the importance of bringing real shit into wrestling.
I like when wrestlers do it. So long as everyone
is on the same page and okay with it, I
think those are the best stories or get it as
close to feeling like real shit. And with Jeff, it
(09:29):
was he was struggling with drug abuse. I don't know
if it was alcohol abuse as well, but he dude
was struggling, and so we just leaned heavy into that.
We built him up through MVP, and MVP was kind
enough to end up, you know, doing the job and
getting Jeff over. But he was the first one that
(09:49):
started talking about his reckless behavior. Was how he would
describe it. Each week, Jeff's trailer burned down like in
an accident, and MVP blamed his ears responsibility and his
reckless behavior for burning down his own thing and killing
his dog. His dog actually died, and MVP brought it
up and he asked if it was okay, and Jeff
(10:10):
was dope enough that he was like, yeah, man, do
what you gotta do. Let's just get this story over,
and he did it, and the moment they had after
that was awesome and it had nothing to do with
my writing. That was just something that the two of them.
I wasn't. I didn't have the courage to ask Jeff
an MVP, like the idea, and he said, let me
talk to him, so he did it. I had nothing
to do, and they executed it beautifully, and that led
(10:33):
Jeff to Edge and that was when the obstacle was
going to be Vicky. It was going to be Edge cheating,
you know, the babyface has to deal with all these
these obstacles. And Vince let us draw that story out
over multiple pay per views. And because of that, the
story worked. If I had to write that in two weeks,
(10:56):
you guys, would people would be like that storyline suck man,
you're the worst writer ever. But because I was given
time and allowed to kind of do my thing, that's
the thing people give me love for now. That said,
I wrote plenty of shit that y'all didn't like. You
just don't know it because I ain't trying to get
exposed like that. Talk about the good stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Well, you must be such a valuable writer to them,
because you're a writer and you're smart. You know all
this stuff works. But also you like wrestling. It's not
like just bringing in someone into that universe that doesn't
even like or no wrestling.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Oh bro, they did, and it was so bad. They
brought in this dude and he wrote a story. He
was like, we're gonna do like a movie on Monday
Night Raw and it'll be like who Kidnapped Kelly Kelly?
And Vinces like, all right, let's try it. And I'm like,
I put my hand up and I'm like, let's not.
I don't. I don't think that's a good idea. You
got a good script here, and I don't think we
want to try to reinvent the wheel. And this guy
(11:47):
got mad at me. He was a USA TV writer,
older guy, and he goes, come on, Freddy, just give
it a chance, and Vince is like, Freddie, give it
a chance. And then it makes me direct the segments
that I hate the most. But it was basically Caine
kidnapped Kelly Kelly and was probably gonna sexually assault her
again the way they did in that horrible storyline. But
he kidnaps her and he's got her taped up and
(12:07):
bound and gagged, and they're trying to find someone was
dating Kelly Kelly and they're trying to find her and
rescue her, all while a professional wrestling show is on,
and there's matches going on, a full it should be
a full police investigation, not a cop as called. And
we're supposed to have matches that people believe in, when
every single promo in between the matches is we're looking
for Kelly, where could she be? And there's a video
(12:28):
of King going, oh, you'll never get her. It was
so shitty and I had to be a part of that, man,
And they're saying, well, you don't like it, fix it?
I'm like, fix it? How do I fix fom it's
supposed to do and turn that into something edible for
you to enjoy? Are you talking about? Man? You brought
the groceries, you cooked the damn food. Oh oh, I
(12:49):
hated it. But the Jeff Hardy stuff was a ton
of fun. And again, a cool thing if you guys
want to, is to string all those promos together and
you'll kind of see how it doesn't rhyme like Edgar
Allan Poe or Doctor Seuss. Those are my inspirations when
I wrote it. I'm not even joking. I love it
all right, y'all. We will be here every week, every
Wednesday and every Thursday. Make sure you give us those
(13:11):
ratings share the podcast, Share the new content with your
friends as well. Let them know it's not always wrestling.
We side quest into other crap as well, and it's
just free flow. We appreciate you guys. We love you guys.
Jeff you got any final words for the people, Just
that we love you guys.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
And tell some friends, you know, get some people to
listen to this stuff. We love talking about wrestling. We
want to keep doing it. Tell your friends we out.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
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