February 2, 2022 • 40 mins
Jeff Hardy was one of the top baby faces in WWE. I share the story of his rise to the top and the behind-the-scenes drama on making Jeff a world champion.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
What's going on everybody, as Freddie Prince Jr. Welcome back
to Wrestling with Freddie. Thanks for all the episodes you've
listened to so far, and thanks for tuning into this
week's episode, which is searching for a Hearty or looking
for Jeff. This was when I was given the Jeff
Hardy assignment by Michael Hayes, which was make Jeff a champion.
(00:28):
This is gonna be his one and only chance, or
so he thought at the time. So we're gonna get
deep into that. I'm sure there'll be a couple side
quests as well at some point, So let's start the show.
Welcome to Wrestling with Freddie. Now stuffing up to the mic.
The host of Wrestling with Freddie Freddie Prince June. Yeah,
(00:49):
if you look up on YouTube or any better wrestling
historian than me, there's a lot of them out there.
But this is the time when Jeff Hardy became the
world's heavyweight champion for the very first time, and I
was given the task of of of accomplishing this which
most people thought was impossible and crazy. That's the cool
part that I'll take credit for. But as far as
(01:11):
the storytelling and the creativity behind it. That was a
group of people that I would love to get credit to.
And uh, like I said, I'm sure there'll be some
side quests. I've been writing for a little while. I
had done an Undertaker promo that Undertaker said, uh, he
didn't change a single word too, and to my knowledge,
at least from what they said, I don't believe that
(01:32):
had happened in a very very long time. Um. And
so I started getting bigger guys. I started getting Kane
and some other top talent there, people that Vince is
very particular with as far as certain words they can say.
Kane wouldn't say destroy, he says obliterate things like things
of that nature. I get the hearty story, and I
(01:53):
know about a lot of what's going on, And just
so you guys know where we're at timeline wise, Jeff
was even with m v P and Jeff's like he
had this like an airstream trailer on the Hardy property
and it burned down and Jeff's dog passed away, and
they were all wondering if they could bring that up,
(02:14):
and Jeff was like, yeah, if you if you have to,
you know you can. An m VP really respected Jeff,
and Jeff knew that. So uh, m v P talks
about his reckless and wild behavior and it even, you know,
getting your your little dog killed, and Jeff like cracks
and they have this fight. And so this is just
after that. Jeff had a lot of positive energy behind
(02:35):
him and m v P had gotten a lot of
like mean nasty heat off of Jeff. And Michael calls
me into his office and he's he says in his
ps in his pure sexy voice, all right, here's what
we're gonna do. I need you to come up with
a way, and we're gonna get the belt on Jeff.
Don't call it a belt, We're gonna get it on him.
(02:57):
And so I'm sitting there like, yeah, okay, no problem.
I don't know about Jeff's history. I don't I didn't
know about a dirt sheet until a couple of years ago.
And I'm forty five. You know, my dad was in
this business and uh died violently, and he was in
the tabloids a lot. So maybe I avoid that on
like a pre programmed, subconscious level. And that's why I
(03:19):
always kind of looked the other direction because it felt
like gossip. Maybe I don't know. I've never self analyzed
that decision. I get into it with this guy Chris
to Joseph, we called him DJ, and he's he's laughing.
He's like, it's never gonna happen. Like what you mean,
It's never gonna happen, and he starts breaking down a
lot of Jeff's issues in the past of rejecting rehab,
(03:40):
having drug issues, things like that, and those were perceived
speed bumps or in in this case, a brick wall
to get through. But for me, I connected hard with it,
which I'll tell you about in a minute, and the
episode that we're trying to talk about serious stuff in
this episode. It won't be all jokes, but I connected
(04:03):
hard with it, and I saw opportunity. So my father
was a stand up comic in the seventies. For those
who may just be tuning in, I broke this down
for you in the very beginning, I think, and he
was a big He was a he was a big
time deal man. Richard Prior discovered him. My dad had
the number one show in the country in like nineteen
seventy five or seventy four or something like that. Drugs
(04:24):
were a big part of his life. In the seventies
and tore my entire family apart because of it. And
on January twenties seven, nineteen seventies six, he put a
gun to his head and he had about six coludes
in his system and UH pulled the trigger and he died.
And it just wrecked my family. And so I had
(04:46):
a lifetime of experience with drugs. Why people do him?
I had gone through the anger of that you have
as a young man, not having a father. I had
gone through the part of my life for it. If
you even did drugs, you weren't in my circle of
friends straight up, like you were just ostracized. And then
(05:06):
as I got older, I started to have more understanding
and and the more knowledge I got of what addicts
go through, it gave me a much clearer perspective. It's
it's a way of self medicating. It's your brain knows
it needs something, it just doesn't know what. And that's
the easiest and unfortunately worst thing you could turn to.
A lot of times they say, you know, the addict
(05:28):
isn't taking the drug. The drug is taking the drug.
This isn't just me telling you this, This is doctors.
A vault from from medical doctors to psychiatrists, everyone in between,
and I've just taken knowledge from all of them. So
I definitely had a sensitivity toward the addict towards drug users,
(05:49):
but still understood at a certain point you gotta stand
on your own two damn feet and and get your
life together, or you can end up like my pops
and rip a family apart. So this was the approach
that I took towards the promos and the storyline that
we were going to do while Edge was champion with
Vicky Guerrero and Jeff was going to have to climb
(06:12):
this ladder, and instead of shining away from it and
running away from it, I leaned heavy into it and
I almost made Jeff well. I made him a baby face,
using drugs as the means to do it without I
feel to this day, without making drugs look cool. We
portrayed a an artist who was tortured, who had self
(06:36):
hate in abundance, and who used art to get that
hatred out, whether it be in Jeff's real life art,
he was painting a lot at the time. I don't
know if he still does through his wrestling and now
through his promos, and the first one I wrote him.
He changed one word um and he he inserted the
(06:59):
word image I nation, which was something Jeff came up with,
and that word inspired every promo I wrote for him
all the way to the championship, and I wrote every
single one of those. And again they're all on YouTube.
You can check them out. You can let me know
if you love them or if you hate him, which
everyone you're allowed to feel. However you feel, get hit
(07:19):
me up on social media and and say, hey, did
you write this crap? Or hey did you write this gold?
I love it. But that was the That was sort
of the spark that kind of lit the fire, and
from that I just really tried to go into what
do addicts suffer from the world is not I repeat,
the world is not black and white. In fact, the
(07:40):
black and white parts of this world are the smallest
parts in comparison to the large area that gray encompasses globally.
Most of us, I would say, aren't good or bad
people were just people trying to get by right. And
then there's incredibly good people. And when I say good,
I don't mean the guy who lets you an entract good.
(08:00):
I mean like the people who are selfless and give
a lot of themselves away for the greater good. So
you might call that great, you might call that the rare,
the select few. I call them the good. Right. Then
there's the bad, the people that are only out for
themselves and will smash and step on anyone to get
what they want and they don't care what the collateral damages.
(08:21):
And then there's you and I is we're a bunch
of decent people who sometimes do wrong, we feel bad
about it, sometimes do right, we feel good about it,
and we're just trying to get by. And the gray
area is where the addict is no longer allowed to exist.
Once they're publicly known as an addict, then it's just
(08:41):
black and white for these people. It's oh, they're junkie,
they're drug addict. Now you can't trust them all. I
can't do this. By the way, all that criticism is
completely justified. And that's why we showed Jeff fail and
fail again. And if you look at the promos in
this light, which was what I tried to do, I
styled them after or his matches. Jeff is a crash
(09:02):
and burn wrestler. It's builds your hopes up, Build your
hopes up, Get up, to the highest most dangerous point possible,
the only place possible where if he jumps off, he
can end the match. And then he fails because the
guy gets out of the way, or he gets betrayed
or whatever the issue is, right, And so we tried
to write the promos in that same sense. And I
(09:22):
wrote these alone in New York, where I just was.
So it was very kind of I was making a
movie out there, and so it's very surreal to be
in the same city. And honestly, the last time I
was there was when I was writing these Jeff Hardy promos.
A lot of these images are are fresh in my mind,
or at least the philosophies behind them. You know, I
don't have the the promos memorized like I used to
(09:44):
have to do back then, so that I could kind
of demonstrate how I think it should be performed. And
so I would want to be off book for that
and then say, look, everything you see me do that
you like, steal that and make it your own, and
everything I do that looks like crap. Just throw it away.
They You're not gonna hurt my feelings the word for word,
That's what I said to a lot of wrestlers. So
(10:04):
that's what I was doing with Jeff and I would
sit in my apartment in New York all by myself,
and usually I would just have music going on the TV,
like your satellite TV as music channels. You don't use
these anymore because it's but I would put on one
of those channels and I would just sit there and
I would try to make my dad a sympathetic professional wrestler.
(10:28):
And that's what each and every one of these were.
And he would talk about the world just sees me
in black and white, but I am the gray, meaning
he could not never possibly be on either side of
that argument. He it's impossible for him. You guys won't
let him. So he's an outcast. And that's what his
fans were at the time. They were the outcast fans.
(10:49):
They were the ones that rooted for the guy that
was never going to be champ, and they knew it,
and they bought his merchandise anyway. And this was a
key component to the whole pitch that I made. When
I made it was I asked if I could see
the merchandise numbers for a bunch of the wrestlers, And
this was before I was assigned the Jeff Hardy pitch,
(11:13):
and I saw that Jeff's arm bands were like I
think at the time, either the I want to say,
I pitched him as the top seller. They may have
been the second top seller, or at least for a
week they were the top seller. So maybe I used
that as like my example. But he sold a lot
of freaking arm bands, okay, And they were like the
Spider Man webs that went up each arm and and
(11:36):
these things went and Jeff Hardy merchandise and his T
shirts they were they were selling like crazy. So I
put together this whole pitch, and I pre wrote every
promo that you guys saw. I presented to Vince on
the same day. Everything was written. Now, some thing's changed.
The Taker promo didn't when they went to London, the
Taker Jeff promo and then a couple like Jeff. Things
(11:59):
would change here in there. But the other people edged
stayed enjoyed staying locked into what I wrote. Vicky enjoyed
staying locked into what I wrote. It was a little
bit of Hunter. He wrote his own stuff. He kind
of did his own thing, and we'll get into that
at the end. This was when Hunter, I don't know
if he ever liked me, but he was always respectful,
but this was when he was kind of like done
(12:19):
with me. And I respect Hunter, but he was for
sure done with me, and I get it. We're doing
these promos and I'm talking about the Gray Area, and
I'm talking about what it's like to be judged every
single day of your life, and the promos are really
getting over with the audience. And the trick to these, well,
first the trick was finding Jeff in order to shoot
(12:41):
the promo. So we get there early, at like nine
ten am. Sometimes a little later earlier was better. Most
people hated it. But the earlier we got there, granted,
the production meeting was longer, but I had more time
to email people what I needed to email, which gave
them more time to learn their stuff or at least
understand the philosophy, and it benefited everyone. He got there
(13:11):
usually around ten AM for most of these, I feel
like I would get to sign my crew. A lot
of my stuff was pre approved, but his championship was
not approved. Just this storyline of the Gray Area was approved.
We're all getting our assignments, and the best way I
think to find Jeff is to find Matt right, and
I was cool with Matt. He had punched me in
(13:32):
the eye on accident one time, gave me a black
eye while he was warming up, so he was always like,
he's always been very sympathetic and kind for nearly fracturing
my head. And I finally go, hey, man, where's your brother?
And he goes, good luck with that, and so no,
there's no panic, but I gotta find him. It's a
big promo. It was very deep. I never I emailed
Jeff a lot of promos, but I never received an
(13:54):
email back, so I don't know if he ever saw
any of them until the day of until the day
we shot them. But I said him a lot. I
said him a lot of emails. So I'm looking all
around the arena, I do a full lap. I don't
see him. I find I think it was drough McIntire
and I say, hey, man, have you seen Jeff? He said, yeah,
(14:15):
he's back by Catering, which is on the complete opposite
side of ore. I man, So I go all the
way back to catering. He's not there. I'm like, Natalia,
this is Nattie Nidhart, say Natalia, have you seen Jeff?
Because I think he's back by the buses. I run
back to the buses. Nobody there, not even someone to
ask have you seen Jeff. I get back, I find
Matt again, or I don't find Matt. Matt finds me.
(14:36):
He goes, hey, man, I saw Jeff. He's back by
the locker rooms. I go to the locker rooms. He's
not in there. I go to into the stairwell next
to the locker rooms on pure Jedi instincts, and Jeff
sitting on the stairs and he's he's not his head's
not down, but he's just sitting there and I go, oh, hey, hey, man,
with What's what's going on? He goes, oh, hey, sorry, man, sorry.
(14:58):
He's got this like cool Carolina drawl when he when
he speaks, and I say, we got this promo to day.
It's all approved. I said, you know, I emailed it
to you. I don't know if you got it. Goes
oh yeah, right on, right on, But he doesn't say
whether he got the email or not. And he starts
looking at it and reading through it. I say, take
your time. I say, I'm gonna stay right outside the
door though, so that if you have any questions or
anything that you wanna, you know, work on we can
(15:20):
work on it together, and uh, he says, no, it's okay, man,
I just I wanna. I really want to learn these
I like, I like your promos. I want to memorize it.
And I see that, so I'm like, I'm gonna leave
him alone. I'm gonna leave m alone. So I leave
him alone on this first one. We get to a
backstage area where we're gonna shoot this because I didn't
want him to do it in ring yet. And we
(15:40):
start filming and he's not happy with the vibe of
it because he doesn't get enough time to memorize. That's
still the biggest issue with the w w E. If
you're not going to give him time to learn it,
let them write for themselves, or don't write for them period.
Just give him a starting place, a midpoint, and an
endpoint and let him flow. But we didn't have that.
We didn't have that option. He's not to and it.
I know it's not where it needs to be, but
(16:02):
I know it can be better, right, So I say,
all right, hold up, dude, and I literally write the
promo out on que cards, on a lot of them
because we didn't have paper. Big enough to do the
whole thing on one and so it doesn't look like
he's reading off a que card. I tell him, hey,
I'm just gonna move it around two different parts of
the camera. We won't move the camera. It'll just be
(16:22):
me moving with the que cards. And you can kind
of let your face move when you feel pain and
that will sort of motivate the move to where you
can see the card again. He's like, all right, all right,
And this was a quick hustle that we had to do.
You only get so much time to get these done
and then approved and then edited into the show. This
was SmackDown. This wasn't on Monday Night Row. We're doing
(16:42):
our thing and it's working, and it takes us like
two or three takes and then it's really flowing and
he nails it and he's almost hardly even looking at
the cards now. He said it so much, and we
get it done, I get it in. It gets on
TV and the crowd pops big for it, and for SmackDown.
Then that was rarer because it wasn't the more popular show.
And they would literally put canned applause in because the
(17:06):
reactions were never as as good. Maybe people knew it
wasn't live. I don't know. It was like canned laughter
on a sitcom, which you do not pull, or maybe
some actors do. Maybe maybe they don't like it. I
don't know. We're outside questioning yet. The pop is so
real that Vince literally says on the headphones. So that
was a real pop. And I'm like, oh, we're good,
We're good, We're good. The storyline starting to develop. He's
(17:27):
going after Edge, nobody trusts it, and we're a week
out from pitching him as champion. Edge still has the
belt and Hunters like right on the edge of the
of the championship picture. At that point, the promos are
all going well. I got Jeff his promo early that
morning because he was there with his brother, so like
(17:50):
nine or ten o'clock, and then, uh, they went to
the locker room to go to sleep, take a nap.
Our Truth was already in there taking a nap, but
we had to be there early for some reason. So
he and the wrestlers did we go that night. Jeff's
got his promo completely memorized. He doesn't do it for me,
but I know he does. You could just kind of
see it in his eyes, right so we're gonna shoot
(18:12):
this thing. We're getting ready to rock and roll, and
all the power goes out and we can't We can't
record anything. Now. Our camera can record, it's on battery, right,
our sound can. They don't have to be plugged in,
but we have no lights. Now it's time to start
giving credit to other people. This was well before we
get into that. Let's give credit where it's dude. The
(18:34):
London Show, which I skimmed over. I didn't go to.
I didn't want to fly all the way to London.
I was living in New York at the time and
taking the train to Stanford every week. And so they
went and Krista Joseph was the one who shot that
whole segment and fought for the segment when people in
the room wanted to change a lot of it. He
fought for it. Free Bird fought for it. I don't
know who else did. I'm sure someone else did. I
(18:56):
wasn't there, so I can't give you credit, but I
know for a fact they did, as my buddy who
did go told me so h So that promo goes
off without a hitch. They say it word for word
how I wrote it, and DJ shot it well, and
he had to. You have to understand he had to
cut back and forth from undertake her in ring to
Hardy backstage on a pre written thing that I wrote,
(19:18):
and the writer's not there. So this it's a challenge
to pull that off. So credit to the trucks as
well for for editing so quickly, because they have to.
So we're back. We're now getting ready to shoot the
promo and the power goes out and Stephanie McMahon comes
by and she's like, what the hell is going on?
I'm like, I don't know what the hell is going on?
We have no power. We can't shoot. She goes, the
(19:38):
cameras work, don't they go? They do? She goes, then
we can shoot. We're not going to be able to
see anything. She goes, hold up. She starts looking around.
We're literally in like a suite at a at a
basketball arena, and she's literally frantically looking around, opening cabinet stores.
I start looking through cabinets and drawers. She finds a
pen light, a green pen light. I grab a highball glass.
(19:59):
She show finding it at me. Right, I grab a
highball glass, like, shine it through this glass. She grabs
the glass and shines it through. One of the guys
had a flashlight on him and so he does the
same thing. One of the crew guys. Of course they would,
And we use this kind of just ghetto light slash glad.
We're like MythBusters, like creating new ways to to to
(20:21):
shoot things. And steph McMahon, the daughter of the owner
of the company, she's literally holding a glass and a
green light and lighting Jeff Hardy and so is one
of the other crew guys. And I'm holding que cards.
That's where the flashlight came from. He gave it to me,
and I'm holding it on the que cards so Jeff
can read the que cards even though he's he's locked in,
(20:42):
but we we need to be there. It helped him.
So we shoot this whole thing and Vince freaking loves it.
And I'm looking at Stephanie and and we didn't see
I I on a lot of stuff, but this is
where she really earned my respect because she was willing
to get her hands dirty and there was no way
we were going to fail. It just wasn't an option.
And I, uh, you know, I'm sitting there going like
(21:03):
we're screwed. What what can I do? I gotta I
gotta find a generator or wait for the power to
come on. She came in and there's no wait. No,
we're not waiting. We're gonna get this. We're not gonna
get screwed. If the power comes back on, we'll shoot
it again. But we're getting this, and we're getting it now.
Not only do we get it, it looked way cooler
than it would have looked if we had full power.
(21:24):
Maybe not to you, but in the moment and the
adrenaline that's going on these shows, it's a big it's
a big deal, and they put a lot on the line.
It's their families. It's not just their company, it's their
family's name that's on the line every week. I know
a lot of you know fans will say, well, they
don't seem to worry about that too much, the way
they booked things. I get that. I get that, And
(21:45):
there's a lot of stuff in the w W E
that I can't stand. All right. I love carrying Cross.
When they brought him up to the main roster, I
literally was like, he's done and that's it. And then
they released him. So I'm with you. I get it.
I love Bray Wyatt too, I'm with you. But they
do take pride in their name, and they do take
pride in their company. And this is just an example
(22:08):
that's not on a gossip column somewhere where I can
legit tell you. Home girl rolled up her sleeves, Doug
a foxhole, got a gun, figuratively took post and was
not letting anybody get over that line like it was.
I loved her for that. I literally loved her for that,
and it helped us accomplished the story that we were
(22:31):
trying to accomplish. So we're kicking, but with the promos.
I'm in here by the way, by the way, you guys.
I was in New York the first time I've been
in New York since I worked for w w E.
I was making this We're on a side quest making
this movie. This is how crazy Manhattan was. I literally
moved to Brooklyn halfway through. So the first like five
(22:52):
days I'm there, there's this homeless dude outside that either
was massively hooked on drugs or straight up had sponti
biffo like the way he was talking like, I was
worried about this guy. Every day. It would get real
cold at night, there were some nice days, but at
night it would get real cold. One night, he's standing
outside the apartment that they set me up in to
where like you can't get in the apartment unless you
(23:13):
step over, and I'm this is kind of a sad story,
but I'm looking at the guy. I'm like, man, this
man he looks dead, right, So I climb over. I
literally step over the dude. Tell the doorman. He's like, no, man,
he's out there every night. I come down the next
morning nine hours later. They called a forced call. When
you don't get twelve hours off, everyone's like, you get
(23:35):
twelve hours off, bro, screw you not all the time.
I come downstairs and my driver was this nice Puerto
Rican lady named Janetta, and she's crying and I'm like,
what's wrong and she goes. When I got here, they
took the poor man in the in the ambulance. He
was dead. It was like messing with my head. I
was talking to the hair and make up people and
(23:55):
a trailer that that morning at work, I'm like, yo,
it was like Manhattan, so different, and it's like messing
with me and the producer her and he's like, dude,
what a dead body? I was like, yeah, he goes,
You're going to Brooklyn. So I went to Brooklyn and
everyone had a smile on their face. Everyone had a beard.
Not the girls, y'all didn't have beards, but the guys
had great beards. Everyone had dogs. They let me pet
(24:16):
their dogs. I didn't steal any of their dogs, which
was hard. People walk around with like sushi and coffee
with real sugar because there's no artificial sweetener in Brooklyn.
They don't allow it. And thank you Brooklyn, because uh,
I was very It was very this l A boy
was very unequipped for Manhattan this time around. So anyway,
we get to the pay per view and this is
(24:39):
the match where we have pitched that Jeff Hardy is
gonna go over. Now all the top dogs know this
is where the story is going. Vince knows this, Kevin
Dunn knows this. Bruce Pritchard of course, Freebird, it's his idea.
I don't believe the agents know until the moment that
we're about to speak of, and Hunter for sure knows,
(25:00):
and Stephanie for sure knows. We get in there and
I believe it's Armageddon was the name of the pay
per view, and we sit down and we make our
or I don't do it, but Michael makes his pitch
for the match. The finish with Hardy going over for
the championship, nobody says anything. It's super quiet, and Vince goes,
anybody have any thoughts and a couple of the agents
(25:21):
speak up and they you know, they're pro, They're pro Jeff.
He's been working hard. We even did an angle. I
get mad at the way the media treats wrestling, but like,
I just always hated it. So we even pulled one
on them where we took that Jeff storyline of him,
you know, being this the screw up that the w
W we had him, and we leaked a story that
(25:43):
wasn't even true with Jeff's permission to uh like CNN
or somebody, and they bought it and so CNN, here's this,
I've got you suckers deal with that, and uh, it
wasn't even true, and it was gonna help us, hi Jeff,
so that he could be this like surprise his entrance
and make this match like a triple threat, I think
is how the story was going to go. But but yeah,
(26:04):
they ran with that story and we got to burn
them on it. Later and Vince like that we got
to give them the middle finger because the media has
never been good to the w w E or WWF.
I remember specifically, Kevin Dunn did not want Jeff to
(26:30):
be champion, and he kind of like shrugged his shoulders.
He goes, you gotta be kidding me with this, and
Vince doesn't say anything. He regards the opinion. He hears
some other agents like speak up and they say good thing.
I remember arn Anderson said good things. Pritchard hasn't said
anything yet. And then Hunter speaks up and goes, are
we seriously I'm going to do a triple agent pressure?
(26:52):
Are we seriously gonna fucking trist this guy? And that
was like a sniper bullet taking you out at the leg,
an honest bullet, but a bullet just the same. I
was nervous that someone might say it because they would
be right. But I believed the story we were telling,
or we're trying to tell, was was worth the risk.
(27:14):
I genuinely did. I thought we were telling an honest,
interesting wrestling story, and I don't think that's the easiest
thing in the world to do, and I don't think
you can just stick it on anyone. I think it
has to fit the talent, and this story fit. And
so I've been preparing the whole time, and Michael was
gonna let me take any more bullets, for sure, because
(27:36):
it's just he just wasn't He brought these guys in. Man,
he fought for the hearties more times than anyone in
the company, and he knew the foundation we were standing
on better than anyone. And I knew that's why he
put it on me because I was smelling good to
the boss at the time. I always smelled good to
the bus, thank you very much. And uh so I'm like,
(27:58):
all right, this is gonna be this is gonna be
my argument. And I know d Jail speak up. But Hunter,
if he wants to smash on dj he can smash
on him. And Vince can smash on anyone. But the
only one who could really smash on me was Vince,
because anybody else I could speak to on at least
an equal playing field, maybe not as far as like
wrestling knowledge, but as far as like confidence and what
(28:22):
I knew I brought to the table, and the fact
that I could walk away. So those are my only cards.
So I start pitching why this is a good idea,
and I'm telling this is an honest story. We've done
nothing but tell the truth. I said, if he has
a relapse, if he goes down again, you take the
title off him. I said, you've taken it off and
before for stuff like that on smaller belts. I said,
(28:43):
we've taken it off other people in a day. I said,
we can pull this off. I said, you gotta you know.
I'm giving him this passion plea. It's about five minutes long.
And then Hunter starts shooting it down again, and I
don't you know, I don't want it to be a fight.
I don't want it to be an argument. I don't
want to have any He's in the company, but I
don't want this whole story that we built up to
(29:04):
let the fans of Jeff Hardy down again. And it's
my idea. There's some pride and there's some ego there
that I believe is worthy of this brass ring, so
to speak. Right, So we're having our creative argument back
and forth. Hunter starts challenging the merits of the story,
but that's hard for him to do because I had
this thing plotted out. So I got an answer for
(29:25):
him at every stop, and then he brings up the
reliability again, and I say, I'm a kind of out
of options, so I just hit him. Would look as
unreliable as this dude has been. He's the number one
selling merch guy that we have in the company. And
I threw out his numbers from whatever week I saw it, right,
I go, that's off those armed bands and his T shirts.
(29:46):
I said, these fans believe in him more than any
other wrestler in the company, and that includes you, which
I shouldn't have said, but I did. I wanted Jeff
to go over in this freaking match. It gets kind
of quiet, and I'm looking at Vince and I go,
we came all this way. If we don't make him
champ now, we're never gonna do it. And if he
screws up, it's on me, and uh, Vince kind of
(30:10):
sits there for a moment, and then he says, all right, Uh,
everybody get out, and everybody means everybody except Bruce, Kevin
and Hunter, right, So that means I have to go.
So I'm gone, Freebird's gone, DJ is gone. We're all
waiting outside. We don't like go to our stations. We're
waiting outside. We want to know the answer. The production
(30:30):
meeting on this day was on the same floor as
like the V I P. Cafeteria, So there's this like
empty cafeteria behind us, a lot of free space. We're
sitting there and I'm looking at Freebird and I go,
what do you think? And he goes, I don't know.
You know, you did your best. He's like trying to
prep me for failure. So now I'm like, shoot, Ben,
it's just not gonna happen, Like, is it seriously gonna
(30:53):
get get killed right now? And listen again, Hunter was
proven right at the end of the day. I mean,
Jeff got in trouble. I think less than a year
after this happened. They gave him the other belt after that,
the other championship, and then he got in trouble and
then got a bigger trouble and had to leave the
company for a while. So at the end of the
day he was right. But all of a sudden, the
(31:13):
door swings open and only Hunter comes out, and he
doesn't even look at me right, and he walks by.
And so this now means two things. One, this dude
doesn't like me anymore, and it's probably gonna work against
me now, which is what happened, and to just gonna
be the world heavyweight champion, which is the whole point
(31:35):
of this in the first place. And so I'm willing
to take these bullets and I'm willing to get him
the champion or to you know, to get this story
through so he can be the champion. And I watched
the match from like the back, like a side, like
a side entrance, right, and Hunters not involved in the
finish because he did not believe in the idea and
I respect that. And Jeff comes in and he gets
(31:58):
it on on edge. I think Hunter was out of
the ring at the time. And then he climbs up
the scaffolding and which is psycho dangerous, but he did
it before the match, did at once, just to show
that he could. And he holds the belt up there
like the highest point in the arena, which speaks volumes
to who Jeff Hardy is, dude still wrestles today, who
(32:21):
he is as a professional wrestler, and who he's always
been as a professional wrestler. And we got that storyline through,
and it was definitely it wasn't the most proud of
a story because I had another story that we'll talk
about on another episode that I was more proud of,
but it just didn't get as much love because it
(32:41):
wasn't it wasn't Jeff, and and it was something that
me and the talent manufactured as opposed to bringing real
stuff out from my own life and the history that
I had with my father and Jeff's trials and tribulations
during that time as well. Um with consent and with
permission of course, but there are there's a smaller one
(33:01):
that that didn't. They didn't last, but I have more
pride than that. But it definitely, you know, it gave
me a lot of latitude which you don't normally have
as a writer there after after Jeff, to work with
younger talent and to kind of spread my wings a
little more. But it caused problems as well. They had
(33:22):
a wrestler that he looked like the rock Um, not
as big, and he could speak English, Arabic, Hebrew and
something else man and he and I had this cool
kind of idea that we had worked out. And I
remember this was maybe like a couple of weeks after
the Jeff thing, and Hunter came up to me and
he was like, hey, man, I'm working with in a
(33:44):
month something, so you don't need to work with it.
He didn't say stay away from him, but he's saying amen,
like I want you around the guys that I like.
And so that's when I was kind of like, ah,
that sucks, man, Like you know, I was just trying
to you don't do right by the company. And Jeff's
sales went through the roof even more after that, and
the storyline lasted pretty strong. We gave Jeff an entering
(34:07):
one with Edge that went a little sideways because it
was entering and not in a controlled environment, but he
still got over and the crowd started chanting with Jeff,
which was, you know, the goal anyway, just it went
a different way than I wanted. But I'm a dungeon
master in Dungeons and Dragons, so I'm prepared when things
go off the rails. But yeah, man, it was that
(34:27):
was a bittersweet moment in the company, and it was
the first time I really started considering, like is it
is it worth it? There's so many egos here. I'm
gonna hurt someone's feelings every time they lose a match.
It was true. I mean I had dudes come up
to me and say, hey, man, if I lose another match,
I feel like they're gonna let me go. I'm not
(34:49):
trained to do anything else that resonated with me. It's
a humbling it's a humbling moment for anyone to go to.
I'm not saying the dude's name. But he followed it
with like, I don't want to be packing groceries if
I get released, and I was like, man, I gotta
get something. His student wasn't even on my on my
list of people are supposed to be working for. And
(35:11):
I started writing for him and his valet, this you know,
twisted sick thing that might work on the w W
E S version of E c W, which they still
had at the time. I probably worked on it for
I think two weeks and they released him ten days in.
I didn't know, And I found out on the SmackDown
that they shot E c W on the same day
(35:32):
a SmackDown on Tuesday back then, that they let Homeboy go.
And I was just like, dang, he knew he saw
it come in. Show business in general is real cutthroat,
and a lot of people talk about luck and I'm
here to tell you there's no such thing there is
being prepared for opportunities, and there has been unprepared for opportunities.
(35:55):
The son of a gun in this group is the
opportunit unity because we never know when it's gonna come,
and far too many of us, far too often are
unprepared when those opportunities present themselves. So if you have
a passion, you have to be ready because you never
(36:17):
ever know when it's going to present itself. I'm telling you,
when I was an acting class, you hear actors talk about,
oh I got an audition tomorrow, Oh what time I'm
at ten? I gotta be there early at nine, And
then you hear that same actor say, you know, hey,
let's go drinking after class. Well, you know where my
(36:37):
head's going. I didn't party until I made it right,
So in my head, I'm like, this dude ain't making
his nine am meeting, But you know who is met,
and those are the opportunities I would bust my ass
on the scene. I wasn't even supposed to be in
on go with. I'll even tell you a name, because
Brian knows I did. It was Ryan Philippi and uh,
(37:00):
he wasn't gonna make that meeting. And I showed up
and they said Ryan, and I walked straight in. The
assistant knew I wasn't Ryan, and I gave the read
and the director goes, that's a that's a great job.
I said, oh thanks. He goes, who are you? And
I just like checked my shoes right away, right like
eyes to the floor and shame. And the casting director
(37:21):
knew the jig was up, and I look up. I go, yeah,
I'm Freddie, and before they could say anything, shout out
but she wouldn't see me otherwise, and the director starts laughing.
He goes, you did great, man, you did great. He goes,
give me your last name. I say, friends. He goes,
all right, I booked this job. The casting director never
sees me again. So I don't know what you want
(37:42):
to take from that. Either take advantage of the opportunity
and lose out on others, or lose out on all
the opportunities. But I knew if I studied my ass
off and gave the best audition, I would have the
best opportunity to book that job. And I've seen wrestlers
do it. I've seen them get their chance and and
have that match where maybe they weren't supposed to or May,
(38:04):
even though they were gonna lose, it was going to
be an eight and they're on the twenty side as
far as who's going to get over, and then the
other wrestler, the veteran, it's like, hey, we're gonna make
this sixt and they give this other wrestler a shot.
I watched Edge do it with Dolph Ziggler early on
and he came backstage. I'll never forget this. Vince goes,
how do you do? And Edge goes that dude can work,
(38:27):
and that was all it took, and all of a sudden,
Ziggler had had Vicky and Ziggler became a champion. And
it's he was prepared for the moment. And when you're
prepared for that moment, opportunity has no choice but to
roll out the red carpet. If you're unprepared, it's it's
a crappy road that hasn't been paved in forty years
(38:49):
and you're a Porsche. You're a Porsche driving on this
horrible street. Why are you doing that? So always, always,
always be prepared. This isn't really connected. This is just
another side question. But especially if you're an artist, work
that craft. Be ready to present it to people. If
you're a painter, have a have a portfolio ready to go.
If your sculptor, don't give them all the way, save
(39:11):
some so you have something to show people. If you're
a writer, you better be writing as soon as you
turn this podcast off. And if it's a wrestling movie
and that nobody thinks it's gonna get made, screw them.
Write it anyway, right, what you want, not what people
tell you to write. That's a good message for all
you streamers out there that stream video games or whatever.
(39:33):
I see you at. What should I play? No, no, no, no, no.
Play what you want to play. That's what's authentic. Anything else,
you're gonna burn out. Maybe that's why I didn't last
in the wrestling business. I tried to write for everybody,
and I burned out. All Right, you guys, thanks for
tuning in. I'll see everybody next week with a brand
new episode of Wrestling with Freddie. This has been a
(39:54):
production of I Hearts Michael podcast Network. For more podcasts
for my Heart Radio. Is it the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?
H m hm mm hmmmmm.
What's going on everybody, as Freddie Prince Jr. Welcome back
to Wrestling with Freddie. Thanks for all the episodes you've
listened to so far, and thanks for tuning into this
week's episode, which is searching for a Hearty or looking
for Jeff. This was when I was given the Jeff
Hardy assignment by Michael Hayes, which was make Jeff a champion.
(00:28):
This is gonna be his one and only chance, or
so he thought at the time. So we're gonna get
deep into that. I'm sure there'll be a couple side
quests as well at some point, So let's start the show.
Welcome to Wrestling with Freddie. Now stuffing up to the mic.
The host of Wrestling with Freddie Freddie Prince June. Yeah,
(00:49):
if you look up on YouTube or any better wrestling
historian than me, there's a lot of them out there.
But this is the time when Jeff Hardy became the
world's heavyweight champion for the very first time, and I
was given the task of of of accomplishing this which
most people thought was impossible and crazy. That's the cool
part that I'll take credit for. But as far as
(01:11):
the storytelling and the creativity behind it. That was a
group of people that I would love to get credit to.
And uh, like I said, I'm sure there'll be some
side quests. I've been writing for a little while. I
had done an Undertaker promo that Undertaker said, uh, he
didn't change a single word too, and to my knowledge,
at least from what they said, I don't believe that
(01:32):
had happened in a very very long time. Um. And
so I started getting bigger guys. I started getting Kane
and some other top talent there, people that Vince is
very particular with as far as certain words they can say.
Kane wouldn't say destroy, he says obliterate things like things
of that nature. I get the hearty story, and I
(01:53):
know about a lot of what's going on, And just
so you guys know where we're at timeline wise, Jeff
was even with m v P and Jeff's like he
had this like an airstream trailer on the Hardy property
and it burned down and Jeff's dog passed away, and
they were all wondering if they could bring that up,
(02:14):
and Jeff was like, yeah, if you if you have to,
you know you can. An m VP really respected Jeff,
and Jeff knew that. So uh, m v P talks
about his reckless and wild behavior and it even, you know,
getting your your little dog killed, and Jeff like cracks
and they have this fight. And so this is just
after that. Jeff had a lot of positive energy behind
(02:35):
him and m v P had gotten a lot of
like mean nasty heat off of Jeff. And Michael calls
me into his office and he's he says in his
ps in his pure sexy voice, all right, here's what
we're gonna do. I need you to come up with
a way, and we're gonna get the belt on Jeff.
Don't call it a belt, We're gonna get it on him.
(02:57):
And so I'm sitting there like, yeah, okay, no problem.
I don't know about Jeff's history. I don't I didn't
know about a dirt sheet until a couple of years ago.
And I'm forty five. You know, my dad was in
this business and uh died violently, and he was in
the tabloids a lot. So maybe I avoid that on
like a pre programmed, subconscious level. And that's why I
(03:19):
always kind of looked the other direction because it felt
like gossip. Maybe I don't know. I've never self analyzed
that decision. I get into it with this guy Chris
to Joseph, we called him DJ, and he's he's laughing.
He's like, it's never gonna happen. Like what you mean,
It's never gonna happen, and he starts breaking down a
lot of Jeff's issues in the past of rejecting rehab,
(03:40):
having drug issues, things like that, and those were perceived
speed bumps or in in this case, a brick wall
to get through. But for me, I connected hard with it,
which I'll tell you about in a minute, and the
episode that we're trying to talk about serious stuff in
this episode. It won't be all jokes, but I connected
(04:03):
hard with it, and I saw opportunity. So my father
was a stand up comic in the seventies. For those
who may just be tuning in, I broke this down
for you in the very beginning, I think, and he
was a big He was a he was a big
time deal man. Richard Prior discovered him. My dad had
the number one show in the country in like nineteen
seventy five or seventy four or something like that. Drugs
(04:24):
were a big part of his life. In the seventies
and tore my entire family apart because of it. And
on January twenties seven, nineteen seventies six, he put a
gun to his head and he had about six coludes
in his system and UH pulled the trigger and he died.
And it just wrecked my family. And so I had
(04:46):
a lifetime of experience with drugs. Why people do him?
I had gone through the anger of that you have
as a young man, not having a father. I had
gone through the part of my life for it. If
you even did drugs, you weren't in my circle of
friends straight up, like you were just ostracized. And then
(05:06):
as I got older, I started to have more understanding
and and the more knowledge I got of what addicts
go through, it gave me a much clearer perspective. It's
it's a way of self medicating. It's your brain knows
it needs something, it just doesn't know what. And that's
the easiest and unfortunately worst thing you could turn to.
A lot of times they say, you know, the addict
(05:28):
isn't taking the drug. The drug is taking the drug.
This isn't just me telling you this, This is doctors.
A vault from from medical doctors to psychiatrists, everyone in between,
and I've just taken knowledge from all of them. So
I definitely had a sensitivity toward the addict towards drug users,
(05:49):
but still understood at a certain point you gotta stand
on your own two damn feet and and get your
life together, or you can end up like my pops
and rip a family apart. So this was the approach
that I took towards the promos and the storyline that
we were going to do while Edge was champion with
Vicky Guerrero and Jeff was going to have to climb
(06:12):
this ladder, and instead of shining away from it and
running away from it, I leaned heavy into it and
I almost made Jeff well. I made him a baby face,
using drugs as the means to do it without I
feel to this day, without making drugs look cool. We
portrayed a an artist who was tortured, who had self
(06:36):
hate in abundance, and who used art to get that
hatred out, whether it be in Jeff's real life art,
he was painting a lot at the time. I don't
know if he still does through his wrestling and now
through his promos, and the first one I wrote him.
He changed one word um and he he inserted the
(06:59):
word image I nation, which was something Jeff came up with,
and that word inspired every promo I wrote for him
all the way to the championship, and I wrote every
single one of those. And again they're all on YouTube.
You can check them out. You can let me know
if you love them or if you hate him, which
everyone you're allowed to feel. However you feel, get hit
(07:19):
me up on social media and and say, hey, did
you write this crap? Or hey did you write this gold?
I love it. But that was the That was sort
of the spark that kind of lit the fire, and
from that I just really tried to go into what
do addicts suffer from the world is not I repeat,
the world is not black and white. In fact, the
(07:40):
black and white parts of this world are the smallest
parts in comparison to the large area that gray encompasses globally.
Most of us, I would say, aren't good or bad
people were just people trying to get by right. And
then there's incredibly good people. And when I say good,
I don't mean the guy who lets you an entract good.
(08:00):
I mean like the people who are selfless and give
a lot of themselves away for the greater good. So
you might call that great, you might call that the rare,
the select few. I call them the good. Right. Then
there's the bad, the people that are only out for
themselves and will smash and step on anyone to get
what they want and they don't care what the collateral damages.
(08:21):
And then there's you and I is we're a bunch
of decent people who sometimes do wrong, we feel bad
about it, sometimes do right, we feel good about it,
and we're just trying to get by. And the gray
area is where the addict is no longer allowed to exist.
Once they're publicly known as an addict, then it's just
(08:41):
black and white for these people. It's oh, they're junkie,
they're drug addict. Now you can't trust them all. I
can't do this. By the way, all that criticism is
completely justified. And that's why we showed Jeff fail and
fail again. And if you look at the promos in
this light, which was what I tried to do, I
styled them after or his matches. Jeff is a crash
(09:02):
and burn wrestler. It's builds your hopes up, Build your
hopes up, Get up, to the highest most dangerous point possible,
the only place possible where if he jumps off, he
can end the match. And then he fails because the
guy gets out of the way, or he gets betrayed
or whatever the issue is, right, And so we tried
to write the promos in that same sense. And I
(09:22):
wrote these alone in New York, where I just was.
So it was very kind of I was making a
movie out there, and so it's very surreal to be
in the same city. And honestly, the last time I
was there was when I was writing these Jeff Hardy promos.
A lot of these images are are fresh in my mind,
or at least the philosophies behind them. You know, I
don't have the the promos memorized like I used to
(09:44):
have to do back then, so that I could kind
of demonstrate how I think it should be performed. And
so I would want to be off book for that
and then say, look, everything you see me do that
you like, steal that and make it your own, and
everything I do that looks like crap. Just throw it away.
They You're not gonna hurt my feelings the word for word,
That's what I said to a lot of wrestlers. So
(10:04):
that's what I was doing with Jeff and I would
sit in my apartment in New York all by myself,
and usually I would just have music going on the TV,
like your satellite TV as music channels. You don't use
these anymore because it's but I would put on one
of those channels and I would just sit there and
I would try to make my dad a sympathetic professional wrestler.
(10:28):
And that's what each and every one of these were.
And he would talk about the world just sees me
in black and white, but I am the gray, meaning
he could not never possibly be on either side of
that argument. He it's impossible for him. You guys won't
let him. So he's an outcast. And that's what his
fans were at the time. They were the outcast fans.
(10:49):
They were the ones that rooted for the guy that
was never going to be champ, and they knew it,
and they bought his merchandise anyway. And this was a
key component to the whole pitch that I made. When
I made it was I asked if I could see
the merchandise numbers for a bunch of the wrestlers, And
this was before I was assigned the Jeff Hardy pitch,
(11:13):
and I saw that Jeff's arm bands were like I
think at the time, either the I want to say,
I pitched him as the top seller. They may have
been the second top seller, or at least for a
week they were the top seller. So maybe I used
that as like my example. But he sold a lot
of freaking arm bands, okay, And they were like the
Spider Man webs that went up each arm and and
(11:36):
these things went and Jeff Hardy merchandise and his T
shirts they were they were selling like crazy. So I
put together this whole pitch, and I pre wrote every
promo that you guys saw. I presented to Vince on
the same day. Everything was written. Now, some thing's changed.
The Taker promo didn't when they went to London, the
Taker Jeff promo and then a couple like Jeff. Things
(11:59):
would change here in there. But the other people edged
stayed enjoyed staying locked into what I wrote. Vicky enjoyed
staying locked into what I wrote. It was a little
bit of Hunter. He wrote his own stuff. He kind
of did his own thing, and we'll get into that
at the end. This was when Hunter, I don't know
if he ever liked me, but he was always respectful,
but this was when he was kind of like done
(12:19):
with me. And I respect Hunter, but he was for
sure done with me, and I get it. We're doing
these promos and I'm talking about the Gray Area, and
I'm talking about what it's like to be judged every
single day of your life, and the promos are really
getting over with the audience. And the trick to these, well,
first the trick was finding Jeff in order to shoot
(12:41):
the promo. So we get there early, at like nine
ten am. Sometimes a little later earlier was better. Most
people hated it. But the earlier we got there, granted,
the production meeting was longer, but I had more time
to email people what I needed to email, which gave
them more time to learn their stuff or at least
understand the philosophy, and it benefited everyone. He got there
(13:11):
usually around ten AM for most of these, I feel
like I would get to sign my crew. A lot
of my stuff was pre approved, but his championship was
not approved. Just this storyline of the Gray Area was approved.
We're all getting our assignments, and the best way I
think to find Jeff is to find Matt right, and
I was cool with Matt. He had punched me in
(13:32):
the eye on accident one time, gave me a black
eye while he was warming up, so he was always like,
he's always been very sympathetic and kind for nearly fracturing
my head. And I finally go, hey, man, where's your brother?
And he goes, good luck with that, and so no,
there's no panic, but I gotta find him. It's a
big promo. It was very deep. I never I emailed
Jeff a lot of promos, but I never received an
(13:54):
email back, so I don't know if he ever saw
any of them until the day of until the day
we shot them. But I said him a lot. I
said him a lot of emails. So I'm looking all
around the arena, I do a full lap. I don't
see him. I find I think it was drough McIntire
and I say, hey, man, have you seen Jeff? He said, yeah,
(14:15):
he's back by Catering, which is on the complete opposite
side of ore. I man, So I go all the
way back to catering. He's not there. I'm like, Natalia,
this is Nattie Nidhart, say Natalia, have you seen Jeff?
Because I think he's back by the buses. I run
back to the buses. Nobody there, not even someone to
ask have you seen Jeff. I get back, I find
Matt again, or I don't find Matt. Matt finds me.
(14:36):
He goes, hey, man, I saw Jeff. He's back by
the locker rooms. I go to the locker rooms. He's
not in there. I go to into the stairwell next
to the locker rooms on pure Jedi instincts, and Jeff
sitting on the stairs and he's he's not his head's
not down, but he's just sitting there and I go, oh, hey, hey, man,
with What's what's going on? He goes, oh, hey, sorry, man, sorry.
(14:58):
He's got this like cool Carolina drawl when he when
he speaks, and I say, we got this promo to day.
It's all approved. I said, you know, I emailed it
to you. I don't know if you got it. Goes
oh yeah, right on, right on, But he doesn't say
whether he got the email or not. And he starts
looking at it and reading through it. I say, take
your time. I say, I'm gonna stay right outside the
door though, so that if you have any questions or
anything that you wanna, you know, work on we can
(15:20):
work on it together, and uh, he says, no, it's okay, man,
I just I wanna. I really want to learn these
I like, I like your promos. I want to memorize it.
And I see that, so I'm like, I'm gonna leave
him alone. I'm gonna leave m alone. So I leave
him alone on this first one. We get to a
backstage area where we're gonna shoot this because I didn't
want him to do it in ring yet. And we
(15:40):
start filming and he's not happy with the vibe of
it because he doesn't get enough time to memorize. That's
still the biggest issue with the w w E. If
you're not going to give him time to learn it,
let them write for themselves, or don't write for them period.
Just give him a starting place, a midpoint, and an
endpoint and let him flow. But we didn't have that.
We didn't have that option. He's not to and it.
I know it's not where it needs to be, but
(16:02):
I know it can be better, right, So I say,
all right, hold up, dude, and I literally write the
promo out on que cards, on a lot of them
because we didn't have paper. Big enough to do the
whole thing on one and so it doesn't look like
he's reading off a que card. I tell him, hey,
I'm just gonna move it around two different parts of
the camera. We won't move the camera. It'll just be
(16:22):
me moving with the que cards. And you can kind
of let your face move when you feel pain and
that will sort of motivate the move to where you
can see the card again. He's like, all right, all right,
And this was a quick hustle that we had to do.
You only get so much time to get these done
and then approved and then edited into the show. This
was SmackDown. This wasn't on Monday Night Row. We're doing
(16:42):
our thing and it's working, and it takes us like
two or three takes and then it's really flowing and
he nails it and he's almost hardly even looking at
the cards now. He said it so much, and we
get it done, I get it in. It gets on
TV and the crowd pops big for it, and for SmackDown.
Then that was rarer because it wasn't the more popular show.
And they would literally put canned applause in because the
(17:06):
reactions were never as as good. Maybe people knew it
wasn't live. I don't know. It was like canned laughter
on a sitcom, which you do not pull, or maybe
some actors do. Maybe maybe they don't like it. I
don't know. We're outside questioning yet. The pop is so
real that Vince literally says on the headphones. So that
was a real pop. And I'm like, oh, we're good,
We're good, We're good. The storyline starting to develop. He's
(17:27):
going after Edge, nobody trusts it, and we're a week
out from pitching him as champion. Edge still has the
belt and Hunters like right on the edge of the
of the championship picture. At that point, the promos are
all going well. I got Jeff his promo early that
morning because he was there with his brother, so like
(17:50):
nine or ten o'clock, and then, uh, they went to
the locker room to go to sleep, take a nap.
Our Truth was already in there taking a nap, but
we had to be there early for some reason. So
he and the wrestlers did we go that night. Jeff's
got his promo completely memorized. He doesn't do it for me,
but I know he does. You could just kind of
see it in his eyes, right so we're gonna shoot
(18:12):
this thing. We're getting ready to rock and roll, and
all the power goes out and we can't We can't
record anything. Now. Our camera can record, it's on battery, right,
our sound can. They don't have to be plugged in,
but we have no lights. Now it's time to start
giving credit to other people. This was well before we
get into that. Let's give credit where it's dude. The
(18:34):
London Show, which I skimmed over. I didn't go to.
I didn't want to fly all the way to London.
I was living in New York at the time and
taking the train to Stanford every week. And so they
went and Krista Joseph was the one who shot that
whole segment and fought for the segment when people in
the room wanted to change a lot of it. He
fought for it. Free Bird fought for it. I don't
know who else did. I'm sure someone else did. I
(18:56):
wasn't there, so I can't give you credit, but I
know for a fact they did, as my buddy who
did go told me so h So that promo goes
off without a hitch. They say it word for word
how I wrote it, and DJ shot it well, and
he had to. You have to understand he had to
cut back and forth from undertake her in ring to
Hardy backstage on a pre written thing that I wrote,
(19:18):
and the writer's not there. So this it's a challenge
to pull that off. So credit to the trucks as
well for for editing so quickly, because they have to.
So we're back. We're now getting ready to shoot the
promo and the power goes out and Stephanie McMahon comes
by and she's like, what the hell is going on?
I'm like, I don't know what the hell is going on?
We have no power. We can't shoot. She goes, the
(19:38):
cameras work, don't they go? They do? She goes, then
we can shoot. We're not going to be able to
see anything. She goes, hold up. She starts looking around.
We're literally in like a suite at a at a
basketball arena, and she's literally frantically looking around, opening cabinet stores.
I start looking through cabinets and drawers. She finds a
pen light, a green pen light. I grab a highball glass.
(19:59):
She show finding it at me. Right, I grab a
highball glass, like, shine it through this glass. She grabs
the glass and shines it through. One of the guys
had a flashlight on him and so he does the
same thing. One of the crew guys. Of course they would,
And we use this kind of just ghetto light slash glad.
We're like MythBusters, like creating new ways to to to
(20:21):
shoot things. And steph McMahon, the daughter of the owner
of the company, she's literally holding a glass and a
green light and lighting Jeff Hardy and so is one
of the other crew guys. And I'm holding que cards.
That's where the flashlight came from. He gave it to me,
and I'm holding it on the que cards so Jeff
can read the que cards even though he's he's locked in,
(20:42):
but we we need to be there. It helped him.
So we shoot this whole thing and Vince freaking loves it.
And I'm looking at Stephanie and and we didn't see
I I on a lot of stuff, but this is
where she really earned my respect because she was willing
to get her hands dirty and there was no way
we were going to fail. It just wasn't an option.
And I, uh, you know, I'm sitting there going like
(21:03):
we're screwed. What what can I do? I gotta I
gotta find a generator or wait for the power to
come on. She came in and there's no wait. No,
we're not waiting. We're gonna get this. We're not gonna
get screwed. If the power comes back on, we'll shoot
it again. But we're getting this, and we're getting it now.
Not only do we get it, it looked way cooler
than it would have looked if we had full power.
(21:24):
Maybe not to you, but in the moment and the
adrenaline that's going on these shows, it's a big it's
a big deal, and they put a lot on the line.
It's their families. It's not just their company, it's their
family's name that's on the line every week. I know
a lot of you know fans will say, well, they
don't seem to worry about that too much, the way
they booked things. I get that. I get that, And
(21:45):
there's a lot of stuff in the w W E
that I can't stand. All right. I love carrying Cross.
When they brought him up to the main roster, I
literally was like, he's done and that's it. And then
they released him. So I'm with you. I get it.
I love Bray Wyatt too, I'm with you. But they
do take pride in their name, and they do take
pride in their company. And this is just an example
(22:08):
that's not on a gossip column somewhere where I can
legit tell you. Home girl rolled up her sleeves, Doug
a foxhole, got a gun, figuratively took post and was
not letting anybody get over that line like it was.
I loved her for that. I literally loved her for that,
and it helped us accomplished the story that we were
(22:31):
trying to accomplish. So we're kicking, but with the promos.
I'm in here by the way, by the way, you guys.
I was in New York the first time I've been
in New York since I worked for w w E.
I was making this We're on a side quest making
this movie. This is how crazy Manhattan was. I literally
moved to Brooklyn halfway through. So the first like five
(22:52):
days I'm there, there's this homeless dude outside that either
was massively hooked on drugs or straight up had sponti
biffo like the way he was talking like, I was
worried about this guy. Every day. It would get real
cold at night, there were some nice days, but at
night it would get real cold. One night, he's standing
outside the apartment that they set me up in to
where like you can't get in the apartment unless you
(23:13):
step over, and I'm this is kind of a sad story,
but I'm looking at the guy. I'm like, man, this
man he looks dead, right, So I climb over. I
literally step over the dude. Tell the doorman. He's like, no, man,
he's out there every night. I come down the next
morning nine hours later. They called a forced call. When
you don't get twelve hours off, everyone's like, you get
(23:35):
twelve hours off, bro, screw you not all the time.
I come downstairs and my driver was this nice Puerto
Rican lady named Janetta, and she's crying and I'm like,
what's wrong and she goes. When I got here, they
took the poor man in the in the ambulance. He
was dead. It was like messing with my head. I
was talking to the hair and make up people and
(23:55):
a trailer that that morning at work, I'm like, yo,
it was like Manhattan, so different, and it's like messing
with me and the producer her and he's like, dude,
what a dead body? I was like, yeah, he goes,
You're going to Brooklyn. So I went to Brooklyn and
everyone had a smile on their face. Everyone had a beard.
Not the girls, y'all didn't have beards, but the guys
had great beards. Everyone had dogs. They let me pet
(24:16):
their dogs. I didn't steal any of their dogs, which
was hard. People walk around with like sushi and coffee
with real sugar because there's no artificial sweetener in Brooklyn.
They don't allow it. And thank you Brooklyn, because uh,
I was very It was very this l A boy
was very unequipped for Manhattan this time around. So anyway,
we get to the pay per view and this is
(24:39):
the match where we have pitched that Jeff Hardy is
gonna go over. Now all the top dogs know this
is where the story is going. Vince knows this, Kevin
Dunn knows this. Bruce Pritchard of course, Freebird, it's his idea.
I don't believe the agents know until the moment that
we're about to speak of, and Hunter for sure knows,
(25:00):
and Stephanie for sure knows. We get in there and
I believe it's Armageddon was the name of the pay
per view, and we sit down and we make our
or I don't do it, but Michael makes his pitch
for the match. The finish with Hardy going over for
the championship, nobody says anything. It's super quiet, and Vince goes,
anybody have any thoughts and a couple of the agents
(25:21):
speak up and they you know, they're pro, They're pro Jeff.
He's been working hard. We even did an angle. I
get mad at the way the media treats wrestling, but like,
I just always hated it. So we even pulled one
on them where we took that Jeff storyline of him,
you know, being this the screw up that the w
W we had him, and we leaked a story that
(25:43):
wasn't even true with Jeff's permission to uh like CNN
or somebody, and they bought it and so CNN, here's this,
I've got you suckers deal with that, and uh, it
wasn't even true, and it was gonna help us, hi Jeff,
so that he could be this like surprise his entrance
and make this match like a triple threat, I think
is how the story was going to go. But but yeah,
(26:04):
they ran with that story and we got to burn
them on it. Later and Vince like that we got
to give them the middle finger because the media has
never been good to the w w E or WWF.
I remember specifically, Kevin Dunn did not want Jeff to
(26:30):
be champion, and he kind of like shrugged his shoulders.
He goes, you gotta be kidding me with this, and
Vince doesn't say anything. He regards the opinion. He hears
some other agents like speak up and they say good thing.
I remember arn Anderson said good things. Pritchard hasn't said
anything yet. And then Hunter speaks up and goes, are
we seriously I'm going to do a triple agent pressure?
(26:52):
Are we seriously gonna fucking trist this guy? And that
was like a sniper bullet taking you out at the leg,
an honest bullet, but a bullet just the same. I
was nervous that someone might say it because they would
be right. But I believed the story we were telling,
or we're trying to tell, was was worth the risk.
(27:14):
I genuinely did. I thought we were telling an honest,
interesting wrestling story, and I don't think that's the easiest
thing in the world to do, and I don't think
you can just stick it on anyone. I think it
has to fit the talent, and this story fit. And
so I've been preparing the whole time, and Michael was
gonna let me take any more bullets, for sure, because
(27:36):
it's just he just wasn't He brought these guys in. Man,
he fought for the hearties more times than anyone in
the company, and he knew the foundation we were standing
on better than anyone. And I knew that's why he
put it on me because I was smelling good to
the boss at the time. I always smelled good to
the bus, thank you very much. And uh so I'm like,
(27:58):
all right, this is gonna be this is gonna be
my argument. And I know d Jail speak up. But Hunter,
if he wants to smash on dj he can smash
on him. And Vince can smash on anyone. But the
only one who could really smash on me was Vince,
because anybody else I could speak to on at least
an equal playing field, maybe not as far as like
wrestling knowledge, but as far as like confidence and what
(28:22):
I knew I brought to the table, and the fact
that I could walk away. So those are my only cards.
So I start pitching why this is a good idea,
and I'm telling this is an honest story. We've done
nothing but tell the truth. I said, if he has
a relapse, if he goes down again, you take the
title off him. I said, you've taken it off and
before for stuff like that on smaller belts. I said,
(28:43):
we've taken it off other people in a day. I said,
we can pull this off. I said, you gotta you know.
I'm giving him this passion plea. It's about five minutes long.
And then Hunter starts shooting it down again, and I
don't you know, I don't want it to be a fight.
I don't want it to be an argument. I don't
want to have any He's in the company, but I
don't want this whole story that we built up to
(29:04):
let the fans of Jeff Hardy down again. And it's
my idea. There's some pride and there's some ego there
that I believe is worthy of this brass ring, so
to speak. Right, So we're having our creative argument back
and forth. Hunter starts challenging the merits of the story,
but that's hard for him to do because I had
this thing plotted out. So I got an answer for
(29:25):
him at every stop, and then he brings up the
reliability again, and I say, I'm a kind of out
of options, so I just hit him. Would look as
unreliable as this dude has been. He's the number one
selling merch guy that we have in the company. And
I threw out his numbers from whatever week I saw it, right,
I go, that's off those armed bands and his T shirts.
(29:46):
I said, these fans believe in him more than any
other wrestler in the company, and that includes you, which
I shouldn't have said, but I did. I wanted Jeff
to go over in this freaking match. It gets kind
of quiet, and I'm looking at Vince and I go,
we came all this way. If we don't make him
champ now, we're never gonna do it. And if he
screws up, it's on me, and uh, Vince kind of
(30:10):
sits there for a moment, and then he says, all right, Uh,
everybody get out, and everybody means everybody except Bruce, Kevin
and Hunter, right, So that means I have to go.
So I'm gone, Freebird's gone, DJ is gone. We're all
waiting outside. We don't like go to our stations. We're
waiting outside. We want to know the answer. The production
(30:30):
meeting on this day was on the same floor as
like the V I P. Cafeteria, So there's this like
empty cafeteria behind us, a lot of free space. We're
sitting there and I'm looking at Freebird and I go,
what do you think? And he goes, I don't know.
You know, you did your best. He's like trying to
prep me for failure. So now I'm like, shoot, Ben,
it's just not gonna happen, Like, is it seriously gonna
(30:53):
get get killed right now? And listen again, Hunter was
proven right at the end of the day. I mean,
Jeff got in trouble. I think less than a year
after this happened. They gave him the other belt after that,
the other championship, and then he got in trouble and
then got a bigger trouble and had to leave the
company for a while. So at the end of the
day he was right. But all of a sudden, the
(31:13):
door swings open and only Hunter comes out, and he
doesn't even look at me right, and he walks by.
And so this now means two things. One, this dude
doesn't like me anymore, and it's probably gonna work against
me now, which is what happened, and to just gonna
be the world heavyweight champion, which is the whole point
(31:35):
of this in the first place. And so I'm willing
to take these bullets and I'm willing to get him
the champion or to you know, to get this story
through so he can be the champion. And I watched
the match from like the back, like a side, like
a side entrance, right, and Hunters not involved in the
finish because he did not believe in the idea and
I respect that. And Jeff comes in and he gets
(31:58):
it on on edge. I think Hunter was out of
the ring at the time. And then he climbs up
the scaffolding and which is psycho dangerous, but he did
it before the match, did at once, just to show
that he could. And he holds the belt up there
like the highest point in the arena, which speaks volumes
to who Jeff Hardy is, dude still wrestles today, who
(32:21):
he is as a professional wrestler, and who he's always
been as a professional wrestler. And we got that storyline through,
and it was definitely it wasn't the most proud of
a story because I had another story that we'll talk
about on another episode that I was more proud of,
but it just didn't get as much love because it
(32:41):
wasn't it wasn't Jeff, and and it was something that
me and the talent manufactured as opposed to bringing real
stuff out from my own life and the history that
I had with my father and Jeff's trials and tribulations
during that time as well. Um with consent and with
permission of course, but there are there's a smaller one
(33:01):
that that didn't. They didn't last, but I have more
pride than that. But it definitely, you know, it gave
me a lot of latitude which you don't normally have
as a writer there after after Jeff, to work with
younger talent and to kind of spread my wings a
little more. But it caused problems as well. They had
(33:22):
a wrestler that he looked like the rock Um, not
as big, and he could speak English, Arabic, Hebrew and
something else man and he and I had this cool
kind of idea that we had worked out. And I
remember this was maybe like a couple of weeks after
the Jeff thing, and Hunter came up to me and
he was like, hey, man, I'm working with in a
(33:44):
month something, so you don't need to work with it.
He didn't say stay away from him, but he's saying amen,
like I want you around the guys that I like.
And so that's when I was kind of like, ah,
that sucks, man, Like you know, I was just trying
to you don't do right by the company. And Jeff's
sales went through the roof even more after that, and
the storyline lasted pretty strong. We gave Jeff an entering
(34:07):
one with Edge that went a little sideways because it
was entering and not in a controlled environment, but he
still got over and the crowd started chanting with Jeff,
which was, you know, the goal anyway, just it went
a different way than I wanted. But I'm a dungeon
master in Dungeons and Dragons, so I'm prepared when things
go off the rails. But yeah, man, it was that
(34:27):
was a bittersweet moment in the company, and it was
the first time I really started considering, like is it
is it worth it? There's so many egos here. I'm
gonna hurt someone's feelings every time they lose a match.
It was true. I mean I had dudes come up
to me and say, hey, man, if I lose another match,
I feel like they're gonna let me go. I'm not
(34:49):
trained to do anything else that resonated with me. It's
a humbling it's a humbling moment for anyone to go to.
I'm not saying the dude's name. But he followed it
with like, I don't want to be packing groceries if
I get released, and I was like, man, I gotta
get something. His student wasn't even on my on my
list of people are supposed to be working for. And
(35:11):
I started writing for him and his valet, this you know,
twisted sick thing that might work on the w W
E S version of E c W, which they still
had at the time. I probably worked on it for
I think two weeks and they released him ten days in.
I didn't know, And I found out on the SmackDown
that they shot E c W on the same day
(35:32):
a SmackDown on Tuesday back then, that they let Homeboy go.
And I was just like, dang, he knew he saw
it come in. Show business in general is real cutthroat,
and a lot of people talk about luck and I'm
here to tell you there's no such thing there is
being prepared for opportunities, and there has been unprepared for opportunities.
(35:55):
The son of a gun in this group is the
opportunit unity because we never know when it's gonna come,
and far too many of us, far too often are
unprepared when those opportunities present themselves. So if you have
a passion, you have to be ready because you never
(36:17):
ever know when it's going to present itself. I'm telling you,
when I was an acting class, you hear actors talk about,
oh I got an audition tomorrow, Oh what time I'm
at ten? I gotta be there early at nine, And
then you hear that same actor say, you know, hey,
let's go drinking after class. Well, you know where my
(36:37):
head's going. I didn't party until I made it right,
So in my head, I'm like, this dude ain't making
his nine am meeting, But you know who is met,
and those are the opportunities I would bust my ass
on the scene. I wasn't even supposed to be in
on go with. I'll even tell you a name, because
Brian knows I did. It was Ryan Philippi and uh,
(37:00):
he wasn't gonna make that meeting. And I showed up
and they said Ryan, and I walked straight in. The
assistant knew I wasn't Ryan, and I gave the read
and the director goes, that's a that's a great job.
I said, oh thanks. He goes, who are you? And
I just like checked my shoes right away, right like
eyes to the floor and shame. And the casting director
(37:21):
knew the jig was up, and I look up. I go, yeah,
I'm Freddie, and before they could say anything, shout out
but she wouldn't see me otherwise, and the director starts laughing.
He goes, you did great, man, you did great. He goes,
give me your last name. I say, friends. He goes,
all right, I booked this job. The casting director never
sees me again. So I don't know what you want
(37:42):
to take from that. Either take advantage of the opportunity
and lose out on others, or lose out on all
the opportunities. But I knew if I studied my ass
off and gave the best audition, I would have the
best opportunity to book that job. And I've seen wrestlers
do it. I've seen them get their chance and and
have that match where maybe they weren't supposed to or May,
(38:04):
even though they were gonna lose, it was going to
be an eight and they're on the twenty side as
far as who's going to get over, and then the
other wrestler, the veteran, it's like, hey, we're gonna make
this sixt and they give this other wrestler a shot.
I watched Edge do it with Dolph Ziggler early on
and he came backstage. I'll never forget this. Vince goes,
how do you do? And Edge goes that dude can work,
(38:27):
and that was all it took, and all of a sudden,
Ziggler had had Vicky and Ziggler became a champion. And
it's he was prepared for the moment. And when you're
prepared for that moment, opportunity has no choice but to
roll out the red carpet. If you're unprepared, it's it's
a crappy road that hasn't been paved in forty years
(38:49):
and you're a Porsche. You're a Porsche driving on this
horrible street. Why are you doing that? So always, always,
always be prepared. This isn't really connected. This is just
another side question. But especially if you're an artist, work
that craft. Be ready to present it to people. If
you're a painter, have a have a portfolio ready to go.
If your sculptor, don't give them all the way, save
(39:11):
some so you have something to show people. If you're
a writer, you better be writing as soon as you
turn this podcast off. And if it's a wrestling movie
and that nobody thinks it's gonna get made, screw them.
Write it anyway, right, what you want, not what people
tell you to write. That's a good message for all
you streamers out there that stream video games or whatever.
(39:33):
I see you at. What should I play? No, no, no, no, no.
Play what you want to play. That's what's authentic. Anything else,
you're gonna burn out. Maybe that's why I didn't last
in the wrestling business. I tried to write for everybody,
and I burned out. All Right, you guys, thanks for
tuning in. I'll see everybody next week with a brand
new episode of Wrestling with Freddie. This has been a
(39:54):
production of I Hearts Michael podcast Network. For more podcasts
for my Heart Radio. Is it the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?
H m hm mm hmmmmm.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.