By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Spike Dudley
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On whether there were any spots he said no to: “No, not really. But here’s the thing, that was all taken with consideration. I never did anything I didn’t think I could walk away from. There were things that I could not do. I’m not a moonsault guy. So doing like any sort of 180, 360, wasn’t even on the table. But nobody ever asked me to do something that I can think of that I went, No, I’m not going to do that. If I knew I could do it, I was willing to do it. For me, it wasn’t the physical pain, a bump is going to hurt. It was am I going to get injured doing it? And no, I can’t really think of anything. I mean, on the Indies after WWE, I’d go to these indie shows with kids with light bulbs and sh*t like that. I’d say no to that stuff. But in ECW, WWE, TNA, nobody ever asked me to do something that I didn’t feel comfortable with.”
On his most painful bump: “I’ll be honest. That one bump that I was telling you about when Bubba [Ray Dudley] and D-Von [Dudley] tossed me over in ECW. That was my idea. So the setup is it’s me and Balls [Mahoney] against Bubba and D-Von in the ring. Bubba and D-Von are standing next to each other. Balls picks me up and tosses me at them, and in theory, they’re supposed to take a bump, but I’m so small that they catch me. They catch me in their arms, cradled side by side, and they just back straight up to the ropes and blind chuck me over the top. This was my bump. I called this bump. But what happened was, when they tossed me, the guard rails were those metal things, my heel hit the top of the guard rail, and exploded. I didn’t think I got hurt. I certainly didn’t need X-rays, but I was like ow! That hurts, and I was kind of hobbled the rest of the time. But that was the one I remember as like, ah, can I go on? Am I able to finish the match? As the most painful, I would say, yeah, definitely. I’d go with that one.”
On deciding to retire from wrestling: “My wife was pregnant and okay, so this is what happened. This is how I officially got out of the business. My wife was a few months pregnant with our first daughter, that’d be 2010. I was working for 2CW in Syracuse, New York, which is a great promotion. It’s no longer there, but at the time, it was an awesome promotion, just great, great guys, truly, aside from like ECW, this group is the group that’s closest to my heart in terms of the boys and all of that. They used me a lot at that company, but they booked me in a match against Sabu again, RIP. I drove up there, it’s about a five-hour drive. Drove up and I did the show, and I got my arm sliced. It wasn’t bleeding that bad. It was a slice, it was just from a gimmick. Honestly, going into it, I was like it’s gonna be my Sabu match, I’m gonna do my arm, so self-inflicted. So I saw it, I just taped it up, I got into my car, and I drove home, and I got home at like, four or five in the morning.
“My wife, she’s like, ‘Are you okay? Everything all right?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I fell asleep, and I woke up at like nine the next morning, and I start to peel the tape off, and blood just starts gushing. I was like, ‘Honey, I think we got to go to the emergency room.’ But then that was the moment where I realized, Okay, I’m gonna be a father. I can’t be doing this crazy stuff anymore, because physically, that’s what I did, was take bumps. And no matter how indestructible we all think we are, you hit a wall where you cannot do that anymore. So I was 40-41, something like that at the time, and that was the eye opener that okay, I can’t do this and be a responsible parent any longer. So I got my stitches and I called it quits. I had a couple of matches after, but that was the signal that you’re done with the business.”
On taking the first-ever 3D from The Dudleys: “We practiced it at House of Hardcore, at the school, different variations of it forever, for weeks before we debuted it. Yeah, that first 3D is not the way 3D is supposed to go. And thank God for Bubba. He was at 400 pounds or something like that, because I landed on his chest. My head never hit, but it was a straight spike piledriver. Had he not been so big and my head hit [the mat], I would have broke my neck. But, yeah, that was ugly. That was not the way the 3D was supposed to be. I mean, honestly, because that was the big thing. When Bubba and D-Von decided they were going to do the tag team, it was like, we need to have a finisher. And we would go to the gym, coming up with variations of some sort of the Diamond Cutter, it was the thing. So yeah, I sat there and took, ‘try this, try this, try this, try this, try this.’ For hours, me as the crash dummy, testing it. And yeah, the way it came off on that first one was not really the intention. That wasn’t what they were looking for. But it did look devastating. But yeah, then they said, Okay, we can’t do this with everybody, so we got to figure out a different way. And then they figured it out where D-Von picks the guy, but if they flatten out versus head straight into the ground.”
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