By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest The Godfather
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On the first time he wrestled The Undertaker: “Memphis, Tennessee. I just worked a program with Lawler, they didn’t know what to do with me. I’m as green as Kermit the Frog. Taker has been in the business a couple of years now. So they said hey, we’re gonna bring this big, tall white kid in to work against you. He’s been in the business a couple of years, maybe we can do something with you. So Mark’s driving in from Texas. I never get a chance to meet him. Everything I’ve done so far is what Jerry Lawler has told me to do in the ring. I know nothing, just what somebody’s telling me what to do, which is a whole other story [laughs]. So I met him in the ring. We have a match where I’m like, Oh, here’s another one of these big ass white boys I’m gonna have to deal with, so it was a little physical in the ring with me and him. He tells me to throw him out. So I throw him out, I go after him, I’m chasing him around one corner the other corner. I guess he found that chair he was looking for. He hit me over the head with a chair so hard that you know the cartoons when you see the stars and little birdies? I swear I see that. He looked down at me and said ‘Do you want to do this easy way or the hard way?’ I said ‘I think let’s do this the easy way.’ From that point, we became really good friends from that day.”
On hating The Goodfather: “When it happened, like I said, I was done. I told Vince finish me up. Then the jokester that he is, he put the tag team belts on me and Bull and kept me there even longer. He was more poking fun out of them [the network], he was hoping that maybe we can get back to The Godfather in some form. They tried to bring The Godfather back but it just didn’t work because I was no longer a pimp, there were no longer Ho’s, you couldn’t talk about smoking weed, just couldn’t. People didn’t want that, they wanted The Godfather.”
On Right to Censor: “On a shoot, nobody hated it more than me. As much as Ric Flair is Ric Flair, The Godfather is me and it was just you took it away from me and it was just like oh, it took the air out of it and I was done. I just did my best and RTC just the music alone had serious heat. I did my best but that was the only time in wrestling that I really wasn’t happy and I was just waiting for it to come to an end.”
On Over The Edge 1999: “I remember spending the day with Owen. I remember talking with the girls and then Owen was coming out. I’ve never seen it. But when that happened, I was behind the curtain with the girls going through it. [I said] ‘Don’t worry if you mess up. If you fall, I’ll do this…’ I was telling them that then whoever it was, it might have been Bruce Prichard, I don’t know who was sitting at the table. I know it wasn’t Jim Ross. He goes ‘Owen fell!’ And then I’m like, what? He goes, ‘Owen just fell!’ We were looking at the monitors and then it all went down. I just remembered what Owen looked like when he came through the curtain. And other than that, I don’t [remember]. I called my wife right away and she tells me a lot of things that I said that I don’t remember. But she tells me you said this and you said that. And then I’m like well, I don’t remember that. So it was a blur after that. I don’t remember how or when I found out that there was no match or what was going on. I really don’t remember.”
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