Buff Bagwell Interview
“Samoa Joe, to me, I’ve never got that,” Bagwell expressed. “I know he’s very popular. I know he’s very good in the ring, I think he’s a great wrestler, I like to watch him. But when you’ve got a chance to do a storyline, to the world of wrestling fans, who’s going to be Sting’s tag team partner, and the options are Lex Luger, Marcus Bagwell, and Samoa Joe. I mean, who in the heck is Samoa Joe? And Luger wasn’t fit enough, so I fit the part perfectly.” He added, “I really don’t know where [TNA] were going with that, except maybe a push for Samoa Joe? Me and Samoa Joe haven’t spoke 10 words together. He was on one independent show with in in Cleveland, and he got mad because I was in the main event and he wasn’t. To me, Samoa Joe is a fat, out of shape guy who looks like he should not be in a wrestling ring, and I’ve not heard or seen anybody ever draw a dollar with him.”
“Here’s how I look at it. If I was a promoter like Vince McMahon or Ted Turner, if I was trying to make money in the wrestling industry, I would judge it by having a person walk through Walmart. If CM Punk walked through Walmart even as popular as he is, he’s not going to get noticed as much as Hulk Hogan walking through Walmart. The reason why I say Walmart, is [because] that is our fanbase.”
“He was able to stay over for a year and not have a fight, and then you go out and take such a big fight and get beat up. I mean, brother, that leaves not a dent, not a scratch, that leaves a scar. I’m not sure that can be fixed. So, it was a bad, bad decision, but whoever his manager is to keep his name getting said without having a fight, weighing a buck fifty; thin as a rail, he doesn’t look like a tough guy, I heard some things but he don’t look it. But to be able to get talked about on a pretty regular basis, bravo [claps]! But when you go out and get beat up real bad, that is really bad. I was rooting for him, because it makes us all look good. We’re all pro wrestlers. But, instead, he goes out there and gets his brain beaten out.”
“I was sitting at home one day, and – keep in mind, I was called up about the concussion lawsuit going on, you know how the boys are, there’s a lot of trash in this business; a lot of it – I remember me and Lex [Luger] talking about it like come on man, really? No one made me do anything, it was a scam, reaching out for things. It’s ridiculous. Well, I’ve probably over the years had three or four or five of those kind of phone calls, where somebody saw a loophole, trying to get everybody together to go after Vince, and everytime I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. One day I get a call, about a year ago, probably, from a lawyer, super great guy, his name is Matthew Peterson, and he talks to me for a minute and says, ‘I’m doing a thing where I’m checking on independent contracts; I know a lot about WCW’. He made me give him my resume over the phone. And it was a good one. I liked the way he spoke, I liked the way he talked, he said, ‘basically, what I do is I look at your contract, and I see if you felt like you’ve been mistreated at all; and if you do, we look at some openings and see how you feel about that.’ I said, I’ll send you a copy of my contract today so you can look at it and see what you think! So, I sent him my contract, and I realize that in a class action lawsuit, there’s a bunch of people always. Well, there aren’t a whole lot of people who worked for the WCW, WWF, and WWE, and I fall in that real small group of names that did that.
So, maybe that’s why I thought this one was intriguing at first. I said that only thing I’m upset about, is every single week, I hear somebody say, ‘you were on WWE, the nWo part is on now, and you beat up Scotty Riggs’. The first time I heard that, no big deal, didn’t think anything about it. All of a sudden, I’m hearing 2 Cold Scorpio, Scotty Riggs, Nasty Boys. So me and this lawyer started talking, and he sees that they didn’t – through their wording – fire me. They released me. I realized that I wasn’t getting any checks anymore. Every once in a while I would get a 100 dollar check, a 200 dollar check here and there, but nothing was ever WWE Network. It was always some kind of nWo tape that I was on, or t-shirts. And the last thing I got from them, and that’s what got me on this, was probably 5,6,7 years ago; and it was probably a hundred bucks. All of a sudden, I’m hearing the Network, Network, Network, and I’m always on it. And little kids come up to me and say, ‘Yeah I saw you! My daddy watched you on TV!’ So, me and the lawyer started talking, and sure enough, he finds a loophole where they owe me a breakdown that they have to pay me a certain amount of money quarterly. And that’s all it basically boils down to.”
