It’s good to be king… except when this is the result.
Jerry Lawler was a recent guest on the Broken Skull Sessions with Steve Austin and spoke about the time that he was “welcomed” into the WWE by having a group of Superstars take a poop in his crown.
Lawler was explaining how he got the call to join WWE and what the reception was like from the Memphis-area wrestlers he’d worked with before in the territory system. Lawler explained that he probably had some heat with some wrestlers that he needed to let go in Memphis, or perhaps they felt they’d deserved more. When he was going to back to the dressing room, he explained that Jimmy Hart had to break the news that someone had used his trademark crown as a toilet. Lawler says he offered to leave the company if it would cause problems, but Vince McMahon made sure it didn’t happen again.
“What had happened was there were a lot of guys that had worked for Jerry Jarrett and me in the past down in Memphis and you know how things go with them. Your life—your shelf life—was only so long in the territory so guys would come in and eventually, you’d have to give them their notice or fire them and let them move on to another territory. So, when I came into the WWE, there were several guys that had worked for Jerry Jarrett and I that didn’t have fond memories. They either felt like they didn’t make any money down there or they felt like they got fired for no reason or that sort of thing, so there was some animosity towards some guys.
“There was a little incident that happened one night, I came back, we were going back to the dressing room and Jimmy Hart—Jimmy Hart was a great friend of mine and still is today—comes running in and says, ‘King, don’t go in there! Don’t go in and look at your crown.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and he said, ‘Somebody took a crap in your crown…’ and so I said, ‘OK’ and I went right in and talked to Vince. I said, ‘Hey, I can understand why there’s some people that are not going to take a shine to me right away and so if that’s the case, I don’t have to be here, I’ll go back to Memphis. And he said, ‘No, I promise you nothing like that will happen again’ and sure enough from that time on, there was no problem.”
Lawler prefaced his comments to Austin by saying “every wrestler in the business that steps foot in the ring thinks he’s the best worker around.” This alleged incident was “payback” for Lawler being notoriously frugal with payoffs for the wrestlers that worked for him. Lawler’s particular story has taken on an almost urban legend like quality over the years, with more and more people confirming the incident took place to various degrees (although the culprits’ names have changed with almost every retelling of the story.)
Percy Pringle claimed he was watching the door while it happened and said Steve Keirn was the guilty party, while Bobby Heenan named The Undertaker as one of the people responsible in his autobiography. During one shoot interview, Bret Hart says he walked in after a TV taping and saw it as well, and Honky Tonk Man and Raven once claimed in a shoot interview that a company memo was sent out asking people not to defecate in the crown anymore.
Check out the full episode at this link.
