Road Warrior Animal was the latest guest on “The Ric Flair Show” which you can listen to in full via the MLWRadio.com, and below are some interview highlights.
On Paul Ellering Managing Again:
Yeah. Paul [Ellering] and I still do appearances together. I just saw him a couple of weeks ago. I know he is still managing in NXT, of course everybody is always sending me texts and comparing them, and I say, listen, young guys have to start somewhere in the business, right? He is an amazing teacher.
On Ole Anderson Discovering the Road Warriors:
Hawk and I, as well as Rick Rude, and Barry Darsow, we owe Ole Anderson our careers. He was a good friend of Eddie Sharkey, who trained Jesse Ventura. Eddie said he was going to do a wrestling camp and he knows Ole Anderson, we all thought that he was full of crap, but then we found out he did train Jesse Ventura because Ventura told us himself. I know one good Ole story; one time, when I first went down there as the Road Warrior myself. There was a big buyout with Jim Barnett and Ole Anderson that was with Georgia Championship Wrestling. Ole said that was going to send this guy Jim Crockett from North Carolina for two months and will bring you back. I said great, I am a dumb kid, when they say one or two months, it means one or two months you will be coming back, so I ended up going to the Carolina’s, which I loved a lot. I got in the ring with guys like Ric Flair, there was a TV match I was in there tapping out to the Figure Four. I was in there with Jack Brisco. Jack Brisco let me slam him one time on TV, and so did Ricky Steamboat and I got to learn, and I was only in the business for 1-2 months. I was in there for 2-3 months working in the Carolina’s and I remember making $150 working 9 times that week, and I am thinking to myself, how am I in the Lord paying child support, or pay for anything, so you can imagine, I went into Jim Crockett’s office, and I said, Mr. Crockett, I can’t do anything with this, I can’t make any money, and he said, Joe, there’s nothing else I can do, and I said thanks for the opportunity and I actually quit wrestling and went home. Ole called me on the phone and I said to Ole that I was going to kill him and knock his teeth out. He made me sell my car, lose furniture, unable to pay bills. Ole said, hold on, hold on, hold on. We had gone to the bar and Eddie showed Ole this picture of Mike [Road Warrior Hawk], and Ole said, I have already seen Joe, and Eddie said, that’s not Joe, that is Mike. Rick Rude, Hawk and I started walking, the phone rings, and Rude didn’t want the phone answered and thought it was just a girl, so I ended up answering the phone, and it was Ole Anderson, and he wanted Hawk, Rick Rude and myself to go down to work with Ole and that was how the Road Warriors started. Imagine the look on my face at Georgia Championship Wrestling. There is Tito Santana, there is Sgt Slaughter, Tommy Rich, Dusty Rhodes, there’s Buzz Sawyer, Dick Murdoch, Paul Orndorff, all these guys that were great wrestlers, and Hawk and I were like, holy crap! I guess we made it, and from that point on, Ole was good on his word, and that was one Ole story. Another Ole story, to show how strange Ole is, Ole called so much about this business, when his dad passed away, I went up to him and said my condolences. I asked him when he was going home for the funeral, and Ole responded with, I’m not going home for the funeral, I said, why aren’t you going to the funeral? He said, what can I do for him? He’s already gone, that was how hard-nosed Ole was.
On Dusty Rhodes:
Well, you know, it’s funny. I still hear about the spike and I hear about it everytime I go on the road, because I think it was a combination at the time that the way Dusty sold that spike, and the way I was hammering the spike to him, that people went, holy crap, he is trying to take his eye, and Dusty was selling it like I was taking out his eye. It wasn’t just that, it wasn’t about, in today’s terms, me and Hawk getting our shine in, or Dusty getting our shine in. We knew there was a time and a place for everything in the wrestling business. When we did that, people actually thought that Dusty had his eye taken out, and it was a testament to the way Dusty sold. Dusty was one of the greatest guys in the business, I’m going to say that now. Not only was he a great friend with Hawk and I, but I mean, they would be editing shows, and I would go in to see how Dusty would produce and edit the shows, and he would ask me or Hawk, who he would call his babies, or his Pitbull’s. I know Ric [Flair] misses Dusty, I miss Dusty, he was a great human being, and I mean, anytime, anybody leaves the promotion, it is for their own benefit and self preservation. It’s like the NFL, you would like to stay with one team the entire time, but it doesn’t happen.
On the Era of Wrestling in 1986:
Well, the whole latter part of 86 and on, it was the best time of my wrestling career. Although, I did achieve a few things in the WWF, but still, you know, that era of wrestling, I believe that company had the quality and the amount of more stars in one area; the NWA was loaded. You had the Midnight Express, the Rock & Roll Express, the Koloffs, Four Horseman, Dusty, you had everybody in there. You had your top four categories of top stars, with the exception of Hulk Hogan, were all in the NWA. It was great business and you know, don’t get me wrong, WWF had Hulk, Warrior and Andre. A lot of the times, everyone was copying what the NWA was doing during that time period. Warrior and Sting had their faces painted, when Hawk saw the way Warrior painted his face, you remember, it was Hawk who used to paint that face, and stopped painting it that way when Warrior started using it. I remember, even with Sting, they brought in this blonde hair guy and he said, the only problem was, he paints his face, Jim Crockett respected our opinion, and Crockett said that if it bothers you that Sting paints his face, we won’t bring him in; we said, no, bring him in, and we will call him the brothers of paint, and of course, Sting went off with Flair, Flair groomed him and became who he became.
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