On the most recent edition of ‘Conversations with the Big Guy’ featuring former WWE Intercontinental Champion Ryback, and his Co-Host Pat Buck, which you can listen to the entire podcast at this link. Below are a few of the highlights from the podcast:
On His Opinion of Hulk Hogan:
People are always going to be drawn to him. He really brought wrestling to a different level. I like him a lot. I’ve had several conversations with him where we’ve talked about The Secret and Positivity. When you meet him in person, he is such a down to earth nice guy; granted, this isn’t him in his prime, backstage. I don’t know, you hear stories, I can only tell you how he was with me, and he was a real pleasure to be around. Very positive and I remember when I made my comeback there in San Antonio and they brought back the ‘Feed Me More’ Ryback. I was a little nervous for that one, which is one of the few times I was nervous up there because I didn’t know what the reception was going to be and the crowd blew me away. It was one of the only times I have had goosebumps in wrestling, and I remember him saying that I am a machine, brother! It was really cool coming from the Hulkster. He is really a cool dude in my book. People make mistakes in their life. In our private lives, you can pull anything from anybody and people can judge the f*** out of you, you know what I mean? It’s really just unfortunate. Not to say that anything is right or wrong; we’ve all said things, all made mistakes. He’s a really great dude and anyone that questions it has their head up their a**.
On His Opinion of This Is Your Life Bayley Segment:
I don’t watch it as much as I used to, and even when I was with them, I would come back and had it DVR’d and watch the matches usually. During the TV days, you barely had any time. All you cared about was getting to the next show in the next town. I saw maybe 2 or 3 matches early on, and then they had the little promo video for it and it was just–I don’t know what it was about it, but it felt like Nickelodeon for me. You have to have something for everybody on it, I’ll never hate on anything like that, but it just didn’t appeal to me, I just stopped watching the show, but then I heard so many things so I went back to watch it. My DVR kept freezing throughout the entire segment and pausing every 10 seconds, but I sat through and watched it all. The biggest thing is that the crowd just wasn’t into it. I think it was one of those things where the crowd—I feel like at live events you have more kids, but TV shows you are getting that F***ing Mark, which is who shows up to TV now. You can see it’s older teenagers, guys in their 20’s and 30’s. Nothing was bad, I’ll never talk bad about the talents because they are going out there and doing their jobs, but it doesn’t help when you can’t acknowledge it. You can tell Alexa [Bliss] is reading her lines, so it’s just the way that it is. It’s a great learning experience for her, but I believe she should have gone off on the crowd a little bit, redirected it a little bit and made it a little more than what it was. That is what you are going to get when having a 3-hour show; there will be some stuff that they buy and that they don’t buy, but it wasn’t great by any means. It’s definitely worth watching where the crowd was chanting, ‘DELETE.’ It was not a good attempt to do a ‘This Is Your Life’ from the days of The Rock and Mick Foley.
On the Comments Made By Nia Jax on Social Media:
Everybody is frustrated there from top to bottom, but she’s been handed a lot early on in my opinion. It’s very early on to make a comment like that, and when I saw that I totally understand it, like, if you are not on TV a couple of weeks is frustrating; but with her character on TV, it’s not like they can just throw her in random. It could be a good TV that you are not on TV every week; if you’re being booked for live events who the f*** cares, you’re making money until they find something good for you, but when you go and make comments like that, there’s no good that comes out of that because it’s not like real sports where you control the outcome, it’s writers and Vince [McMahon] where they control your character, and they can write her in now where she goes out there and Job her out every week. She has to either go do it or not do it and get released, so she put herself in a real bad position by making comments like that on Social Media. It reminded me of that guy with Lord Tensai. I believe his name was Sakamoto. I remember there was Japanese heat for another Japanese guy coming on the roster. Yoshi [Tatsu] had gone on Social Media and made a comment. If we were in UFC it’d be cool, you may have gotten yourself booked for a big fight and a big payday, but in Pro Wrestling you can’t, yo go on there and say that there was a comment was made and a week later he got Jobbed out on Raw. That is what it reminded me of because no good ever comes out of it, but she’s young so it is what it is.
