During a recent edition of Kayfabe Commentaries’ Vince Russo Attitude, WWF Attitude Era Veteran Ken Shamrock revealed that he turned down an incest storyline and a match with Chyna during his time in the company.
Below are the highlights:
On how he survived his childhood by fighting almost everyday:
“It’s a sad thing because you look at a kid who’s pretty much, when he was born, had been born on the wrong side of the fence. Lived in pretty much a ghetto area. My biological mother at the time was a go-go dancer – the kind of characters that came around probably weren’t all the best in the world.
A lot of things that happened to us because of that industry and that world that no little kid should ever have to go through, but these are things that happen. And when you talk about, when you see things on TV all the time about these seven-year-old kids these ten-year-old kids slinging drugs on the corner, people go – that’s crazy, man…they’re too young to be doing that stuff.
But when you talk about survival…. when you talk about putting somebody in a situation, five six seven eight nine years old and being able to survive within that world they live in, they either lay down or they fight and those are the only two characters you got. Guys that will lay down and most of them end up dead at that age or the ones that just stand up and refuse to die. And I just happened to have that character.
I was fighting all the time. A five years old got jumped in the bathroom at school. Five years old, this is Kindergarten, I’ve got kids jumping because of color of my skin. I didn’t know it at the time. I grew up all in an African-American neighborhood in Macon, Georgia near an Air Force Base. It was all pretty much predominately African American but I had no idea that’s what we were fighting for.
Those kids that beat me up had no idea that’s what they were doing. But when they’re sitting at home and they’re listening all the stuff that’s going on back in 1967 and 70 of all the racial tensions and people dying because of the color of their skin and they’re seeing this stuff on TV and all of a sudden the parents are screaming and yelling at the TV and the kids are sitting there watching their parents screaming yelling at the TV because of what’s happening on TV, it implants in their head.
They go outside, they see me, they see what happened on TV, they fight me, they jump me, they beat me because of what they experienced not because it’s something that they actually feel, but it’s something that they actually learning because of what parents are doing in front of their TV. That’s the world I grew up in.
It was either lay down and die or stand up and survive and I fought almost every single day when I was a young kid in Macon, Georgia because we didn’t understand the environment because we didn’t know what was going on. All we knew was that’s just the way the world was.”
On if he was a victim of politics in the WWF and the Incest storyline that he turned down:
“Absolutely not. I took a stand. And that’s why I ended up with two and a half years instead of three years in my contract because I took a stand. There had come a point in time where I wasn’t favorable to the organization for whatever reason.
I know my reasons and I’m sure they have their reasons, but whatever it was that they wanted to sit on, I wasn’t favorable anymore. So they started writing these and I realized it soon, most people don’t even know it or see it coming, they just continue moving. But I started seeing the scripts change.
And I remember they came to me one time about fighting Chyna and losing. Now the losing part wasn’t a problem, but it was the idea of what my concepts and my principles were built on at home with my kids. They don’t know it’s not real.
The kids in school don’t know it’s not real. So now I’ve got to start thinking about – “Well, do I go ahead and do this match and punch this girl, slam this girl when I tell my kids don’t touch a woman, do not put your hands on a woman?” And I’m a big, big believer that you just don’t put your hands on a woman. So I was wrestling with that and finally I went to Vince and said I can’t do it.
The other one was my sister Ryan, the one that played my sister. I was actually dating her at the time. So we had a thing going on and I remember that she was playing my sister and the reason why I was running around trying to fight everybody and get her out of that was because they wanted me to be in love with her.
So here was another one I had to make a decision on. And I get it. There’s nothing wrong with that. I mean people live their lives differently, but some people in their lives there are just certain things that they go – You know what? I can’t. That’s just some part of my life that I can’t invade.
And I couldn’t do that. I had a son named Ryan and then there is this girl portraying my sister. My kids are going to school. Even though the physical part of it, that’s all stuff that you can get around.
But when you talk about incest and then you talk about beating up a woman, I can’t wrap my head around that.”
