WWF Attitude Era Veteran Steve Blackman may have been out of the ring for nearly two decades, but he hasn’t ruled out stepping between the ropes one more time, even if the idea only lives in his head. Now 61, Blackman spends his days working as a bail bondsman, a job he transitioned into after his time in the World Wrestling Federation. He also briefly ran an MMA school and worked as a bounty hunter. Wrestling hasn’t been part of his daily life in years, but that doesn’t mean it never creeps into his thoughts. “Some days I feel good,” he told Insight with Chris Van Vliet. “I’m like, ‘Man, I could go out there and do a couple matches.’ It crosses my mind.” Those thoughts started appearing more often after his second neck surgery, which finally brought him relief from chronic pain that haunted him throughout his WWF run. “I don’t have those headaches all day, every day… I had four bone spurs digging in nerves in my neck,” Steve explained. “Every time I’d land or move, it was like pencil points digging in.”
Despite those fleeting thoughts of returning, Blackman said there have been no serious discussions, not with WWE or anyone else. “I haven’t even really discussed anything with anyone,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, there’s times where I thought, ‘It’d be fun to go back there and do a hardcore match.’ But I haven’t talked to anybody about it.”
Much of his career was shaped by the Hardcore division, where the chaos of weapons-based matches surprisingly worked to his advantage. Rather than take full-impact slams night after night, Steve could adjust to his condition and still deliver what fans expected.
“There were nights where I wanted to do more crazy stuff, and I just couldn’t. My head hurt too bad,” he said. “But the hardcore stuff worked out great for me… I was getting cracked as much as them, but it was still easier on my neck.”
What fans didn’t know at the time was how much Blackman was suffering behind the scenes, not just occasional discomfort, but daily pain so severe it left him vomiting and unable to move.
“Every other day I’d have a migraine,” he said. “I don’t mean a little headache… I mean feels like you’re being stabbed in your head. Throw up, lay down, throw up, lay down, go to bed. Then sleep all day and do it again the next night.”
He recalled one match against Kane that nearly broke him right at the start. A missed landing led to a brutal flare-up that nearly ended the match before it really began.
“I landed on the back of my head on the floor… the migraine kicked in in one second, just shot up through my spine,” Steve said. “Every time he hit me, I felt like a grenade was going off. And that was the beginning of the match. We had 15 minutes more to go.”
Blackman described doing whatever he could to cope on the road, including laying on baseballs in hotel rooms just to ease nerve pressure enough to sleep.
“Sometimes I’d lie on my side, put a baseball under my back, try to lay on it… find a spot where I could pinch off the nerve going to my head,” he recalled. “After about an hour, I could fall asleep, then wrestle again the next night.”
Steve Blackman’s last regular WWE run ended in 2002 when his contract expired. He’d debuted with the company briefly in the late ’80s but made his full-time return in 1997. Since then, he’s only made two appearances: a 2004 indie match and a one-off return for WWE’s 15th anniversary RAW Battle Royal in 2007.
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