He could’ve said, ‘You know what, I can’t make it that day and I’m going to take a few months off’. But he came back specifically, and came back hurt, to deliver that match with me.”
On his WrestleMania 8 match with Roddy Piper:
That was Roddy’s idea (hitting him with the ring bell), Roddy gets full marks for that. We worked out the match very roughly.
I didn’t see Roddy a whole lot in those days. He was on one circuit and I was on another circuit. And then we did get to meet each other in, I believe it was, Moncton, New Brunswick of all places, where we could sit down and sort of talk about the match, and start to put this match together.
And I was kind of dreading it, because I loved Roddy, and I was very close with Roddy. Then I started worrying, ‘What if Roddy gives me a bunch of really lousy ideas and I don’t like it?’.
Like, how do I tell a guy I love and have so much respect for that I don’t like that idea? I hadn’t been in that situation very many times. It’s like, do you speak up, do you not speak up? And I was sort of, kind of, a control freak too.
I had a sort of set idea of how I thought the match should go. And we sat down in a restaurant in New Brunswick, and I said, ‘What do you think?’.
Then Roddy goes, ‘This is what I have in mind, this is what I was thinking’. And he started telling me his ideas on how the match should go and the pace of it. Anyways, we had the exact same script.
I remember listening to it and it’s like, ‘I’m in agreement with all of that, like everything. Let’s do it exactly like that, that’s exactly what I was thinking’.
And we met without flushing out all the details of what the story was going to be, just sort of the arc of the story. And it was very harmonious.
And as far as the match went, the pinning thing at the end with the sleeper hold, and me pushing off the top turnbuckle with my feet, that was a move that Roddy thought of, or created. Because I’d never seen it done anywhere else, but he came up with that idea.
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