On Vince McMahon wanting to do his Johnny B.Badd gimmick in WWF:
“Vince even talked about putting the strap on me right away. I mean, it was incredible! Here’s the thing that people don’t understand: Vince thought that they would be able to do some version of the Johnny B. Badd character. That’s what he was interested in.
So when we sit in the meeting and all-of-a-sudden Vince realizes I can’t do anything – this is when the lawsuits are going forward back and forth because everybody is stealing each other’s wrestlers and it was a crazy time back then too – so Vince realizes, ‘okay, we can’t do anything with the Johnny B. Badd character, so what are we going to do?’
We’re sitting in this meeting and they said, ‘what about using your real name?’ I said, ‘well, Marc Mero is kind of a boring name.’ And I don’t know how it came up, I don’t remember exactly, but it was ‘Wildman’ Marc Mero. And I said to Vince, I go, ‘what is a wildman?’ And he goes, ‘well, can you do a Tarzan yell?’
I said, ‘I don’t got a very strong voice.’ Steve, I can’t yell very good and I tried. I ended up doing something like [voice cracks in high pitched yell]. Anyways, like, Ric Flair had the ‘woooo’ and I could not do the Tarzan yell, okay?
So they start doing drawings of this ‘Wildman’ Marc Mero and I was like, ‘what am I, from the jungle? What am I?’
So I never really connected with what ‘Wildman’ Marc Mero was because I was still doing the same moves that Johnny B. Badd was doing and it was still kind of the same gimmick.”
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