• ON THIS DAY IN WWF HISTORY (May 31, 1986) – WWF Maple Leaf Wrestling
On this day in 1986, the World Wrestling Federation aired another episode of their weekly TV show ‘WWF Maple Leaf Wrestling’.
This episode included pre-taped matches & interviews featuring the 1986 WWF Superstars.
You can find the card below:
– Jake Roberts vs. Andre Malo
– Ricky Steamboat vs. Terry Gibbs
– Paul Orndorff vs. Neil Carr
– The Body Shop: Adrian Adonis
– King Kong Bundy & Big John Studd vs. Leaping Lanny Poffo & Jose Louis Rivera
• The Undertaker Comments On The Backstage Reaction To His WrestleMania 33 Match
While speaking on The Bill Simmons’ podcast, The Undertaker discussed his WrestleMania 33 match with Roman Reigns, and how disappointed he was after it & more.
Below are the highlights:
On being in a bad physical condition in 2017 during his feud with Roman Reigns:
“My hip was so bad going into that [WrestleMania 33] match, I couldn’t perform at a level I would’ve liked to perform at. The magnitude of putting Roman over was going to be a big launching pad for him, obviously I wanted to perform and wanted that to be the moment where this is the slingshot and I just didn’t have it.
I knew it yeah, I knew it before it even started. I knew I was going to be in trouble at the Royal Rumble in January before that, if you go back and look at the footage you can tell that I’m not in the shape I should be in, I couldn’t train the way I wanted to train but I had already committed. I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place and passing a torch is a really big thing in our industry.”
His thoughts on Roman Reigns:
“He’s a really good dude, he deserved it and I just wanted to be able to give the best to him that I could knowing what that match was going to mean to his career. When I couldn’t deliver for him, yeah that stuff bothers me.”
On the backstage reaction to his WrestleMania 33 match:
“I don’t think it was so much as to say it was a good match, but everyone kind of knew that that was the end. It was over the body of work and the appreciation, it definitely wasn’t for that match. That match fell way short of expectations, I think it was more so a respect thing for all the 27 years prior more so.
Grown men, grown tough guy men who had tears in their eyes when I put the hat and the coat down, nobody expected that. No one knew what was happening, it was so organic, I think it caught everybody off guard. The applause and the greetings were more so for the body of work than the match.”
On how tough it is to do one match per year:
“It’s tough. When you can’t take bumps, and you can’t put your body through that then it’s really tough on the backside of the match. You can get through the match, but my body would literally shut down after a WrestleMania match just from the trauma. That’s the best thing about being able to work all the time, your body stays conditioned for the trauma that it has to take. Especially it being WrestleMania, that’s where everything is let go and they don’t put any stops on anything. The body not being conditioned for that, it’s pretty brutal.”
On being disappointed for the time he was given in his match against John Cena:
“That’s why I was so disappointed, because I had all that time in the ring, sparing and going over stuff every other day, and I got to New Orleans and they said this match is going to go 5 minutes. I’m ready to go for 45 minutes, that’s how I trained and at a 45 minute pace I was so dead set.
I was so disappointed from the prior year that I had the mindset of: I’m going to tear this up and go at a pace that people normally haven’t seen me at and do things people haven’t seen me do in a long time. I was so prepared and then it was just 5 minutes.
We sell entertainment, not time. That was a selfish thing for me, what you saw last year is not where I’m at.”
