The following is an excerpt from a recent interview with WWE Hall Of Famer Road Warrior Animal:
On his new book: “I’m glad to be on the Main Event. It had been 8 years since Hawk died and I had a couple of publishers asking me to write a book. I didn’t want to do a book because there had been a lot of garbage books out there about the business. I didn’t want to write a kiss-all, tell-all, I just kind of wanted to write a chronological timeline of my career and that’s what I did. I have fans asking me all the time what I felt like about this particular time in my career, how you first started, or how it felt to win this title. I put it all down. No matter what country I went, we travelled all over the world.”
On steroid use and wrestling deaths: “No, because steroids wasn’t the reason that Hawk died. Steroids had nothing to do with Hawk dying. I want to make that perfectly clear. Because when we took steroids in the younger part of our career they were legal and we took them under doctor supervision. They told us that we couldn’t take them anymore, that they were against the rules, so we stopped taking them.”
“What killed Hawk and messed him up was going to Australia and getting free Xanax and Cocaine from people and doing the yo-yo effect. That’s what caused Henning to die, that’s what caused [Rick] Rude to die, and that’s what caused Davey Boy Smith to die. You do all the upper stuff like Cocaine and then you do Morphine or whatever to bring you down and that’s what leads to making your heart explode. I was with Hawk in Australia and his wrestling pulse rate was 190.”
On being inducted into the WWE Hall Of Fame: “I got the call about a month before we got inducted. My first thought was that it’s about time. I figured we would go in sooner or later. For whatever reason they waited until now. It was cool, it was still a special night. It was definitely 100% red carpet treatment. The WWE knows how to put on an event and they take care of the guys. Vince said to us in the meetings that it’s our night that it’s them celebrating us, and that’s what we did.”
On the current state of tag-team wrestling: “Our business has always had peaks and valleys. We’re in a downturn for the business, as far as tag teams go. It’s going to go down and down and down. You’re starting to slowly see all these groups formed now. Out of these groups you’re going to have some tag teams formed. Hopefully you’ll end up getting a good nucleus of tag teams that can bring the division back up. The fans enjoy seeing the tag teams. They’re entertaining matches, there are four guys involved, and if you know how to do it you can make it a main event on your card. You need that on a card to help out, they can share the load with your singles world champion.”
Check out the complete interview online at WWE-Radio.com.
