On his advice for talent that work hardcore matches: “Yeah, learning psychology. That’s my biggest problem with hardcore matches, is they usually have no psychology to them. They’re just people hitting each other with weapons back and forth. If you watch my hardcore matches, I’d like to think that they stand out completely uniquely, because mine had a story. The baby face shines, the heel gets heat, baby face makes a comeback. It’s a basic story, but it’s a story. Most hardcore matches [nowadays] are just, “I hit you, you hit me.” And then they just upped the weapon ante. But I always tried to be clever with it and creative.
“To me, one of my favorite things ever was Dreamer and I were working, and we did a double down, but I got up first. And while we were down, Dreamer hung his leg off the apron and Beulah [McGillicutty] taped a frying pan to his shin. And it’s like, “Why is she taping a frying pan to his shin?!” Psychology-wise, instead of standing up tall and doing it, she was creeped down low doing it so nobody could see what she was doing. And then when I go to get up, I pick Dreamer up and he goes to kick me in the gut. I catch his foot and he hits me with the frying pan taped to his ankle. It’s amazing, what a clever spot. That’s the kind of stuff that I live for.
“And unfortunately, most hardcore matches at least … I don’t watch it anymore, so I can’t say now, but I don’t presume that the business has changed much because the business doesn’t really change much unless people force it to. And very few people reinvent the wheel. I kind of feel like I helped reinvent the wheel to an extent in the sense that I had a three-dimensional character and everybody else was a two- dimensional cookie cutter. So to me, that’s what I love about hardcore. When Rhino gored the shopping cart, and I moved, went to gore me, I moved and he gored and hit the inside of the shopping cart. It was brilliant.”
“To me, one of my favorite things ever was Dreamer and I were working, and we did a double down, but I got up first. And while we were down, Dreamer hung his leg off the apron and Beulah [McGillicutty] taped a frying pan to his shin. And it’s like, “Why is she taping a frying pan to his shin?!” Psychology-wise, instead of standing up tall and doing it, she was creeped down low doing it so nobody could see what she was doing. And then when I go to get up, I pick Dreamer up and he goes to kick me in the gut. I catch his foot and he hits me with the frying pan taped to his ankle. It’s amazing, what a clever spot. That’s the kind of stuff that I live for.
“And unfortunately, most hardcore matches at least … I don’t watch it anymore, so I can’t say now, but I don’t presume that the business has changed much because the business doesn’t really change much unless people force it to. And very few people reinvent the wheel. I kind of feel like I helped reinvent the wheel to an extent in the sense that I had a three-dimensional character and everybody else was a two- dimensional cookie cutter. So to me, that’s what I love about hardcore. When Rhino gored the shopping cart, and I moved, went to gore me, I moved and he gored and hit the inside of the shopping cart. It was brilliant.”
