Bobby Heenan: Kill you more ways than my wife’s meatloaf.
This is from his former manager, someone who traveled with him and went to bars with him. Oh no, we said bars didn’t we? The one constant in the legend of Meng was that his fights usually started at a bar. And then things got really interesting.
Sean Waltman: He fought a bar full of people and twelve cops. Had to be maced before they could put cuffs on him.
Ted DiBiase: There was an incident in a bar in East St. Louis, which is a real rough part of town . . . One of the guys got into it and there were a lot of people involved and the police came. The big man had had a few drinks that night. And he’s just trying to help and in the process of trying to help he gets maced and handcuffed. Now they handcuffed him behind his back and he broke the handcuffs. He snapped them.
Reno: If he’s drunk, I would stay way the hell away from him. I’ve seen him and Goldberg go at it. They were both hammered when we were in England, and him and Goldberg went at it for fun. They were both hammered and they were just in the middle of the lobby rolling around. Then you got Ric Flair jumping on them, taking his pants off and running around.
Hacksaw Jim Duggan: Meng has paid the price for having trouble out in the bars, because you never win a fight in a bar. At the very least you lose money. So I’ve seen Meng go, but I hate to give any special stories, because I know about the statute of limitations.
Harley Race: There’s six police officers in Montreal . . . Meng bit one guy’s nose off; chewed on it a little bit. I’m not really sure what happened to the other guys. I know there’s one guy who had an ear halfway tore off.
Bobby Heenan: Took his two fingers on his right hand, his index finger and his trigger finger, and he reached into the guy’s mouth and broke off his bottom teeth.
Jimmy Hart: In Hawaii one time, these policemen had come to break up a fight and he beat both of them up. Before it was over it took two or three police cars to come out and surround him.
Rick Steiner: I was in LA one time with him and he fought eight cops, they shot him with mace and he closed his eyes and sucked it in. He just opened his mouth and took in a deep breath. I mean, some of the stuff he did was like “What the hell?”
Bill Apter: I saw him put a fist through a wall in a restaurant where some fans were bothering him.
Alan Funk: I’ve seen the guy get smashed in the face with a chair about fifty times and the guy never even had a lump on his head. How the hell are you gonna hurt a guy like that?
Matt Borne: Here’s a 280-90 pound guy that’s lightning fast with his feet. It’s a pretty scary thought.
Bob Orton Jr.: He trained in all kinds of self-defense . . . and he’s six-one and about a strong as a bull. That’s probably a fella you wouldn’t want pissed off at you.
Ted DiBiase: He is from the island of Tonga. He was sent to the United States from Japan. What was he doing in Japan, you may be asking? Oh nothing much, just fighting as a sumo wrestler! The man is a three dimensional tough guy — and there are plenty of other legendary stories about him that take place outside of the barroom. Notice that many of these show he isn’t just a fighting machine, but that he has a heart and respect for his fellow wrestlers.
Chris Candido: He was talking to me, Tammy Sytch and Chris Jericho. Up came Eric Bischoff and Greg Gagne and they walk right in front of us and start talking to Meng. He just looks at them and goes, “Hey!” And the entire locker room just froze. And I was like, man, these just weren’t funny stories, apparently, he really is that tough. And he says, “Apologize to my friends, I’m talking.” Everybody shut up and let him talk.
Jacques Rougeau: I was working against him. It was me and Raymond . . . Raymond gets in the ring, he has a spot with Tonga and for one reason or another Raymond tags me in, but he tags me in too early. So I looked at Tonga . . . it must have been that time of the month . . . I locked up with him and by the time I had the chance to figure out what was going on he already had spinned me around and suplexed me on my neck. He’s already on top of me like in amateur wrestling. I let him do everything he wanted to. I’m giving you my body . . . you do what you want with it.
Kevin Sullivan: One night I was booking . . . so I had to go tell these guys that they were going to do a job . . . They said to me . . . “What the fukk! This is not the right thing.” Now they got themselves worked up, and they’re saying, “Well, I don’t know if we should do this. This is bullshyt, holy bullshyt, blah, blah, blah.” Now it’s starting to get a little worse. They said, “We’ll kick anybody’s ass here, blah, blah, blah.” They keep going, “Why do you disrespect us? We’ll kill anybody here.” So I said, “Wait a minute, I’ll go get Meng, he’ll handle this for me.” They said, “No, no, no, whatever you want, we’ll do whatever you want.”
Jake Roberts: I’ve seen him pull Jesse Barr’s eye out.
Kevin Sullivan: In Puerto Rico this guy was working digging a ditch and they were walking down the street and Jesse went down the street with Meng and he kicked dirt on the guy. Meng said, “Brother, you shouldn’t have done that.” [Jesse] said, “fukk you, what are you gonna do about it?” Big mistake. About three seconds later Jesse didn’t have an eye.
Jake Roberts: It was really cool. But Haku is such a good man, he put it back in for him.
Meng: The fans, they challenged me when they had a few beers. We walk into a bar or walk into a restaurant, we kind of take the attention from the women. I take the attention from the local people. We can walk in, ten wrestlers into a bar, and they’ll pick on me. It was always me — and Arn Anderson will tell you that.
"What about Jesse Barr? Did that even happen?"
Meng: It happened. But it’s sad because I always considered the boys as my family. They are my family. [When] things like that happen, to me, it’s very sad. We should control it, but we’re still human beings too.
Jake Roberts: If I had a gun, and I was sitting in a tank, and I had one shell left, and Haku was three hundred yards away? He’s mine, right? Well, the first thing I’m going to do is jump out of the tank and shoot myself — because I don’t want to wound that son of a bytch and piss him off.