Arn Anderson says he never once refused to lose to somebody he did not like, because sulking through a match only guarantees that both men have a bad one.
Anderson was asked directly on the latest episode of ARN whether he had ever disliked anyone enough to refuse to put them over.
“No. No. That was my job. If that’s what was sent to me, that’s what I did. And I tried. You know, you could be a horse’s a** and go out because you’re ped. You’re getting beat and have a s**ty match. But guess what? Both of you had a s***ty match. Versus just go out. Make him look like Godzilla.”
He said the wrestlers who did not see it that way rarely lasted.
“There were guys that wouldn’t do jobs. They didn’t. If they did, they didn’t like it, and it was obvious in the ring, which just showed bad attitude.”
The mechanism for dealing with it, in his telling, was not management.
“Yeah, I mean, there was no safe place once you got an attitude and your coworkers around you looked at you like, who the hell did you? Who did you beat?”
“I didn’t need a booker to come in and go, hey, quit being a d***, do the job, or get your bag and get out of here. You know, and that’s happened too.”
He also said he had ways of handling anyone who thought they were above losing to him.
“There was a guy in that locker room that was going to be so disrespectful that he thought he was better than me. He couldn’t put me over. I’d make a fool out of a guy pretty quickly, and he wouldn’t even know it was coming.”
Asked by his co-host about The Undertaker’s reputation as the man who kept order in the WWE locker room, Anderson said it was earned rather than assumed.
“Yep. He led the charge because he earned it, he earned the respect of those guys. Because he went out there, worked his a** off every single night, and he probably has the best and most over gimmick in the history of the business. I don’t know what would have topped it.”
Anderson wrestled from 1982 until 1997, when a neck injury ended his career, and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame with the Four Horsemen in 2012. He spent years afterward as a producer, first for WWE and later for AEW.
The Undertaker debuted in 1990, retired in 2020, and now runs creative for AAA.
