Kevin Nash says a full Kliq angle was there to be made and he cost everyone the chance when he blew his leg out, and that he had told Vince McMahon to his face that night was how wrestlers get hurt.
Nash raised it on Kliq This while going back over the injury, and said the timing is the part that still bothers him.
“That fu**ed me up, because we got Shawn,” Nash said. “We could have maybe done something and gotten Paul to get involved with us, to where that would have been like the Kliq angle. Like finally do the Kliq angle.”
Then the injury landed.
“But I fu**ed that up when I blew my leg out, because Shawn was back,” he said. “Shawn was back in the mix. So, oh well.”
The pieces were briefly all in the same company. Shawn Michaels had returned to the ring after years away, Triple H was on top, and Nash and Scott Hall were both on the roster. It is the only period in which all four were active in WWE at the same time, and it closed before anything was built on it.
The injury was a torn quad, and it happened on his first night back from a torn bicep, three weeks ahead of schedule.
“This is my first thing I’ve done coming back, and I’m coming back three weeks early,” Nash said. “And I remember looking at Vince and stuff and saying, doing this kind of s*** when people aren’t cleared and ain’t been in the ring is exactly how people get hurt.”
Told by co-host Sean Oliver that he had made his point, Nash said that was not what it was.
“It wasn’t to make a point. It was just one of those things,” he said. “Why, if you were that sure that it was that bad of an idea in your heart, why did you still do it?”
The conversation had started somewhere else, on the difference between being hurt and being injured, and how his wife learned to tell which was which over the phone.
“People like, I just watched, I think Kevin’s hurt. He’s like, no, he’s just, he’s not hurt,” Nash said. “And my brother-in-law called my wife and she goes, I think your husband’s messed up. He says Kev messed himself up tonight. And she’s like, no. She put that phone down, but three minutes later that phone rang, and she knew.”
He gave one detail from the night that he said he had never told publicly. Disco Inferno had to get a key from Nash’s concierge, go into his place and send his gear on a same-day Delta flight to the building, where a courier collected it.
“Disco did great, except he didn’t pack one of the knee sleeves,” Nash said.
On the money side, Nash said the standard at the time was six months of full pay and then nothing until you came back.
“You were paid full 100 percent for six months, and then when you returned is when you got paid,” he said. “I went nine months and a week before I showed up on TV, and I got every check.”
That nine months is the window he is talking about. The four men have never worked an angle together as a unit in WWE. The Kliq as a group existed backstage rather than on screen, and its most famous moment remains the Madison Square Garden curtain call in 1996, which happened without the company’s blessing and which all four have spent the years since being asked about.
