In an exclusive for WrestlingNews.co, Steve Fall interviewed former WWE star Mr. Kennedy (Ken Anderson). He talked about winning the Money the Bank, injuries, wrestling politics, Jeff Hardy, CM Punk and more.
Click below for the full interview and scroll down for the transcribed highlights.
Mr. Kennedy talking about the plans WWE had for him in winning Money in the Bank in 2007:
“The only specifics I ever got were after I won the Money in the Bank briefcase, they told me, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have you hold on to that for a year. I came out, I believe the next night, and I announced that I was going to cash it in at WrestleMania the next year. That was the plan going forward, and then Undertaker got injured. They called me in the office and said, ‘Hey, There’s been a change. We got to get this title off Taker’, so they laid out this scenario for me. This was on a Tuesday night after SmackDown because SmackDown was taped on Tuesday nights. Taker had torn his biceps. Next Tuesday, Taker is going to have a cage match. He’s barely going to get the win. Somebody is going to come out and beat him even more. He was barely going to survive that one. Then they were going to hit my music and I was going to cash in the briefcase and become world champion.”
“I remember I went to the bar that night with Michael Cole and Mark Carrano. They were the only two that knew about it. They were like, ‘Good job kid. You deserve it.’ Saturday, we had a show in Poughkeepsie. I took a bump in the ring. We had a double shot. We had an afternoon show and then we took a couple hours off and then we wrestled an evening show. The first show, I took a clothesline, simple move, I’ve done it a million times. I felt something pop in my triceps. I rolled out to the outside and immediately it started swelling up. I went to the hospital that night. I got an MRI.”
“Stephanie called me in my room the next day. I was in my hotel room and she was like, ‘You tore your triceps off the bone. We still need to get that title off Taker, so Vince’s jet is going to come pick you up right now. You’re going to come to Penn State. Edge is going to challenge you for the briefcase. You’re going to drop it to Edge and then Edge is going to do what you were supposed to do tomorrow night.”
“The best part about that story is, so I do all that. I couldn’t move my arm. I thought my arm was screwed. I did all that. I dropped the briefcase. I went down to Alabama the next day to James Andrews. I was sitting on his table. He was feeling my arm and he said, ‘That’s not a tear. I don’t feel a tear in there at all. I’m trying to look for your MRIs, but I can’t find it, so we have to have you do another MRI’, which sucks because I’m absolutely claustrophobic. I just hate sitting in those tubes. I did that. He called me a little later and he said, ‘There’s no tear. It’s just a large hematoma’, which is basically just a bunch of blood vessels popped inside my arm and it bled internally. He goes, ‘You’ll be out for a month or a month and a half.’”
On if he was held down in WWE:
“What job you pick in life, if you outwork everybody, if you just keep your nose to the grindstone, keep your nose clean, you’ll get past it, and I didn’t do that. I remember at one point when I got there, for like three years, I was like, ‘Yea, let’s fu**ing do this.’ Then for a while, it was, I was punching a clock. It was another job. Just tell me where do you want me? What do you want me to do? That was pretty much it. I feel like my creative juices were completely fizzled out. At the time, and I’m not like complaining, it’s just the way that it was. It was very scripted. You know, they hand you a script. This is what you’re doing. But I also, like, I wasn’t coming up with fantastic ideas, countering them with these fantastic ideas and they were shooting it down. It was just like, I literally would show up. ‘Am I working tonight? F**k, I’m working twice.’ If I could go back and do anything, it would be to not take that attitude and keep hustling.”
On getting suspended before being revealed as Vince McMahon’s son:
“The only reason that I didn’t end up becoming the son was I got suspended literally like five days before they were going to do the reveal in Green Bay, because the reveal ended up happening in Green Bay. I got suspended. I was part of that Signature Pharmacy (story). There was like, nine or ten of us that got busted for getting performance enhancing supplements off an internet website, which kind of wasn’t how that all went down.”
“I remember that particular instance. I came home. They had already told me a few months before, Stephanie had come up to me and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do this thing. I want Vince to tell you. Vince thinks this is going to be good. He’s excited about it. I went in and he pitched me the whole idea. ‘We’re gonna have this big investigation and you’re gonna be my son.’ I flew home on a Wednesday. I got a call from Johnny’s secretary in the office. ‘Hey you need to come to the airport to come to Stamford. Vince wants to talk to you.’ I go back to the airport and fly back to Stanford. A car picks me up and I go to Titan Towers. There’s eight other guys in the office. He said, ‘We instituted this Wellness Policy. On such and such a date, it says here that you received some growth hormone.’ I was like, ‘It says in our policy that you’re not allowed to order this stuff off the internet. I didn’t order it off the internet. I saw a doctor.’ Well, the doctor ended up ordering it off the internet, so they suspended me for 30 days and fined me $10,000.”
This interview is exclusive to WrestlingNews.co. If you use these quotes, please include a link back to this page. For exclusive news and FIRST ACCESS to interviews, check us out at WrestlingNewsPremium.com.
