The following highlights were sent to us from the interview that Chris Van Vliet did with Muhammad Hassan on Insight With Chris Van Vliet:
On jealousy from the locker room:
“I think there was, especially when I first got there, and nobody knew me, I felt a lot more heat. Coming in and getting a push to the moon, it doesn’t upset the top guys, it does upset some of the mid-card guys because they look at it as that’s their spot. The top guys will tell you if that was your spot, you would have taken it. So all the top guys treated me really well and most of the middle card guys did too. But you know that there’s just heat coming in and being new and back then it was a different locker room. You know, there wasn’t a lot of rules. But I definitely had some heat during my career in the WWE.”
On being told he couldn’t be on TV anymore:
“So I remember when we didn’t know where we were gonna go with it. I remember when they were getting a lot of pressure, the character was gonna change or come off TV. I remember talking to Johnny Ace, who was head of talent relations at the time, and I was like any idea what’s going on? And I said something like I’m about to buy a house and he’s like, don’t buy the house. That’s when I knew I was like okay, and I didn’t know what’s gonna happen after that. But after that, it was pretty quick. We couldn’t be on TV anymore. We did the pay-per-view with Undertaker and Buffalo and that was it. They wouldn’t even put the character back on TV in any capacity.”
On the rumoured World Championship run:
“I know I heard that and I don’t know where it originally came from. But I was supposed to, as far as I know, beat the Undertaker, obviously with a lot of help and then wrestle Batista at [SummerSlam] in Washington, DC. Dave is from Washington, DC. So it was kind of like, the era of beats the hometown boy in the nation’s capital was supposed to be the story.”
On if there were ever any plans to return:
“Absolutely not. I don’t want to travel, I don’t want to put my body through [that]. It’s been rough enough as it is getting old. Like I said, Absolutely not never, I just wanted to have a couple of matches [in 2018]. There are small local shows and local promoters, nice guys. So it was just something to do. I did I think two or three matches, and that was it. I’ll never do it again.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjGsY1EyuUo
