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Celeb 'Idol' fan: Jerry 'The King' Lawler

Posted: Feb 19th 2010 By: mikeiles

Some people are closet wrestling fans. Professional wrestling great Jerry "The King" Lawler is a closet American Idol fan.

Lawler -- a color commentator for WWE's Monday Night Raw and most famous outside the square circle for his early-'80s feud with comedian Andy Kaufman -- had been a casual Idol watcher for years. He got more invested last season, though, when Alexis Grace and Lil Rounds, two contestants from Memphis, Tenn., where Lawler lives, made the Top 12.

"I became a pretty big Alexis Grace fan, and I was really pulling for her," says the WWE Hall of Famer, who began working in the early '70s for Memphis' Mid-South Wrestling promotion.

Lawler and Alexis actually had met once before the show.

"We made eye contact in a record store," he says. "I guess she thought she recognized me but was too embarrassed to say anything. And I thought, 'Well, there's a cute girl that's looking at me,' but I didn't say anything to her, either.

"After I left, I got in my car and started to drive away. I was about to pull out onto the main street, and she pulled up in her car besides me. I rolled down my window, then she rolled down hers and said, 'You're Jerry Lawler, aren't you?'"

Lawler didn't make the connection between the woman he'd met and the one he watched on Idol until after the season was over and he went to a club where Alexis was hosting a karaoke night.

"I went up to introduce myself to her, and she said, 'We actually met once before,' and she reminded me of the story," he says.

This season, he says, he's favoring Crystal Bowersox, Lacey Brown, Katie Stevens and Tyler Grady.

"When you're a guy my age that grew up on the '60s music, it's good to see a young person say that they really enjoyed that and were really influenced by the music of the '60s and '70s, The Doors, The Who and groups like that," he says. "You could actually see some of that in Tyler's performances."

Lawler adds that Lilly Scott ought to stick to singing and steer clear of dancing any more, calling her celebration "the worst dancing down Hollywood Boulevard that I've ever seen."

In general, Lawler says, he prefers the audition episodes, with their horrible and apparently clueless singers, to the competition itself. "I guess it's my wrestling background that makes me a fan of that part of the show," he says. "When it gets down to where they're all good, it loses some of its edginess and shock value."

Whereas Tom T. Hall once sang that he loves "winners when they cry, losers when they cry," Lawler would rather see them both cry, so he really enjoyed Wednesday's tear-filled segment with Andrew Garcia and Thaddeus Johnson.

"I loved it when the big guy at the end, Thaddeus Johnson, came out, and they showed him saying, 'I killed it! I killed it!' And then they killed him -- told him he didn't make it. Man, what a bawling baby! I loved that! That was the highlight of the show for me."

Another highlight so far this season, from Lawler's perspective: the performance of Ellen DeGeneres.

"You can tell she's got that mean streak," he says, "but she tries to hide it. She tries not to let it come out." Watching Ellen break the news to singers that they'd made the Top 24, he says, "you could tell that she really enjoyed stringing those contestants along, dragging out the suspense. You could just see the devilish smile wanting to pop out on her face before she finally told them, 'Oh, okay, you've made it.' She tried to make it sound so depressing for them before she gave them the good news.

"She'd make a great WWE Diva."

And with the judges' chair next to Ellen opening up at season's end, a man known for his insults and coarse one-liners -- like saying there wasn't anything wrong with one hopeful's recent performance "that a vasectomy of the vocal cords wouldn't cure" -- thinks he just might see a new career path opening before him.

"I would be somewhere between Simon and Howard Stern, I would think."

Tags: Jerry Lawler, WWE