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Interview With Jerry "The King" Lawler

Posted: Apr 25th 2009 By: CMBurnham

I had a great time at the Northeast Wrestling show in Newburgh tonight. Michael O'Brien does a nice job of mixing veteran talent with young guys and it looked to be a legitimate sellout at Newburgh Free Academy.

One of the best fan reactions of the night ? outside of performers like Ric Flair, Jerry "The King" Lawler, Ron Simmons and of course ?The Beautiful People ? was the hammer that goes with the ring bell. Working a different style match than a lot of the wrestlers on the card, Lawler and Romeo Roselli (formerly of the Heartthrobs) wrestled a match built around Romeo hiding the hammer from referee Kevin Keenan twice and nailing Lawler and boy, was the crowd into that. Eventually, Lawler got his hands on the hammer and cracked Romeo and planted him with a piledriver for the win. After the show, I had the opportunity to sit down with the King and discuss his Hall of Fame career.

Phil Strum: What's it like working shows like this these days? How often do you do them?

Jerry Lawler: Believe or not, I probably wrestle on events like this ? one of the other wrestlers asked me earlier in the evening ? I probably do about 100 of these a year. I do most weekends and a couple of times a week. Then, of course, I do Monday Night RAW and then usually on Friday and Saturday, I'm usually doing these independent-type shows. Without a doubt, my favorites are Northeast Wrestling. I've had a relationship with Michael O'Brien, the guy that runs these shows and promotes these events, for the past, going on seven years. He does a terrific job. As you could see tonight, complete sellout here in Newburgh. It's almost like that every event I go to. That makes it fun and worthwhile. Nine out of 10 of these type events are fundraisers for different charities or different organizations or schools or clubs or sports teams. It's not only a chance to go out and have a good time, but hang out with some wrestling fans...and wrestle. With the WWE, I'm primarily a color commentator now. They throw me in there to wrestle every now and then, but not as often as I'd like. I still enjoy wrestling a lot. It gives me a chance to do that. It helps these different clubs and organizations make some money.

PS: I was a little disappointed we didn't get to see you in there with Chris Jericho at WrestleMania this year.

JL: I would have certainly loved to have been. That's the one thing that has eluded me, I guess, in my WWE career, even though I'm in the Hall of Fame. As a matter of fact, when they first contacted me in 2007 and told me that they were going to induct me into the Hall of Fame, I said, "No. No.. Don't do it. I don't feel like I'm worthy of being in there and I said, plus I feel like that means your wrestling career is over' because I was thinking like baseball or football hall of fames. They said, oh no no. It doesn't mean that at all. I said, "I've never even wrestled on a WrestleMania.' That's the one thing I haven't had the opportunity to do. But I'm still hopin'. Maybe next year. It is something that would probably be the final jewel in my little wrestling crown.

PS: You're still wrestling often enough. How many matches do you have with WWE a year?

JL: Here and there. I'm probably with WWE. 15? 20 a year. Which is not very often. They're doing a SmackDown event that's coming to my hometown of Memphis on June the 5th and they contacted me just the other day and they want me to wrestle on that event. It's just different times and different situations occur. Ordinarily, I never even know, except for an event like the one coming up in Memphis. Usually, I get there on a Monday and they say, hey, we're going to have you wrestle Chris Jericho or something.

PS: How much preparation do you do actually do going into a Monday Night RAW broadcast? How mcuh goes into that?

JL: I don't want to make it sound trivial or anything, but I honestly don't do a lot of preparation. I work that way intentionally. This is the way I've always looked at this. Vince McMahon or the WWE or the powers that be may look at it entirely different, but I've always approached my job not that I'm a commentator or an announcer, but I've always approached my job as a wrestler, sitting out there, talking with an announcer or a commentator and giving my views or my reactions on what I see in the ring. I'm there and I can give a different insight than the announcer because I do that for a living as well. I don't feel like I have to or what preparation I can do. I don't want to be too prepared in that I want my reactions to be natural and honest. I want to be seeing something for the first time without having any pre-arranged notions of what I'm about to see or what may take place next or anything like that. I feel like my color commentating is more honest, so to speak, the less I prepare.

PS: How do you feel some of the newer guys are doing? They've put a lot of new faces into the broadcast booth now with Matt Striker, Josh Mathews and Todd Grisham.

JL: Every one of them ? talented guys. I don't mean this as any kind of derogatory remark or anything, but when I look at them, I just think, it's almost like they're trying too hard. I'm a huge Cleveland Indians baseball fan, because as a kid, growing up, I was there. I have several friends that are on the team ? Ryan Garko, Travis Hafner. I just had a ton of text messages from Travis Hafner the other day and the Indians have started out kind of slow. He was just telling me, everybody seems too uptight. Nobody's having fun. They're not relaxed. In sports, you suffer. Basically, you're playing a kid's game. In wrestling, I think it's the same way. I know they probably feel there's a lot of pressure on them to do well, but honestly, that's pressure they're putting on themselves. When I look at them, I think they need to kind of loosen up a little bit and have more fun at it. If the commentators are enjoying what they're doing, it's going to be a better broadcast. The fans watching ?that's going to come across on the screen. They're going to feel that enjoyment and that fun. I just try to keep in mind, that hey, this is supposed to be entertainment. People are supposed to have a good time watching this. Supposed to have fun watching this. So I try to have fun doing it. I think the young guys need to get that attitude, as opposed to having the attitude ? oh my gosh, if I screw up. I can't screw up. This has got to be perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. Most of this is live TV. It's a wrestling show. It's not brain surgery. It's not life or death. I've always had the opinion, you can screw up. What the heck. Anything can happen on a WWE show.

PS: Especially when it's live.

JL: Exactly

PS: And you show up on the air with a nosebleed like Josh Mathews did!

JL: Exactly. To me, I can't believe nobody ? Striker didn't attempt to bring that to anybody's attention. If I was sitting there and Michael Cole's nose started bleeding, the next 90 minutes would be nothing but fun and one-liners. That's what I mean. That's something, I mean, how often is something like that going to happen? Take advantage of it!

PS: He gave it to him pretty good the next night.

JL: Oh, did he? That's good.

PS: You've pretty much accomplished everything you can possibly accomplish in your career. What else are you looking to accomplish in your wrestling career. You've been going strong now for almost four decades.

JL: I started in like 1971, so that's a pretty good run there. I think one of the secrets to my longevity and my success and I know you may say, oh yeah right, but I'm going to tell you, this is the honest to God's truth. I have never set out to accomplish anything in this business. When I got started, I was such a fan. Thank God the promoters didn't realize it, but I would have paid them to let me wrestle. I was always amazed that I could actually making money doing something that I enjoyed so much. It was never about accomplish anything. It was never about winning anything or getting any certain position. It was about just going out there and doing what I always have so much fun doing. That particular type of performing, to me, is nothing like it. I've never even thought about, hey, what more can I accomplish? If I can have another match, that's an accomplishment for me. Any time a promoter calls me and says, 'hey, we're going to have a show in Newburgh, New York, we'd love to have you on the event,' that, to me, is an accomplishment. That's just the way I look at it. Because I don't take it as seriously, it's just been fun and a great way for me to make a living, rather than accomplishing anything. I've never looked at it that way.

PS: One of the real gems I was able to discover about 10 years ago was you and Andy Kaufman in Memphis, watching some of those tapes.

JL: Andy Kaufman was one of the biggest things to ever happen to me in my career, as far as helping put me on the map on a national level. Quite frankly, you know, I' m from Memphis, Tennessee. We had a great promotion down there for 30-something years that I wrestled. We drew big crowds in our particular area and territory down there. We were wrestling, at that time, and all the way through the mid-80s was regionalized. Before the advent of cable television, where eveything got blown out all over the world, it was next to impossible to make national news. To be known on a national level. You were just known in whatever region you were wrestling in at the time. Then, along came Andy Kaufman. Because he was on the highest-rated show on television at the time, Taxi, and he wanted to get involved with wrestling. It just sort of fell in my lap because of a guy, Bill Apter, who was a magazine writer, at the time overheard a conversation that Andy had with Vince McMahon Sr. in which Andy wanted to get involved and wrestle some women out of the audience. He never dreamed...Andy never thought about wrestling a man. That just evolved as I had him come down to Memphis and wrestle the women. It evolved into, finally, I thought, this is a great opportunity to get at least some sort of rub off this superstar. I just told him, 'I said, Andy, you know, you've wrestled the women down here three or four weeks in a row. It's going over great. You need to move onto something. Why don't you have a match with a man?' And he said, 'Oh no no, I could never do that.' I said, well, what if I came up with a way that you could do that? Would you be interested. And he said, "Oh my God, yeah." The truth of the matter is Andy grew up a wrestling fan and idolized "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers. He told me many times, 'I was always amazed.' He said what captivated him about wrestling were the bad guys that could go on television and intentionally try to make people despise them, but still be popular. That became ingrained in part of Andy's comedic performances. He never told a joke in his career. Andy wasn't a comedian and didn't even like to be called a comedian. He was a performance artist. His reaction, that he enjoyed getting from a crowd, was he enjoyed having them dislike him more than have them like him. He would go out and sometimes, 1,000 or 1,500 people would come to see him do comedy and he'd walk out on a podium, open up a book called "The Great Gatsby" and just start reading. And read for hours until finally, everybody finally just got up and left. And they're going, what the heck? Andy was great and of course, then he got the cancer. He told me at one time, I would give up everything that I'm doing in Hollywood, I'd give up Taxi, the comedy clubs, everything, if I could just stay involved in wrestling. That's how much he loved it. All the events he did for us. All the huge sellout crowds he helped us draw there in Memphis and all around our wrestling area, he earned a lot of money and we paid him a lot of money. on all those events, Percentage of the gate every time that he wrestled for us. After he died, he had never cashed one of those checks.

PS: Wow. He really respected it.

JL: He really did.

Tags: Ric Flair, Jerry Lawler, WWE