IGN interviews Ultimate Warrior

[Guest Krazy Karter]

IGN.com

Jon Robinson

 

Ultimate Warrior Interview

The virtual ropes are about to shake with the Warrior's return to the ring.

 

February 19, 2004 - Parts Unknown.

 

It must be an interesting place to live with so many of its inhabitants stalking around the sidewalks in masks, face paint, and tights.

 

And don't expect to meet a Joe or John in Parts Unknown, as the names here are as imaginative as the costumes. You might run into The Missing Link at the super market, maybe bump into Mankind at the Post Office, and if you're lucky, you'll never bump bumpers with the masked men from Doom.

 

But the most famous resident from Parts Unknown might also be its most mysterious.

 

An outrageously ripped body builder and former chiropractic student who broke into the business with the name The Dingo Warrior, helped transform the then WWF from a side show to one of the greatest shows on earth as he dropped Dingo for Ultimate, and became a living, breathing, clotheslining, super hero the likes of whom, the squared circle had never seen.

 

From the way he ran to the ring and shook the ropes to his trademark gorilla press and splash, the Ultimate Warrior received more pop than a Pepsi factory as he stormed his way up the ranks and eventually defeated the seemingly unbeatable champ, Hulk Hogan.

 

But then something happened. The Warrior disappeared.

 

Sure, he'd reappear sporadically, but every time you started looking forward to one of his flying clotheslines, it seemed the man with the face paint was gone again.

 

Where did he go? Why doesn't he wrestle anymore? Will he ever come back?

 

IGN Sports decided to head straight to the source for answers as we sat down for a one-on-one with the man who could've put Parts Unknown on the map…if only we knew where it was.

 

IGN Sports: I saw you plenty of times in person out at the Cow Palace, now I can relive my youth by playing those same matches, even in the same venue.

 

Ultimate Warrior: I always loved the Cow Palace. As you travel around, you have favorite places to wrestle and the Cow Palace was right up there for me. I remember this one night I was out there with the WWF and they used to have those matches on TV where the superstars would wrestle the nobodies, we used to call them jobbers, even though I don't think it's politically correct to use that term anymore. Anyway, we were out there, it must've been around 1990, and this guy came in for a clothesline and I knocked him out. This used to happen a lot in the beginning because we liked to work stiff, there wasn't any of this pansy stuff going on, but my finish was to pick him up over my head. But since he was knocked out, he was like a bag of crap and I couldn't even balance him. I tried as hard as I could for a long time, I think I almost ripped his balls off trying to get him up over my head. I ended up having to do the match over because it's impossible to do that press slam if the other guy can't make himself stiff, and this guy was just out cold. He was just dead weight. That's what I remember most about the Cow Palace, that match, that night, that poor guy's balls. [laughs]

 

 

IGN Sports: You're included in the Legends roster, but I was curious if you consider yourself a legend of the sport.

 

Ultimate Warrior: I think the Ultimate Warrior is for sure. I was one of the first guys to talk about their characters in the third-person, and I think the character of the Ultimate Warrior certainly is a legend. The reason would be, back when I came into the business, they were just different times. Hulk Hogan was really the only superstar character that there was. I know the program WWF Superstars had all of the underneath stars, but Hogan was really the standard bearer, and for a character to come along into the business and open the eyes of the office to make them see an equal potential to Hulk Hogan or even potential beyond what Hogan already was, it was truly incredible, and the Ultimate Warrior was the character who came along and did it. I think that the way the character captured a unique bond with the people who became his fans and so many years later, it's been over five years since I've been in the ring, and if you look at my career in the early 90's, right after my match with Hogan, I took a long break, I came back, then I took a three-year break, I came back again, took another long break. Just the way the memory of the character stayed in people's minds, that's what makes the character a legend all by itself.

 

IGN Sports: How did you initially come up with the Warrior character or persona?

 

Ultimate Warrior: I did the Dingo Warrior thing down in Texas in WCCW. When I first went in to WCCW, that's when Sting and I decided to go our separate ways. When we were working for Bill Watts, he liked to control his talent and he liked to do things that weren't really professional with the young talent. I stood up against it and we had a manager at the time, Eddie Gilbert, who was showing us the ropes and showing us how not to be so green, and we were polite and we showed respect to the veterans and I think that is one of the major reasons why we made it in the business, because we continued to do that. We didn't come in and act like we wanted to throw our weight around. So when I went to Texas, I started the Dingo Warrior character, and that really started from being on the rodeo grounds there at the Fort Worth Coliseum, and the crew had all come in, and the locker room all started talking about what I should be and somebody said that I looked like a Warrior. We threw the word Dingo in front of it and I was the Dingo Warrior.

 

Then, when I went to go work for the WWF, they had called me and they were working a show in Waco, Texas and wanted to see if I could be a part of it. They found out about me through this guy named George Scott, who was an old booker for the WWF and he was a good friend of Fritz's. George agreed that after he retired, he would come over to WCCW and try to help get things going for us. He came in and through the grapevine, a couple of the talent overheard a conversation he was having with Vince and Pat Patterson, talking about this kid with raw talent down in Texas, and that kid turned out to be me.

 

At that time, though, I was trying to work out a deal to go Japan and I had approached Fritz Von Erich to get a pay raise from $50 a night to $100 a night, but he didn't want to do it, so I had no other choice but to leave for Japan. George Scott caught wind of that and told the WWF who then called and said they wanted to get a look at me before I left. So I went to Waco and I ended up getting a better reception than anyone they had on the card because we used to wrestle in Waco all the time and everyone knew me. So they brought me in for about eight or nine months and kept me down with the C-talent, just testing me, seeing if I was going to listen, seeing if I had what it takes to travel, see where my head was at, if I was halfway together. Then came the time when they were going to put me on TV and they told me that they liked the Warrior, but they didn't like Dingo. But for the entire time I was behind the scenes, they told me that they weren't going to use the Warrior thing, because that's what they did back then, they didn't use people's identities that they brought in, they created their own. But since my character was getting over so well, they decide to go with the Warrior thing. So they put me on camera and I said "I'm not this kind of Warrior, I'm not that kind of Warrior, I'm the Ultimate Warrior!" And that's how that got started.

 

IGN Sports: You were only making $50 a night?

 

Ultimate Warrior: In the beginning, s*#!, I remember making $25 a night out in Tennessee.

 

 

IGN Sports: How do you live off of $25 a night?

 

Ultimate Warrior: You have to cram about six or seven guys in a car and four or five guys in the same hotel room. Promoters can be hell. It's like a square-ringed circus.

 

IGN Sports: But you survived to make it, as we said, to be a legend in the business. Why do you think you were able to make it while so many others failed?

 

Ultimate Warrior: When I go out and talk to people about how unique they are as a human being and that there's a niche for them that they need to follow through on for their lives, it's what I truly believe in. When I first got into the WWF and ran toward the ring and shook the ropes, all of the veterans used to tell me not to do that stuff. They'd tell me that it just didn't fit, that it just didn't work, that it's just not what they did there. And they'd tell me this stuff, but it would just go right out the other side of my head because I knew the people were buying it, and the reason they were telling me this is because I was moving up the ladder and I was about to take their spot. Ultimate Warrior was a character who made an impression on people. It was his intensity, his colorfulness, but also Warrior as an identity means something to everyone. Even through all of the grumbling and haphazard approach at the beginning to developing the character's persona, there was something that people connected to. It was about fighting the challenges, the heavens and the gods and stuff, and when little kids saw that, it was very impressionable.

 

IGN Sports: How did you even get started in this crazy business?

 

Ultimate Warrior: I was going to chiropractic school, but I had also sustained a successful amateur bodybuilding career and Gold's Gym had taken me out to California for six weeks to train for this bodybuilding contest, and after I left, there was a guy from the competition that called me who said there was this guy putting together a group of big, bodybuilder-type guys to create this professional wrestling team. It seemed legit at the time, but after a couple of weeks, we were eating peanut butter out of the can just trying to survive and the things just fell out underneath it. Me and Sting had about ten hours of training and we sent pictures out to all of the regional wrestling territories. One of those was Mid Southern, Jerry Jarrett had it at the time, and they told us to come on out. For the next couple of years, we did the typical, paying the hard dues type of thing. We slept on the floor and ate tuna out of the can until things started paying off.

 

IGN Sports: You worked so hard to become that superstar, that legend of wrestling, but then you left. What made you decide to ultimately quit the wrestling business?

 

Ultimate Warrior: There was a reversal of challenges, that's probably the easiest way to say it. I had a relationship with Vince, and at the time, Vince and his company were very different. If you needed a light bulb changed in the dressing room, you went to Vince. It wasn't the company that it is now. They didn't have the creative team to write and script everything out, and Vince was the guy you went to all the time and you sat down and had a Coca Cola with him whenever you saw him. We had an evolving and extensive relationship from both a personal and business perspective and we had some falling outs in our business relationship. As the Ultimate Warrior character was evolving creatively, I was also evolving as a man. I was maturing as a man, and I was exposed to this person that represented himself in a certain way, and there was this place that we came to and I was not willing to tolerate or accept the unethical way that he wanted to treat me. And it was hard because you're surrounded by hundreds of other people who accept him and the way that he was. I wasn't one of those people, and when I realized that, there was a challenge to stand up to Vince, and I pursued that challenge. At the same time, there was a creative turn in the entertainment business and especially sports entertainment, where it just became degenerative. I think lazy might even be the right word to use. People became more apt to go for the lowest thing to do rather than what was the highest thing to do. It just wasn't creatively inspiring for me anymore. When I went to WCW in 1998, it was a challenge for me to take the Ultimate Warrior character to a whole new level. He's already done certain things, and he could still do those things he had proven he could do, but people in WCW, the people who put the programs together, they just weren't interested in doing anything like that. So it's really a combination of working for a guy that I ended up not liking very well at all, and was not willing to work for just for the sake of having big paychecks. And creatively, I just thought people were doing things that I thought were the lazy things to do, not the harder things to do, not the things to do to come up with better ideas to evolve the character or wrestling itself for that matter.

 

IGN Sports: What are you up to these days?

 

Ultimate Warrior: I've built a speaking career going out speaking to young people or people of any age for that matter. I don't know if anyone ever really retires from wrestling or boxing, I think it's ridiculous that people say this, there's nothing really official to it. But I had to develop other things to get into for my life. For some, it would've been great if I just became a bum, hanging out at the corner bar or asking for change on the corner as I tell people my glory story, but that's not me. Even from the early 90's, when I had my first fallout with Vince, I pursued other interests. Over the last three or four years I've built a speaking career, going out and talking about things that are important to me. I read a lot of classical literature, I've read the great books of the western world, and I go out and talk about serious ideas. I talk a lot about how the power of your life comes from using your mind, not your muscle.

 

 

IGN Sports: There are always rumors about your return to the ring. Sure, we can play as you in Showdown, but are we ever going to see you back in the real squared-circle?

 

Ultimate Warrior: I probably have five or six more years where I could come back as the Ultimate Warrior physically because I know the kind of discipline I have, but I don't think that's ever going to happen. It's not going to happen with Vince McMahon. They can have all of the anniversaries that they're going to have, the big one at 25, the big one at 30, but you're never going to see me walk through the ring ropes and wave to the crowd. It's never going to happen. I don't need it. I'm not so starved for that type of attention that I have to do it and I would go back on saying that I never would. I just won't do it.

 

IGN Sports: What about wrestling in NWA: TNA?

 

Ultimate Warrior: I don't watch it. I talked to those guys in the beginning, and then they started coming up with ideas that were different than what they originally said from the outset. I'm not interested. When I had discussions with those guys, they just didn't seem to get that the Ultimate Warrior to me is on the same level as a Hulk Hogan in a lot of ways. I might not be there all the way, but I'm right there sniffing his BUTT. Some of these promoters, like when I talked to Jerry Jarrett, he was like "I know you have your gym bag packed and are running around New Mexico like the Ultimate Warrior, so why don't I just give you a couple of thousand bucks and you show up in our ring?" It's nutty. I go on with my life. It's been five years since I've been in the ring. I'm not sitting in New Mexico biting at the bit to go back into the ring. It's going to take more than that to make it happen. For now, I'm excited just to come back in the video game. I'm excited because Acclaim is committed to making the best game possible, and I can't wait to play as myself in Showdown.

[deancoles 0]

He doesn't seem so crazy in the interview.I hope his attire from the Royal Rumble 91 is included in the game.

[Guest JumpinJackFlash]

Was his Royal Rumble 91 attire a bunch of American stars on his tights? If so, then it is included.

 

Edit: They're not stars. They're Warrior logos. But it is Patriot colors.

[Guest Man Of 1,004 Modes]

Was his Royal Rumble 91 attire a bunch of American stars on his tights? If so, then it is included.

 

Edit: They're not stars. They're Warrior logos. But it is Patriot colors.

I'm more than positive the RR 91 attire is in. And if the pictures ever load, the WM VI look.

[Steviekick 0]

I was suprised that his interview made that much sense...Think about it:

 

Ultimate Warrior giving a coherent interview.

Eddie Guerrero the World Champ.

Chris Benoit maineventing WM XX.

 

The apocalypse is upon us!