WWE Hall of Famer JBL appeared on the podcast “Something to Wrestle With,” where he discussed various topics, including WWE’s decision to change Mariah May’s ring name to Blake Monroe and whether this change negatively impacts Monroe.
JBL said, “I’m trying to think if I’m her, would it bother me? And I think it — it would be kind of cool to have this cool heritage of this name of somebody that nobody knows about. And it’s got this cool kind of wink-wink, ‘By the way, there’s this old porn star that had the same name, and we looked remarkably similar.’”
On whether he would change it:
“But I think — yeah, I think I’d change it. I think I’d just, ‘You know what, deep six that. We had a name, we thought it worked. And turns out that name was used, and people are going to bring–‘ WWE fans are two things: they’re brutal and they’re smart. And there’s no tell what they’ll come up with because of that name. So now it might be to her benefit. I mean, sometimes you have like — look, one of the hardest things. I remember when we’re wrestlers, we had big fat wrestlers. They’d always say, some of them would say, ‘Man, don’t call me fat out there, the fans will chant it.’ I’d go, ‘Yeah, they’re not chanting anything right now. Your fat ass is going to be unemployed if they don’t start chanting something. So at least they’re chanting something.’ Some of the guys will go out there and go, ‘Hey man, call me fat. Call me whatever you want. Let’s get fans chanting anything,’ you know. Because you got to be noticed, and there’s a difference there. And so maybe it works to her advantage. I don’t know. I think I’d probably change it, but I don’t know, it’s kind of fun.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
