Former WWE RAW commentator Rob Bartlett recently appeared on The Ten Count with Steve Fall for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Bartlett talked about how he got hired by WWE for Monday Night RAW:
“It was by Mr. McMahon himself. I was working on the Imus in the Morning program, which I had done for 31 years before he retired. The program was very involved with the Connecticut Special Olympics and I used to do a lot of their fundraisers. I was kind of like the quote unquote celebrity auctioneer. I would basically shame all these really rich types into paying enormous amounts of money for, you know, basically worthless stuff.”
“There was this fundraiser one evening, some banquet or whatever it was, and there was an auction. It was somewhere in Stanford, I think, and it was in a tent. It was outside of the tent. There were a couple hundred people, and Vince was sitting up front at a table with his lovely wife and whoever else was within his party. He was wearing a three piece velour peach colored suit, and so I did basically 20 minutes just on the suit, which he appeared to be enjoying and laughing along with everybody else. He was basically the foundation of my act that evening. Everything went well. We raised a lot of money for the Connecticut Special Olympics, and then during the week, I’m heading back from the station after Imus and the morning show. I got a call from his assistant. She says, ‘Vince McMahon called. He wants to speak with you’. I thought, oh, no, here it comes. There’s gonna be death threats. The Steiner brothers are going to be waiting for me in my garage. I called and he said, ‘Bartlett, I’m really disappointed that you didn’t appreciate the fashion sense I displayed the other night. How would you like to be on live TV? I got this idea for this program called Monday Night Raw’, and he explained to me the whole concept of it.”
“At the time, my son was eight. I have four sons, but this is the first one. He turned out okay, so we had three more. He was about eight and a huge WWF fan. I had taken him to a bunch of matches. I think I took them to the match where Macho Man got married to Miss Elizabeth. It was a father son bonding kind of thing and I thought, wow, this would be great. I’ll get some good seats at the shows and my son can meet some of the wrestlers. So, I thought it’d be fun. I thought it’d be an interesting experience.”
On dressing as Vince McMahon without permission on Monday Night RAW:
“Making fun of Vince was one of my favorites. The following week, we were back at Manhattan Center and it was the pre-show meeting. Everyone went crazy for it and the crew went nuts because no one had ever dared make fun of Vince before and I had really nothing to lose. I kind of knew that I wasn’t going to be there much longer, so I figured I’d go for it. Everyone just thought it was the greatest.”
“So I show up and then you could see the wrestlers are kind of looking down and smiling. They don’t want to say anything. We’re all in the room for the pre-show meeting, Vince walks in, and there’s a hush. The place goes silent. He walks in and he just stares at me. He goes, ‘Barlett, you’re fired.’ The place goes nuts.”
“The following week or two weeks later, I showed up at the Manhattan Center for the show and there was nobody there. There’s a cameraman. The entire place is empty. Nobody in the stands. Empty. They got a camera and they’re shooting me on camera. They didn’t tell me they were moving and they set it up so they could play this joke on me and that’s how he got me back for the impression.”
On working next to Vince McMahon on RAW:
“I never got scolded. I was never told not to do something or not to say something, or if I said something that he didn’t particularly care for, there was never any admonishment for it. He really believed in letting me do what I did and I think he just kind of hoped that I would catch on.”
On getting ribbed by The Steiner Brothers.
“The Steiner Brothers, I remember one of them sat on my lap and the other one pinched my Adam’s apple to the point where I thought I was gonna pass out, but it was all in good fun. It was never mean-spirited or nasty or another way to make me feel bad. If anything, they were really kind.”
On how Hulk Hogan treated him in the locker room:
“Nice, kind, supportive. We talked about his movies because obviously I took my son to see Mr. Nanny and Suburban Commando. Again, he was really nice to me. There was no reason to. He could have played the big time Hollywood star and looked down his nose, but he wasn’t. He was very welcoming.”
On being told never to mention Miss Elizabeth to Randy Savage on WWE RAW:
“He (Randy Savage) was a pussycat, You know, I mean, he really, really was. He’d been really hurt by Miss Elizabeth. They had gotten divorce I think before I started with them. That was the only topic that was off limits. That was the only thing that I was told to stay away from.”
Rob Bartlett on Undertaker getting into character on the first episode of WWE RAW:
“He would be in costume, he would have the hat off, but he would be sitting in a corner and when I say sitting, I mean his back was up against the wall, but he was in a squat position so his feet were flat on the ground and his head was down, the hair was in his face, and he stayed like that for as long as it took before the show began. It wasn’t until his match was about to happen. They would say, ‘You’re on.’ He would slowly get up, put the hat on, and walk out. This guy was in character from the time he got out of the car in a parking lot until he went into the ring, which I always thought was kind of a cool little thing. That was the commitment he had to that character. He was scary. You know, you didn’t want to mess with that guy. It was really, really scary.”
Bartlett on Bobby Heenan:
“Bobby was so nice to me that when we actually did eventually work together in that one show when I played Vince McMahon. He wasn’t nasty to me on the air. He was enjoying me getting on Vince because that’s not something that he could ever really do. He was as supportive as anyone could be.”
On writing sitcoms for WWE with Kevin Dunn:
“He (Kevin Dunn) wanted to develop other things. He wanted to go in a direction that was using the wrestlers as something else. He wanted a wrestling sitcom, and so I wrote a pilot for him called, ‘The Turnbuckles’, which was about a family of wrestlers. In the master bedroom, the bed was a ring. Then I had written a treatment for a Saturday Night Live type show which would be sketches, featuring all the different wrestlers.”
On why he chose to leave WWE:
“I didn’t think it was working. I didn’t feel I was adding anything to it. In many ways, I kind of saw myself, especially when I watched the tapes back, I would put the brakes on it. I’m trying to interject things to be funny and it would just stop things cold. It kind of ruined the flow of the program. I mean, it was a great idea to have somebody like that, but it didn’t work.”
You can check out the interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
