WWE Hall of Famer Jesse “The Body” Ventura recently spoke with AdFreeShows.com for an interview covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Ventura talked about Superstar Billy Graham being his hero:
“Without Superstar Billy Graham, there would not be Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura. There would not be Hulk Hogan. There would not be any of those people you yelled for because Superstar was the hero to all of us. Bar none. Superstar Graham was the person who I had just gotten out of the Navy. I came home on leave. I didn’t have nothing to do one night and all my friends were busy so I said, ‘I’m gonna go watch wrestling.’ Now here I am, a former Navy SEAL, two tours of Southeast Asia, I have nothing to do home on leave, so I went down. I remember walking up to the window to Minneapolis Auditorium. I said to the lady, ‘Give me the best ticket you got.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Are you alone?’ I said, ‘Yep.’ She said, ‘I got one in the front row’. I said, ‘Really?’ So I bought the front row ticket. I’m down there sitting with all the nuts in the old days of wrestling in the front row in Minneapolis.”
“That night, I was sitting in the front row, and Superstar Billy Graham was in the semi-final that night. I don’t remember who he wrestled. He walked out to the ring and he actually looked at me. I caught his eyes sitting ringside. I looked him up and down, I watched the whole thing, and it was right there I thought, ‘God, maybe this is what I ought to try to do.’ Then I went to college and I met a bunch of weightlifters at college and found out they were all Graham fans. We started going to the Auditorium, and as typical college kids, cheering for the bad guy, Superstar.”
“I took my dad with me once because we had an extra ticket, and my dad came home that night, and he grabbed me and said, ‘You better be careful down there.’ I said, ‘What do you mean dad?’ He said, ‘You get those fans so riled up, somebody’s going to come and glom you over the head’ because, you know, I’d be down there cheering for Graham and all that, and the thing was, we looked like twin brothers. I ended up dying my hair blonde and Graham and I looked like twin brothers when we both had the bleached blonde hair.”
“I got to meet him. I was training at The Seventh Street gym. I walked in one Saturday morning and the owner of the gym said, ‘Hey, your hero is in the back.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Superstar. He’s back there working out. ‘So I got the opportunity to go back and talk with him. I told him I was training. He gave me great advice. He said, ‘Don’t break in here in Minneapolis. Go out to a small place first. You got to learn the business.”
Jimmy Snuka putting him over in his Ventura’s first year in the business:
“I had left Kansas City and was in my second territory, Portland, where I might brag and add, I had only been in the business nine months when Don Owen put the Northwest heavyweight title on me and said, ‘Make me money.’ I hadn’t even been in the business for one year. It was nine months. You know who was responsible for it? Snuka. Jimmy Snuka had the title. He was going to drop it to me. I was the villain, and they got cold feet that night, and they weren’t going to do it when we had the big meeting. Jimmy jumped up in the meeting and in Jimmy’s typical Snuka language, he said, ‘No bra. I’m dropping it to the brother tonight. I can’t make no money with the title. I make money trying to get the title’, and he was dead on. People weren’t gonna come and see Jesse Ventura take the title for Jimmy Snuka. They wanted to pay to see Jimmy Snuka kick Jesse Ventura’s ass. Well, in order to do that, Jesse has to have the belt. Jimmy was business baby. That’s one thing I’ll tell you about brother Snuka. When it came to business, he didn’t have an ego. Jimmy liked money. Jimmy knew what would make him money.”
If he has any political plans for 2024:
“I’m here. Do I have anything in place? No. I want people to know Jesse Ventura is simply a citizen. I don’t have a staff. I don’t have gophers. I don’t have people hired, but I’m here, and if say, the Forward party with Andrew Yang, if they approached me to be a candidate, I will say this. I would have to give any, if it was reasonable, if it was the Libertarians, the Forward party, if they had national, if they had the ability to win, which means they have to have ballot access in enough states to become the president, I would have to give it its do consideration, wouldn’t I? Because as I look at my country today, I’m still a patriotic individual. The one thing that always will rise up in the back of my mind when it comes to that is this. It’ll come down to if it’s feasible, I’ll always ask myself this question, ‘If not you, then who?’ So until I see, the who, I’ll always give it its due consideration and right now, I’m seeing a rematch between Trump and Biden. In typical Jesse mode, I could whip either one of them and I could whip them both at the same time. All I need is the ballot access and let me in the debates. Then the question comes, ‘At my age, do I really want to finish my life doing that shit?’ But then again, there it is, but if not you, then who?, and if you’re a person like me, I sometimes tend to believe in destiny. I think that if it’s destined for Jesse to run for president, then something will happen that will make that happen, and if it doesn’t happen, then it wasn’t destiny.”
You can listen to the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
