“The Lethal Weapon” Steve Blackman appeared as a guest on the latest episode of “INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet” for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
Featured below are some of the highlights and a complete video archive of the discussion.
On being in pain throughout his WWE career: “Yes. I think it would be like Monday I’d wrestle and get a migraine, and I don’t mean a little headache where, oh, I have a headache. No, I mean feels like you’re being stabbed in your head. Throw up, lay down, throw up, lay down, go to bed. The next day, sleep all day, wrestle the next day, the migraine again, go through that next day resting. So it’d be like every other day I’d have a migraine. I’m not being funny, but you can’t imagine what it’s like getting forearmed or body slammed when you have a migraine, you feel like a grenade went off in your head. I wrestled Kane one night in a hardcore match. I landed on the back of my head on the floor. My foot got caught. I jumped off the rail, kicked him, my shoe hit him on the chest, and I landed on my back. The migraine kicked in in one second, just shot up through my spine. Every time he hit me, I felt like a grenade was going off, and that was the beginning of the match. We had 15 minutes more to go, and I’m like, Oh my God. I’m just fighting through it, fighting through it. I’d sit out in the hall and just squeeze my head. And then a night in a hotel, I’d literally lie on my side. Sometimes I’d have a baseball in my bag. I’d put a baseball under my back, try to lay on it. I’d find a spot where I could pinch off the nerve going to my head. So finally, after about an hour, I could fall asleep, and then sleep the whole night and the next day I would just be tired from the pain, but I’d wrestle again, and that’s what I went through for years. I’m going to say, 80% of my run. It was brutal. I’m like, Man, if I had that stuff done before I went back, it wouldn’t have got much worse in there. But if I’d had that done and then gone back, I just could’ve done a lot more. There were nights where I wanted to do more crazy stuff, and I just couldn’t. My head hurt too bad. So I just do what I could to get by. But the hardcore stuff worked out great for me, because I could just showcase weapons and speed and things like that. It sounds funny, but I was getting cracked as much as them, but it was still easier on my neck.”
On Head Cheese: “I don’t know how that came about, but it got over. The vignettes were comical. People popped like crazy on them. It’s funny because it got over great for three months, here’s another one, we were going to get the tag belts at that time. And one of the guys in the office said something to, I don’t know if it was Vince or whoever was pulling the shots that night, it’s usually Vince, said, ‘I don’t think we should give him the belts yet.’ And they just squashed it and squashed our gimmick. I don’t want to say who it was, that’s not me, but I’m like, Really, dude? I didn’t find out till a year later. But I’m thinking that’s brutal. So he goes up there and uses some clout to put a stop to it.”
On whether he realized it would be that popular: “I did not. It did. It got a heck of a pop. That place popped. Al was a comical guy, so the stuff that he would have me do and stuff, it was entertaining. I’d get to the arena and they’d be like, ‘Steve, you’re going to milk a cow tonight.’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure, I am.’ I’d walk to the locker room, then I’m on the farm milking a cow. The next week of TV, they’re like, ‘Steve, you’re doing a comedy skit at a retirement home.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure, I am.’ And yeah, that woman’s yelling that unscripted ‘Blackman, you suck!’ You remember that? I just remember her yelling that at me. So it was funny, it was going well, and then someone stepped in and squashed it after a few months.”
