WWE Hall of Famer The Undertaker recently took to an episode of his Six Feet Under podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including how fellow WWE Hall of Famer Mark Henry’s fake retirement in 2013 was one of the greatest in-ring promos ever.
Undertaker said, “It was one of the greatest in-ring promos ever. It was real but it was a swerve.”
On his transition out of pro wrestling and if it’s harder than it is to transition from other sports:
“It’s hard to say — whatever you do on those levels, you have passion and when that passion for something is gone, it’s gone. I think the one thing that wrestling unfortunately offers is a lesser version. I had my run with WWE and it gets to a point where I can’t perform at the level of WWE but I can go to Pikeville, Kentucky for some independent small time promotion and I can be the big fish in a very small barrel kind of thing and you end up going years and years living off of the equity that you built up where I don’t think in other major sports — there’s only the NFL. There’s only Major League Baseball. There’s only the NBA. There’s no track down where wrestling gives you a chance to still be something, just at a lesser version of it. It’s good for some guys because wrestlers are notorious for not saving their money or used to be. It’s much better now…there’s programs now in place trying to teach guys how to do with their money so that they don’t end up at the end of their career and then figure out okay now I’m gonna have to go to some small armory and sell my 8×10’s. You end up doing things like — look at the movie, The Wrestler. That’s a prime example. That’s a prime example of somebody who was at the top and kind of worked his way back down and just didn’t know when to say when.”
On slowly conditioning fans to get used to Mark Calaway and not The Undertaker:
“We’re slowly conditioning them to the new version of The Undertaker. The Mark Calaway version of The Undertaker. It’s a slow process of trying to condition. They’re kind of starting to figure it out like the old hat and coat is gone and this is where we’re at now.”
