Jake Roberts Reveals Why His Hulk Hogan Program Was Canceled
With his brand new Dirty Details Tour up and running and the Snake Pit open for business, WWE Hall of Famer and timeless wrestling legend Jake “The Snake” Roberts stops by The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling to discuss his new road show and some of the classic moments from his illustrious and infamous career. In the following excerpt from the 45-minute interview, Jake reveals the details behind his cancelled program with Hulk Hogan and what was the worst match of his career. The full episode can be downloaded at this link.
Cancelled program with Hulk Hogan
“People started chanting DDT, DDT because they believed in that maneuver and rightfully so, they had just seen me kill Steamboat with it. It damn near killed him. Now they are going to go after Hogan and I dropped Hogan on the set and my God the guy is down and I split his skull too. That was one thing they just could not get through their heads and that is you cannot do that DDT on concrete or on a stage set because that would just don’t give much.”
Was it Hulk Hogan or Vince McMahon worried that Jake may overshadow The Hulkster:
“It was Vince. He just said that’s it. He said Oh my god I can’t believe this. After I walked through the curtain he told me to stand right there and that he wants me to hear these people start chanting Hulk and he’s going to come to his feet and he’s going to rip his shirt off and do all of this and you guys are going to make money for a long time and blah blah blah and we waited and waited and started looking at each other and at Pat Patterson and said I don’t know what is going on here and all of a sudden the people started slow at first going DDT and started chanting DDT and Vince looked at me and said wow, well that’s the end of that. He said he’s not going to split his marketing up and that was the whole thing. Vince made his money in marketing and not the wrestling shows. We were on the road to spread the marketing out there and for people to buy the marketing and to make us icons because he made stars out of so many people and sold so much and how many billions of dollars did the marketing make? I don’t know how many people were in the arena, not at all so that was a very expensive lesson to learn and cost me a lot of money.”
Why wrestlers wanted to work with Jake:
“I think most guys wanted to jump on the Jake train anyway. Dibiase for instance, when we wrestled we never said a word. He let me guide the ship and take us to where we needed to go and most guys have been that way with me. They let me run it and that is just being smart because you can’t have two guys out there that both want to run it and if you do you are going to have a cluster f*ck so to speak and are going to have a mess. You’ve got to have a captain and the rest of the guys are just soldiers and are following and they are going to react. My job is to sell it in a big way and I always tried to make my opponents and a lot of people don’t know how to do that. I’m going to go to that ring and if I’m going to lose that match than I am going to make this guy look good enough to beat me, if I am going to win the match than I am going to make him look like he is twice as good as I am because I don’t want to beat a guy that I’ve beat down. I want a beat a guy that had a clear edge to him because that is what makes Jake better than everybody else, was that I would go out and make my opponent and make my opponent a star that way I beat a star I didn’t just beat Joe Blow the popcorn carrier, I beat a star every time.”
For this and every other episode of The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling and The Triple Threat Podcast featuring “The Franchise” Shane Douglas please subscribe to them on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Podomatic, and Player FM. Also follow them on Twitter @TwoManPowerTrip & @rasslinpal. Thanks to them for the transcript.
