Steve Blackman: The Lethal Weapon, Shane McMahon Fall, JBL Airport Fight, Hardcore Title, Brawl For All

Steve Blackman is a retired professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Harrisburg, PA to discuss being known as one of the toughest wrestlers in the locker room, becoming seriously ill and coming very close to dying before he signed with WWE, his match with Shane McMahon at SummerSlam 2000 and McMahon's fall, showing his comedic side with Al Snow as part of Head Cheese, the real story behind his fight with JBL at an airport in St. Louis, being a part of the infamous Brawl For All tournament, what he is doing now, whether a WWE return could be possible and more!

Quote I'm thinking about: 
"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving." – Albert Einstein

On what he is doing now:

"After I got out of wrestling, I had an MMA school. I had that for about 13 years, and then once my kids were born, I just didn't have the time for that. But I had also started a bail bonds business two or three years after the MMA started. So I've been focusing on my bail bonds business for the last 17 years now. They pay a percent, you put up enough assets to write a certain amount of bails, or you write through an insurance company, and they license you to do a certain amount of bails. But I mean, when I first started, it was all on your own. Then the insurance companies got involved six years ago, and don't even get me started on that, that kind of screwed everything up. But nevertheless, I'm fortunate in Harrisburg, because I know everybody at MMA school here, Bail Bonds business. I've lived here many years, so I get a lot of bails out of this county."

What if they don’t pay?

"We're supposed to go track them down. And in the beginning, that's actually why I started the bail business. When I had the MMA school, there's fighters of mine, which I had dozens and dozens of fighters. They're always broke. So they're like, 'Blackman, what can we do to make some money?' I'm like, let me think on it. So I came up with, well, let's start doing bounty hunting. So when I did my homework and I saw I can put up more money and make a lot more money doing bails than I can just tracking people down. Plus, I don't feel like sitting there and staring at somebody's house for a week either. So that's how that came about."

On the terrifying thought of being chased down by Steve Blackman:

"Well, in the beginning, don't hold me to it, but this number is close. In the first few years, I took in 88 guys myself and my other bounty hunters took in the same number. It was funny, because we took in almost the exact same number together, 176 guys we took it in the first three years. That's just brutal. Then you start learning how to get better co-signers, more co-signers, get people to post bails that own something, have something to lose. So if the person doesn't show up, you go after them for it, or you just hound them till they turn the person in."

On whether he would have been interested in UFC if it existed earlier:

"Probably. I would have loved to have done it, and I would have even liked to have done it when I was in WWF. I just had so many neck issues. I was so tired of having migraines every other day. It wasn't the fact of going out there and fighting. I'm not being funny, but any of us can go out there and just go balls to the wall for a minute. It's just being able to train properly. And every time I go out and train for a couple of days hard, I get headaches, my neck would hurt even rolling with the guys in my school, I would roll hard with them the whole time. But I tell them, let's avoid the guillotines for this match, and we'll go for everything else, just because it would kill my neck all the time." 

Did you look into it when you were in WWF?

"I had talked to [Ken] Shamrock about it and stuff before, and he had said that someone had enquired to him about it, see if I want to come out there and do it. And I did it desperately, especially the days when I had a day where my neck didn't feel bad, and I'm banging cardio up that day and stuff, it's like, Man, I'd like to get out there and do that, but they just didn't work out. I mean, I had neck issues." 

On wrestlers saying he was the toughest in the locker room:

"I appreciate that. I will say this. There's a lot of tough guys in WWF. When you look at the size and speed of most of the guys, most guys that played football, wrestled, have that athletic ability. Most of them have the ability to hold their own. It's just how hard they want to go. One thing with me I always had in my head. When they say that I never cared who it was, if there's a problem, I don't care who you are, we're going to go. And that's just the way I've always looked at it. If you don't like me and I have a problem with you, we'll do it every single day, I just don't care. It happens. You know, it's happened before, but that's one thing, no matter who it is, I don't care if you got a problem, just walk up, lace your shoes up and let's go."

On looking like he could still wrestle:

"Sometimes I feel good, especially after my second neck operation. I don't have those headaches all day, every day, where I sit there and just do this, because I had four bone spurs digging in nerves in my neck. So every time I'd land or move, it was like pencil points digging in. So once I had those removed, [I used to] sit there all day just trying to find a spot where I could sit in where it wasn't jagging me. So now that that's been fixed, some days I feel good. I'm like, Man, I could go out there and do a couple matches. It crosses my mind."

On his early days in wrestling and battling illness:

"I started wrestling in 86 in wrestling school in Connecticut. I was there for about a year, and then I went to Japan. Spent six weeks over there. I went, but I was still green, so to speak, because I had just done small promotion matches all across Connecticut and those places. I wrestled in Eastern Canada for four months, where you wrestle every day you're there for four months. I had been in contact with Owen [Hart] because in Japan, 'I said, What do I have to do to get to WWF?' He goes, 'You need to come to Calgary, wrestle with us up there and my dad and polish up.' So after that four-month run in Eastern Canada, Owen got me over there with his father, and that's where I wrestled. When I say every day, you wrestle every day, you don't have days off. I don't remember having a day off period. We did have one, but his brothers, being like him, scheduled us in a charity race three hours from Calgary, and we all wanted to kill him. So that was our one day off. I'll never forget it, because we were so mad. I was up there with Pillman, Benoit, Gary Albright, he wrestled up there. Norman the Lunatic Mike Shaw was up there. The British Bulldogs were with us for six months because they were taking a break from WWF at that time. This was 88 and so we had a hell of a crew up there back then. We'd wrestle long matches, and non stop moving. It's funny, because when I finished up there, and I was starting with WWF, I was supposed to start with them in 89 and I said to the office, I told this guy I’d wrestle for him in Africa. I gave him my word that I come down there for three weeks. And they said, Well, just go ahead start with this when you get back."

"So for me to keep my word, I went down there, became deathly ill, came home, long story short, spent five and a half years till I got better. I was two and a half years on my deathbed, another two and a half years on medicine. They said I probably had dysentery and malaria. It was so bad. When I landed in Africa on Thursday, I weighed 267 the next Thursday, when I left the hospital and Gary Albright helped me get to a flight and finally make my way home, I weighed 232. I was 35 pounds lighter in six days. I started getting sick Friday, and it was insane, and it felt like I had sand in my mouth. I had to carry drinks everywhere I went. I thought I was gonna die from just complete dehydration, which is pretty much where you die from with dysentery, just it's one end to the other nonstop. I drink, go, drink, go, drink, go. I went through IV bag after IV bag. I said to Gary, he came to the hospital, 'Gary, you got to get me out of here, I'm going to die here. I can't keep anything down here.' Well, he got me to the airport. I was down in Durban, South Africa. I flew from Durban to Johannesburg. Once I got there, I had to wait for a ticket from home to come through. That came through 15 minutes before my flight left, where I'd been stuck in Johannesburg with nothing, and that came through. Then, don't hold me to the exact hours, five hour flight to Kenya. We get to Kenya, we had a nine-hour layover on the runway with the doors open. It was 120 degrees and no air conditioning, and I'm feeling like I'm dying every second. All I do is keep grabbing every sodium bottle of water I can do and drink, drink, drink. Then we leave from Kenya and we fly to Amsterdam. We get to Amsterdam, I have a 12-hour layover. I'm laying on the floor. I just crawl into the bathroom, crawl out. They took me to the medical station in that airport, and they're like, 'We're not gonna let you fly.' I said, 'Look, dude, I don't have anything contagious. If I'm going to die, I'm going to die in the States. I'm not going to make my family come halfway around the world to retrieve me anywhere I'm getting home.' So they let me get on the plane. I flew to New York. I had a five-hour layover. I'll never forget some kid wheeled me off in a wheelchair. I don't even know what money I had in my pocket. I don't even know what currency it was. I just gave it to him. I said, 'Get me as much to drink as he can and something to eat.' He comes back with a big bottle of water, some juice. I don't know what I remember what it was. I was delirious. I remember he brought me a sub. I ate the whole sub and drank the water. And I sat there for 5-10 minutes. I'm like, it stayed in my stomach. That's the first time in seven and a half, eight days. Now I actually kept something in there, and so I fly from there to Harrisburg, I go to the doctor and all that. I weighed 232 the next day at the hospital. But you gotta remember now I've eaten and drank stuff while I'm at home before I even got to the doctor the next day. I might have been lighter than that, but it was pure hell. And then I was just sick for years, and then eventually, I finally started getting better, and I went and saw Vince, that's how I got back in."

Did you think you were going to die?

"There were many nights where I went to bed, where I felt so sick. I'll give you an example, if I tried to do push-ups one day, I would do as many push-ups as I could. For one set, I would literally stand up, crawl over, lay down, and sleep till the next day. It was so debilitating, I couldn't even function because it turned into some sort of infection in my intestinal tract after I got over that stuff, and it just lingered and lingered till one doctor figured it out."

On the name The Lethal Weapon:

"That was when I was up in Canada. So I used that for a while, and then came down. And then when I started doing the sticks with my entrance I started doing routines with those. And then I would use a kendo stick and the matches, or the nunchucks, stuff like that. So it was, it was fun doing that."

On wrestlers trying to test him:

"Well, there are people that try to test you in wrestling and out of wrestling. I can give you examples with numerous guys I wrestled with that went through that. One guy tested Shamrock. Shamrock dropped him. He gets sued. Another guy tested British Bulldog, just harassing his wife for 15 minutes. Finally, Davey Boy drops the guy on his head. And then they're looking for him to arrest him and sue him, and their wives are just being hounded. I think Big Show was tested at a hotel one time, dropped the guy. I didn't see this. I heard that the guy just wouldn't leave him alone, and finally, Big Show dropped him, but they had a tape of that one, and he got out of it. That I heard through a couple of the other guys. The one with Bulldog and Shamrock, I rode with those guys all the time, so I know it does. I mean, people would test me. I walk into the Cleveland arena one day, and I don't know who it was. A guy was seven feet tall. I'm just walking in and he's like, 'I think I can take you.' I never even saw the guy in my life. I dropped my gym bag. I said, 'Let's go.' I'm like, Is this guy a basketball player or something? I don't even know who he was, but that's just how people are. It's like, as soon as it doesn't go their way, and they get cracked, now they want to sue you. Well, then don't start it to begin with. I've had people come up to me and start mouthing. Look, dude, just sign a waiver and we'll go. [So what happened with the seven-footer?] He walked away."

So if everybody has you at the top of the list for being the toughest guy in WWE, who's on your list? 

"I think, to me, there's a lot of tough guys in there. Because, like I said, when you're a big guy and you can move, you can usually throw a good punch, and you're usually not that easy just to tie up with and take down, they can usually fight back pretty well. But obviously, when Ken was younger, he would bang with anybody, even when Severn was in with us for a while. Dan never had fast hands or feet, but he was tough on the ground. And anybody that has 100 cage fights has a set on him, because you have to have a lot in you to go through 100 cage fights. But even when you look at Taker and Kane and Farooq, a lot of those guys, all of those guys were athletic, and they're big guys, so they can move, they can throw you. Obviously, Kurt's a hell of a wrestler, he was great, the best in the world at one time at that. But you can look at a lot of the other guys in there, obviously Brock. But most of the guys in there have a pretty hardcore attitude, so I think most of them can hold their own pretty well." 

On the SummerSlam 2000 match with Shane McMahon:

"That was pretty much the plan. I don't remember much being discussed differently than what we did. Most people don't realize, it was rare that I'd go out there and talk about the match and stuff in the ring before we go out and do an appearance. I didn't really walk through much with people. That was a rare one when we went out there to go up to the Titan Tron, we actually climbed up and that's high. And the worst thing was, there was nothing on the floor from the TitanTron until you're seven feet, eight feet away. Then there was a mat the size of a bed way out here. And I'm like, he's going to land on that backwards from up there? What if he falls straight down? This one guy, he’s one of the stunt coordinators, goes, ‘If he just steps back and falls this way, he'll land out there.’ I'm like, You're kidding me, right? I said, well that's insane to me. So they said, 'Okay, we'll do it.' He didn't drop, but he said, Okay, he'll do that. And I said, All right.

So we get up there the next day, I hit him with my stick, and he drops. Well, I'm supposed to drop an elbow on him, and I'm like, I have two feet to land there. How am I going to drop an elbow on this guy from 50 or 60 feet, whatever we were, I shimmy down. I might have still been 25 feet up. So I shimmy down halfway and jump from there and landed. But what happened is, overnight, somebody encased the mat with three-quarter-inch plywood around it. So if you have a limb sticking out, it's just going to snap off. So I had to land right there, drop an elbow on him and try not to completely pancake him. So I landed there, hit him with the elbow and pulled it off. But during the match, our runners would grab props anywhere, and sometimes they were real street signs. I'd be like, Guys, where are you grabbing this stuff? This is a real street sign. Well, don't ask Steve. So he gets out there, he hit me with a street sign one time. If you watch that match, it felt like it ripped the nose off my face. That metal thing just went peeling right down my face. I thought, Holy hell. Then Test and Albert interfered, you know, we had a good match. You know, everybody was getting beat on in that one." 

On whose idea it was for the Shane fall:

"Well, it had to be him. I don't think it was his dad. It had to be Shane. And never forget we were out there going over it and talking about it. I'm like, I'll crack him, crack him, crack him. But the worst part was that I was so sweaty from the match for 15 minutes, trying to hold on to those bars. I was just drenched in sweat. I kept worrying about slipping and dropping, so that's why I stopped where I did, held the bar and then cracked him because I just kept sweating so bad. And we were out there. I'll never forget, Vince is like, 'You need to get that stick out of the way. If you crack him and your stick’s here, and he drops, he's going to [fall differently].' I said, You know what, you're right. So it's good you thought of that. I had to crack him and make sure I got the stick out of the way so he didn't land on it and flip or something like that. It hits me, because you think of crazy little things like that that you wouldn't most of the time." 

On Steve Blackman’s elbow drop afterwards:

"Well, I mean, he dropped twice the distance. I had a narrow area to land in, and even at that 25 feet I was at, that's still hard to land right in that spot. But yes, he overshadowed it with the way he dropped. But I thought the match was pretty good. We did a lot, we hit hard in that match. We hit with all the weapons hard in that match and stuff like that, and took hard bumps. So I thought it went well."

On being pitched the Brawl For All:

"[Rolls eyes] All right. I'm at home on one of my days off, the office calls me and they go, 'We're having this Brawl For All and it's a real fight. You wear boxing gloves and you can do whatever you want.' I thought it was just somebody in the office ribbing me, because you got to remember those wrestlers do nothing but rib each other. So I'm like, 'Yeah, sure we are.' Then, I think it was Bruce Pritchard, he's like, 'Steve, we're having a Brawl For All, and you can do whatever.' I said, 'Let me get this straight, we're gonna have a Brawl For All. I can kick, shoot, punch, knee, elbow…' And they're like, yep. I said, 'What's the prize?' And they said, Well, you get an extra five grand a week and then the prize at the end, whatever it was. I said, 'Well, I don't believe you, but go ahead and sign me up.' I didn't believe him. I thought the whole thing was a rib, one of the guys playing a joke. So we get to the next TV, I haven't trained for this in a while, and I never forget. We get there, and they're like, you're fighting Mero tonight in the Brawl For All. I'm like, this thing's real?! Okay. So we go out in the ring, and there were 16 of us in it, we're going over the different things we could do. I said, 'Well, he told me I'm allowed to kick when he called me.' When we were out in the ring, Vince is like, 'What kind of kick do you mean?' And I should have thought faster. I stood there, and you know how in the MMA, most of us do fast, hard shin kicks. I flew with one and Vince was like, 'No, no. 'And Bradshaw's like, 'There's no way we're taking those.' I'm thinking, why didn't I just do a slow side kick or front kick or something just slower? I went out there and flew with it because I was warmed up. I'm like, Oh! So now they insisted no kicking, because I'm the only one out of 16 that wants to kick. Well, there's no knees, there were no elbows, there's no head butts. It's a boxing match with takedowns. So they put me against Marc [Mero], who in boxing was probably the best in there. I think he won New York Golden Gloves five years. So, great. So we go out there and they said, 'What are you gonna do?' I aid, 'I'm gonna take him down every 10 seconds.' Well, if you counted, I took him down 13 times in three minutes. I shot a jab. I threw a jab. Shot through a jab. Shot the third or fourth time I threw the jab, I faked the shot, and it came over top with a bomb. He was pretty quick. He ended up dropping his chin just a hair because I caught him here, and his feet staggered, or I finally caught him on the chin a couple of inches lower, I dropped him. But it was funny, because those gloves were massive, brand new. It was like wearing mittens like this to box with. I'm like, Who came up with this idea? Then three of the guys got hurt, and it just was horrible for the business. The people didn't even know what the hell was going on. I keep taking him down. People in the crowd are like, what is this?" 

On at first thinking he could win the Brawl for All:

"I did think that. And then after I fought Marc, I'm like, Okay, let me go home and train now, and let's get moving here. So one of my friends at home was about 6 foot 3, 300 pounds, amateur wrestler his whole life. So I started working, we started training, and he waist locked me, and just as he waist locked me, I wasn't expecting him to sit so fast, he sat on the side of my leg and tore the cartilage in my leg. I'm like, Oh, my God, this can't be happening. We were just starting to do warm-ups. I was going to throw, he'd throw, I'd throw, and he just sat on the side of my leg. I couldn't believe it. I had to get my leg worked on then, and I couldn't finish the thing. And I was livid, because I wanted to get out there at that point. And so that's what happened there."

On whether he has put wrestling behind him:

"I did at the time because, again, knowing I needed a couple, they told me up front, I need a couple of neck operations. Because when they go through the front, they can only do a certain amount of area one time. Had one done, cut my headaches down about 40%. Had another one done, cut it down again, so now I can function. I'm not in pain all day, and if I am, I can still work through it and go about my business. I can do sprints again, do stuff again. But at that time, for those years, it's like I didn't even want to think about it, because I knew I couldn't go back, knew it wasn't going back. And I thought, You know what, it's time to move on. And I just started focusing on my other stuff."

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, what 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 pop 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 realised 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." 

On possibly making a WWE return:

"I haven't even really discussed anything with anyone. Don't get me wrong. I mean, there's times where I thought, oh man, it'd be fun to go back there and do a hardcore match or something like that, and just flow with it, and just to do it again. You know, it's been 20 years, but I don't really bring it up. I haven't talked to anybody about it."

What is Steve Blackman grateful for?

"My wife and kids, to be healthy again and the way my business worked out."

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