The following are highlights from a recent WGD Weekly interview with Jake “The Snake” Roberts:
On the possibility of buying TNA: “I want to run an Indigogo and raise the money to buy that son of a bitch and do it right. Not to be in competition with Vince, but to do wrestling the way I liked it. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t. But, now I hear the guy from Smashing Pumpkins is snatching it, so maybe I should just buy the band Smashing Pumpkins and go on with my life and start singing.”
On how he would run TNA if he were able to purchase it: “I got all the thoughts, bro. There ain’t nobody better at that. I would make it simple, there would be good guys and there would be bad guys. There wouldn’t be no bullshit and there wouldn’t be twenty minute interviews. We would actually, ‘rassle…the world needs it, man.”
On he wants in the 2014 Royal Rumble match: “All I can hope for right now, you know, I’m trying to get myself in shape to do the Royal Rumble, one last time…You know, I’d like to go out on my own terms with my head held high, I think I deserve that. I’ve had thirty seven years in the ring and it was a wonderful life, it was crazy, insane, I did a lot of things wrong, but I did a lot of things right too, brother.”
On turning down Vince McMahon in 1984: “Vince McMahon had tried to hire me before when I was with Georgia Championship Wrestling, because he bought out Georgia Championship Wrestling from some individuals at the time. He tried to hire me and I did my stupid shit, cussed him out, called him a fag, and that’s not a cigarette by the way, and told him to shove it up his ass and walked out…then…I was back asking the man for a job.”
On a classic Andre The Giant story: “One instance that was pretty horrifying for me, it was his birthday and we were up in Montreal…he had quite a few bottles of wine, and a couple bottles of vodka too. We got in the ring and there is something you never want to see if you are an opponent, and that is a playful fucking giant. It’s dangerous…if they are giggling and they are hopping around, so, I think, ‘my god, are you fucking serious, what am I gonna do now?’…during the match, we would usually do a spot…he’d grab both ropes…and he’d squat down on me, it looked great, it normally didn’t bother me at all, but this night hi hand slipped off the rope and he adjusted every frigging vertebrae in my body…I just couldn’t believe it, it knocked the breath out of me, then I turned on my side and all of a sudden I felt my shoulder vibrating, I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck is that?’…and he is laughing…Dave Hebner came over and said, ‘Andre, what are
you doing laughing’…’I’m farting,’ he says, and my shoulder is vibrating, I don’t know what the world record for a fart is, but it was well into the thirty second range, and the stench, it would have gagged the maggots. My first thought was to get up and paint brush the son of a bitch, but, I quickly got over that.”
On his memories of traveling with a young Undertaker early in his WWE run: “He came to me and he says, ‘I hear you know all the great strip joints,’ I said, ‘yes, I do, worldwide,’ he says, ‘I’ll travel with you’…so, he tried to hang with me, and it’s a chemical world, so I was cheating. After about three or four weeks, we went to TV and Vince looked at him and said, ‘Mark, I don’t think you need the makeup today, you look like hell. Jake is killing you and a few days later, he was in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. Finally, I had to smarten him up and tell him how I was doing it, and we then became very, very good friends. I have all the respect in the world for Mark. He has earned everything that he has gotten. He is a unique character, I love the fact that he upholds kayfabe, just a great guy, and of course he was there for the stripper times with me, and we did it well.”