Arn Anderson On Cactus Jack vs. Vader Rivalry In WCW, How WCW Viewed Cactus, Ron Simmons Winning World Title

In a recent edition of ARN, Arn Anderson discussed the Cactus Jack vs. Vader rivalry in WCW, how WCW viewed Cactus compared to WWE, Ron Simmons winning the world title, and much more. You can read his comments below.

Arn Anderson on Ron Simmons winning the world title in WCW: “I thought it was great. Ron is a guy that had the look, had the credentials, the pedigree, amateur football player, professional football, you name it. The guy was a 600-pound bench presser for god sakes. He had it all. Ron was a good choice.”

On the Cactus Jack vs. Vader rivalry in WCW and Cactus being able to take punishment: “The key to the whole thing was, Cactus didn’t care. You beat him, abuse him, hit him with every piece of furniture in the building. It’s like the guy just would not stay down. He was just almost to a point of you could cripple him, but you couldn’t kill him. The guy just would not die. He would not stay down, and that made [Vader] even more vicious in all the stuff that he did. It was like Cactus built a career on getting slaughtered. It wasn’t because all the great offense he had and all the great storytelling, it was just the fact that the man would just take any amount of abuse you could dish out and at the end of the day, he was still probably the only one left standing.”

On differences in how WCW and WWE viewed Mick Foley: “It doesn’t matter what I think or what I saw in him or you saw in him. It would’ve been who was the boss at the time and what did he see in him? The fact that he didn’t have a body, he wasn’t young, he wasn’t a matinee idol – that’s what they wanted, and that’s what they were looking for. When he went to WWE, they saw a way to take his inability to show pain and all that stuff and to create characters – different slants of that character to where it was just one-dimensional and WCW was, ‘Hey here’s a guy that just won’t stay down.’ Well, at least you know how to push that and promote it. That’s all you got. Consequently, you take that same guy and he’s falling out of the ceiling and sitting up with his teeth through the roof of his mouth and going, ‘Have a nice day.’ Well, that’s just brilliance. That’s the difference on how you create a character and how you don’t.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit ARN with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.