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Big Show On How Brock Lesnar and OVW Led to His Career Resurgance

July 3, 2020 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
Big Show Brock Lesnar 2003 Paul Wight Image Credit: WWE

The Big Show recently looked back on his time in OVW and working with Brock Lesnar in a new interview with TalkSport. You can check out some highlights below:

On working with Brock Lesnar: “Brock is one of those guys, just like Kurt Angle, who really got our business, the nuts and bolts of it, immediately, right off the bat. And I owe a resurgence of my career to Brock Lesnar. At the time, I come up from WCW and I had a lot of guys who really looked out for me and I was the big kid in the locker room. Ya know, [Hulk] Hogan, [Randy] Savage, [Ric] Flair, Arn [Anderson], Sting and [Lex] Lugar – all those guys – Scott [Hall] and Kevin [Nash] too – they all looked after me in WCW. Everybody was on a different thing, everybody was on guaranteed money, it really wasn’t as competitive. When I got to New York – or the WWF – it was a completely different shark tank.”

On being sent down to developmental in OVW: “I noticed I was lacking in a lot of areas of my career. It had a lot of holes in it. Whereas I was getting help before to fill in, I wasn’t getting any help when I moved to WWE because I was taking a spot that somebody else wanted. It was extremely competitive. And when I made mistake after mistake after mistake, I didn’t know what else to do with myself and I was pretty frustrated. They sent me down to Louisville after a knee surgery to rehabilitate and they kind of left me there for 10 months. They didn’t have creative for me and I kind of think it was one of those things where ‘this kid needs to go away and learn something.’”

On being put into a match with Lesnar early in Lesnar’s run: “I remember whoever Brock was working with when he came up here – because Brock, right when he first came up, everybody knew he was going to be something right away – whoever it was missed a flight or whatever it was and Brock didn’t have an opponent for the main event that night. So Jack Lanza put me in the main event that night. He said ‘well, we’ll have Big Show wrestle Brock’. And Brock and I, because we trusted each other, we actually just went out there and tore the house down and had fun. And that was one of the first agent reports that went from the live events and went back to Vince. Vince said to me ‘so you work pretty well with Brock?’ And I said ‘yeah.’ And then it went a long and they asked Brock who he wanted to work with and he said me. He said ‘he’s a giant who can work.’ So that kind of endorsement, they were forced to take another look at me and I was able to make the best of that opportunity. Down the line, Brock and I had some great feuds. I’ll never forget that stretcher match! Because I’m terrified of heights and he jacked me up about 30ft in the air on that forklift and he was just laughing knowing how scared I was up there! If you look at him when he’s on the forklift he’s legit laughing [laughs] because I’m just screaming like ‘you son of a gun!’

article topics :

Big Show, Brock Lesnar, OVW, Jeremy Thomas