Bruce Pritchard on the End of Yokozuna’s WWE Career, Offering to Help Him Lose Weight

– On the latest Something to Wrestle With, Bruce Prichard recalled the decision to release Yokozuna from his WWE contract. While he had a run as one of the top guys in the company in the 1993 and 1994, by 1996 his weight had become such an issue that he was unable to compete and his health was at risk. He was sent home after his match at the 1996 Survivor Series, where he only briefly entered the ring to go after Vader and the match ended in a no contest.

Yokozuna tried to lose lose weight and he did lose 100 lbs., he still weighed in at nearly 600 lbs. and the he failed a physical from the New York State Athletic Commission, which resulted in his his wrestling license being revoked in several other states. Prichard discussed the decision to send him home and ultimately release him. He would make infrequent independent wrestling appearances after until he passed away in 2000.

Highlights from the discussion, and the full podcast, are below:

On the end of Yokozuna’s run at Survivor Series: “Well, it should have been the end before that. It’s just another example of in the day, Vince kind of having that blind faith and wanting to continually help. ‘By God, they’ll come around. No, they’ll do it, they’ll be all right.’ And then when it’s in front of you, you’re feeling it, it just takes that last step sometimes. So you know, this was it. It was that, ‘God dammit, man. He can’t get in the ring again. Not on on our watch.’ And it should have been done before that.”

On telling Yokozuna he was done: “[We said] ‘We wanna save your life. We want you to have a life, we want to see you get healthy. So get healthy, drop this weight, and we will help you.’ You know, ‘We’ll do whatever we have to do to get you where you need to be, whether it’s,’ you know, we talked about the band thing [laparoscopic gastric banding]. But that was even still pretty damned new at that point. That was almost, I want to say it was experimental, but it was expensive, and nobody was really sold on it yet. Lap band. He talked about getting liposuction, it’s like, ‘What the f**k? That’s not gonna help you. You have to get into some kind of shape.’ And then at some point, even if let’s say that he goes out and does it on his own. With all that skin, he’s gonna have to have some major surgeries anyway. But in order to come out of those better, you’ve gotta lose the weight and get into some kind of shape on your own first for any of that s**t to work. So it was a heart-to-heart conversation, saying, ‘Rodney, we want to help you. We want to get you in shape, and we want to fix you. But you know, we’ve been down this road. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes to get it done.'”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Something to Wrestle with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.