D-Von Dudley Breaks Down the Infamous Mae Young Table Spot

The Dudley Boyz in their heyday were famous for putting opponents through tables, to the point where remembering any one particular victim has to be a challenge. Except, perhaps, for one of the most notable: then 77 year-old Mae Young. When Bubba Ray slammed her through the wood off the top rope, it was a shocking moment, albeit one that Young recovered from just fine.

Some three decades later, D-Von Dudley has gone into depth with Scott Johnson at Going Ringside about how that spot went down, and as partner Bubba has claimed in the past, put them on the map in WWE.

On Vince McMahon hoping to get them heel heat:

“Vince tried to turn his heels. He said that he thought this would be a perfect thing to turn us heels. We weren’t baby faces really. We were kind of baby faces, but we weren’t. Coming from ECW, people knew who we were. Not the majority of the WWE fans knew who we were, but I would say a good percentage did. So, we weren’t getting cheered because we came from ECW. He wanted us turned full heels.

He thought at first Terri Runnels was going to be able to make us heels by putting her through the table when we did the things with the Hardyz. Okay. And me and Bubba both said that’s not going to work, cuz at that time the business has changed where the bad guys were becoming good guys and the good guys were becoming bad guys. So we said we said that’s going to turn us babyface. He didn’t believe it, and it somewhat did. So now move forward. and he goes, ‘I got an idea. We’re going to put Mae Young through a table.'”

On their immediate reaction:

“He at that time he could have done whatever he wanted to do and said whatever he wanted to say. And me and Bubba both said, ‘No, that’s not going to work. I don’t care if she’s 90 years old, 102. We put her through that table, that crowd’s going to lose their mind.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

On Mae Young’s reaction

“Mae Young is not going to do something she doesn’t want to do. If they said Mae, we’d like the Dudleyz to put you through a table, I’m sure without any thought Mae Young said, Okay, fine. Let’s do it. Because she was just that type of person. She was probably one of the toughest women you would ever come in contact with. She was tougher than Moolah, I would say.”

“We saw their matches with Jeff Jarrett. We knew how Jeff treated them. Jeff didn’t hold back and Jeff literally beat the hell out of
them. But we came from the old school mentality just like Jeff did. But we were always taught that you very gently touch somebody cuz they may not want to work with you again. And we knew Mae was old school. So we wanted to make sure that that was the case. We wanted to be gentle with her.”

“And we get to the back and Mae Young said ‘Come here, you two!’ and we said ‘What’s going on?’ and she was like BAM! and slapped Bubba and he went, holy cow, I stepped back. She was like, ‘Next time you’re in the ring with me just make sure one thing: you hit me like you hit one of the boys.’ and I just went ‘Duly noted, you ain’t got to slap me, I’m good.’ You hit her. Especially when she still got a right hand that slapped the hell out of Bubba. You hit her.”

On why Bubba did the move rather than D-Von:

“There was just a little bit of talk between me and Bubba and I was like, we’re going to put her through a table. So, Bubba thought I was saying, well, if you want to do it, you can. You know, you get the spotlight. I was like, No, no, you do it because if I slip or something happens and she slips, it’s on me. I was like, “You take it. You put it through the table. It’s cool.” So, I was happy with that.

“I think that was my biggest fear was the office getting mad because, you know, I might have dropped Mae or did something. But Bubba was good with that. I’m scared of heights. So me going up on the top rope to put somebody through a table was never my forte anyway. It took me a long time to get comfortable to go up on the top rope to do the thing we call the ‘What’s Up.’ You know where I jump off the top rope into the guy’s crotch with my head and kind of like put him out of his misery. So me going up there, carrying somebody up there, especially an 80-year-old woman? No”

On the reaction in the back afterward:

“I think Vince knew deep down inside that that just put us over the top as babyfaces, because it did. If you go back and look at that video, they actually thought that somebody was going to run down from the back or Mark Henry was going to get up and stop us from doing it. And when they didn’t and nobody came and Bubba stood up, you can see that whole crowd during the hard camera stand up and go, ‘Oh my god, it’s not going to happen.’ Even Jerry the King Lawler didn’t believe it was going to happen because Jerry didn’t know it. The commentators were left um in the dark about a lot of things because they want Vince wanted that natural reaction and that’s what we got. So when you go back and listen to Jerry the King Lawler, you hear him say, ‘No, the Dudleyz are not going to do this. Somebody’s got to be coming from the back. Somebody’s got to be’ and nobody came.”

On Mae Young’s reaction afterward:

“After Smackdown, she told me and Bubba that she wanted to talk to Vince and have a cage match. Like, there was a cage match and me and Bubba were in, or got involved in. She wanted to run down. She wanted us to hit her, put her down, then take it to the top and put her through the top through the a table through the top of the cage.”

“Sometimes I look back and go, ‘What the hell were we thinking? That was such a risk.’ But you know what? It worked. God was in our favor. The angels were watching us, guided her through where she didn’t get hurt. And neither did Bubba, neither did I. And I’m just happy to this day that we still talk about it and be in awe of, still, what we did.”