Father James Mitchell Says His Run With Abyss Was One Of His Best

During a virtual signing for Captain’s Corner (via Post Wrestling), Father James Mitchell spoke about his partnership with Abyss in TNA and said it was one of the best runs of his career. Here are highlights:

On working with Abyss: “Clearly one of the best runs I ever had [was with Abyss]. Probably overall. I mean look, when I was on WCW, I was seen by more people but I was in a less important spot, you know what I mean? And TNA with Abyss, that was the perfect combination of manager and monster. Even when we were at the backburner, we were on the top of the mid-card, you know? When we weren’t figured in heavily. He’s an amazing guy. I used to tell him he gave way too much of himself, he’s left pieces of his body all over the f*cking world. But he’s very passionate about the business. It was an honor. He was one of the only wrestlers, other than [Chris] Kanyon, that I specifically lobbied to manage because when I first saw him, I said, ‘Man, I could do something with this guy’ and not to disparage anybody he worked with before, but, he had not been on that kind of platform before, Spike TV and I actually made the pitch, ‘Man, you need to put me with this guy’ and it might have taken nine, ten months but, he is a great friend, a very hard, hard, hardworking guy, loves the business and I’m glad to know that he’s cashed in his chips and he’s got a grown up job in WWE. I’m assuming the kind with insurance and benefits and 401k, dental vision, all that stuff… He deserves it man… There’s the famous clip of Jeff Hardy doing the Swanton Bomb or whatever it’s called, where there was the whole stage and he climbed on top of the set. Then he had to leap out, I don’t know, the length of this hotel room, to then fall all the way down and land on Abyss. I told them all day, ‘Guys, don’t do this sh*t. You’re gonna die’ and there’s a spot like right after he hits it, I have tears in my eyes. I thought they were dead. I thought both of them were dead and Abyss, he would just put himself through that all the time and he kept trying to top himself and I’m like, ‘Man, you gotta stop at some point. At some point, they’re gonna bring out the chainsaw. Let’s bring it down.’ Remember when [Mick] Foley fell through the cage and they play that highlight for 12 years, forever, right? But you can’t… At some point, you got to roll on your laurels. But, yeah, God man, what a sweet guy. I hate to say that about a heel but what a genuine, sweet person, good friend and I wish him all the best and he made me so, what can I say?”

On the fireball thrower explosion incident in ECW: “Yes [I can explain what happened with the fireball thrower incident in ECW]. I had a flash gun which you put in between — you wear it like a ring and it had two barrels on it so, originally I had a one barrel but I upgraded to two barrels and it was about the size of a .44 Magnum casing pretty much. You would put flash paper in it and you would hit a little glow plug just like on a cigarette lighter and it would make the paper go boom and fly out. Well magicians usually put a little piece of paper about this big in it while I brought 8 x 10 sheets of flash paper. So we started experimenting with putting more and more pieces in and getting a bigger pop and we were going to be doing a pay-per-view that night, so I wanted to make a big blast as we came out down the runway and I end up putting an entire 8 x 10 so imagine this [holds up Post-it Notes] many of those, crumpled up and ramrodded into a flash gun and I was putting it in with a toothbrush and somehow, I accidentally touched the button. I forgot to take the battery out of it so, I touched the button that ignited it and because the toothbrush was down in it, it couldn’t go up so it went out and it exploded in my hand and I’ve told this story many times and it never changes even though I always fact check it. It went bang! And I looked at Mikey [Whipwreck] and I went, ‘F*ck! This is not good.’ Mikey had pieces of meat on his face. Like in Pulp Friction, where the gun goes off in the car, Mikey had my blood on his face and I was like, ‘Oh sh*t’ but it wasn’t bleeding yet and I was just looking, I was in shock and then suddenly, it just started squirting to the beat of my heart and God knows what I was on then… So, I bump into Sandman in the bathroom. I had been buying these silly gimmicks and sh*t beforehand. Sandman thought it was a magic trick and he’s like, ‘Ah! Red guy! That’s the best one yet. That looks great!’ I’m like, ‘Nah man, I think I’m gonna die’ and I walked up to the mirror… I walked up to put water over my hand and I saw that my jacket was all exploded and I went, ‘Oh no’ and then there was I saw a big wet spot and my finger went about that deep into my abdomen. At this point, I about fainted, they took me to the hospital, blah, blah, blah. Blew off part of my finger here… It was much easier to kayfabe when I had the long fingernails because you couldn’t really notice the difference. But, yeah, this was horrible. My hand looked like Leatherface’s mask. Yeah, it was a nightmare. But I recovered. They actually said the worst part was the shrapnel on my stomach because they said it was like getting shot with a small [unable to make out word] gun. So they just taped my hand up and said, ‘F*ck your hand. We’re just gonna tape it up over here. We gotta worry about this stuff in your gut,’ and the lucky thing for me is that believe it or not, I apparently have a very muscular gut. It’s big but it’s solid. Sheiky baby… So apparently, that kind of saved my ass. So I had a lot of muscle that it had to go through.”

On ECW One Night Stand 2005: “The first time that WWE branded an ECW pay-per-view and I’m sure they were expecting it to flop and I remember Vince McMahon standing there in the hallway or in the shoot when Sandman came out, and the crowd went ape sh*t, the look on all their faces. But Vince started smiling, yeah, I get it. Yeah, because you could see them looking like who are these rag tag, raggamuffin, outlaw wrestlers? But when that crowd popped, I remember seeing Vince ‘till this day, he goes [big smirk]. He got a mad scientist evil smile like, ah! I get it now.”

On getting into the wrestling business: “I lied, conned and swindled my way into the business. There was no way to get into pro wrestling. Unlike some of my predecessors like Paul Heyman and [Jim] Cornette who had an in because they were photographers and they were at least hovering on the outer bands of the universe. I was just a guy who was too hard-headed to take a ‘no’ and I was stupid enough to call promoters I didn’t know and insist that they should hire me and through a whole confluence of events, I eventually started sending video tapes of myself cutting horrible promos because I didn’t know what I was doing… Any who, I bullsh*tted my way in. I mean we obviously can elaborate on this over the next little while but it was a complete con job to get in and the only way I got through was because I had a decent vocabulary and I could basically cut a better promo than anybody on the outlaw shows that I was working with. That was my in. I have one skill.”