Fred Rosser On Working With Bob Backlund In WWE, Pitching The Idea to Vince McMahon

When Fred Rosser was Darren Young in WWE, he had an on-screen life coach in Bob Backlund and he recently recalled how that came about. Rosser talked about working with Backlund in 2016 on a recent episode of Under the Ring, and you can check out some highlights below:

Fred Rosser on working with Bob Backlund: “When I was with Bob Backlund, he’s a one-take kinda guy. He’s old-school. We never rehearsed a lot, Bob Backlund and I. What you saw was what you got with us.”

On being paired with Backlund: “You know, tag teams don’t last forever and I knew sooner or later Titus and I would be broken up. So you’ve gotta have ideas. And I had done several autograph signings with Bob Backlund for Special Olympics and the Be A Star anti-bullying campaign. And every time he does autograph signings, he does them standing up, and so do I. So there was a point in my career when I was doing the signing with him, I’m looking over at Bob. And I said to myself, ‘Man, he’s energetic, I’m energetic. I’d love to–‘ And at the time WWE wasn’t heavy into managers, but I said to myself, ‘I’d love to have him as like my — not my manager, but something like my life coach.'”

On coming up with the plan: “And it was really my idea, and I’ve said it in many interviews because a lot of guys think that it was just given to me. It was actually my idea. And I wrote it out, I had visuals, I actually kind of mirrored the idea from Mike Tyson and his former trainer Cus D’Amato. Because they’re like strange bedfellows, but Mike was very, very locked in to his trainer Cus D’Amato. so that’s what I did. I took the ideas, I proposed them to Vince McMahon… I proposed the idea to him. He loved it, he called up Bob Backlund personally.”