Justin Roberts Recalls Meeting Vince McMahon, Working His First WrestleMania

– Justin Roberts spoke with Wrestling Inc promoting his book Best Seat in the House: Your Backstage Pass through My WWE Journey. Some highlights are below:

On when he started writing the book: “It took about three years. It was about 3-4 years when I first started…It actually started when I was still with the company. I was on a long flight and trying to stay awake. I had been toying with the idea for a while and I thought, you know what, I’m just going to start this out. I started typing the story out and got quite a bit down and then I realized, okay, there are some stuff I can say, some stuff that I can’t, I’m not going to do anything with this, and will just sit on it for a while. As soon as I got released, the next day I picked up the computer and started typing away again.”

On who his favorite wrestlers growing up were: “Right off the bat, Mr. Perfect. I like the characters such as The Genius, Brother Love, the Ultimate Warrior, Jake the Snake, Million Dollar Man, Legion of Doom, Nasty Boys. I just like everybody. I never had a favorite, I just liked everybody and don’t believe I had just one favorite. I was just into everybody.”

On meeting Mr. Perfect: “He was very cool, calm, laid back. Very confident and funny, every time I saw him he told me that I looked like Tom Zenk [Z-Man in WCW] and he would tell me Tom Zenk stories and how he would stand up for him. It was in High School maybe, like people used to pick on Tom in High School and he would stick up for him so you would just hear these Tom Zenk stories every time I saw him; whether it was the times I saw him or whether it was at the Hotel Bar when WWE was in town, he was cool. When I Reffed his match he would grab my arm, and I had a very scrawny arm and I got bruised so I took a picture of it and called it the ‘Perfect Bruise.’ I marked out for anything with Hennig, I was just a really big fan.”

On his favorite wrestling era: “My favorite would probably be the early to mid 90’s, late 80’s and early 90’s. I loved the characters and the storylines. Everything was so well planned out and happened over six months, with a pay per view every four months, so it wasn’t like a pay per view every three weeks. People ask me about pay per views, and I don’t remember every pay per view because they happened so often and practically blended in but if you wanted to talk about pay per views in the early 90’s, I remember those because there were only like 4 a year and you could keep track, and remembered everything that happened, so I loved that era and thought it was super cool.”

On his favorites during that the Monday Night War: “Oh man, [Steve] Austin and Bret [Hart] on Raw, just everybody on WCW because you had the Savage and Hogan, Sting, Flair and Luger, it just goes back to not having favorites and liking everybody, seeing everything going on. Brian Pillman was awesome in that era. Everybody was cool, it was just entertaining TV on both channels, just flipping back and forth between channels. I was lucky that my remote in college had a back button so when you hit it it’d just go back to the last station I was watching, so when you hit that one button it would go back to USA and TNT and that was what I did, I flipped back and forth every week. I would never watch just one show, just flipping back and forth.”

On getting a job with WWE: “I was working the independents since I was 16 and when I was 22, I was sending video tapes and resumes all the time. I had been sending them to WWF and WCW and then when it became WWE and I just been sending stuff for a long time. Right when I graduated college I let them know that I just graduated college willing to do anything you guys need. I had sent a lot of emails and letters in the past, but they just never really responded. Then when I sent this one, we talked about it and said that they were going to give me a tryout so they gave me a dark match at Raw and two dark matches on SmackDown the next night.”

On what it was like meeting Vince McMahon for the first time: “Intimidating. But, he was really cool and nice. Just kind of welcoming. One of the days inside an elevator it was me, John Cena, Shelton Benjamin, Rob Conway and maybe one more, but elevators are pretty awkward to begin with, and us in there with Vince was very awkward. One of them thanked him for the opportunity, but he said, no, thank you guys. You guys are the future. Cena really took that to heart there.”

On working his first WrestleMania: “It was neat because it had been handed to me and then pulled away a couple of different times. I didn’t really know it was going to happen until I got in the ring and the music started playing. I really didn’t know if that match was going to happen, if I was going to be announcing it. When I did it was just really cool to see around 80,000 people in a football stadium and be in the middle of the ring was just really neat, really neat.”