Mark Henry Says Vince McMahon Told Him There’s A Lot Of Entitlement Backstage

In an interview with the Jim Ross Report, Mark Henry spoke about his role backstage and how Vince McMahon told him there was a lot of “entitlement” among some of the talents. Here are highlights:

On encountering pro wrestling bias in his non-wrestling career: “I have. There’s been many times where people’s like, ‘You do the Olympic wrestling?’ And I was like, ‘No I was on the Olympic team but I was a weightlifter. I did professional wrestling for the WWE.’ And they would go, ‘Oh the fake stuff?’ The only thing that I could consider fake about it is the fact that there are people that watch it and say they don’t. I’ve always kind of took my jabs at people but it’s kind of like a war between academics and athletes. Athletes have always kinda said ‘You wish you were me’ and academics were always like, ‘We’ll take the money that y’all bring in, but you’re beatin’ your body and brain up and you’re going to need somebody like me to take care of you when you get done and when the sport is done with you and you’re all washed up.’ It’s the same thing with those intellectual people and they’re always gonna be around and there’s nothing you can do to fix that. I don’t take a lot of stock in trying to convince people in seeing it my way. I associate with people that are of like mind and enjoy what I do and will take my advice and my experience in every facet in sports and entertainment and say, ‘There’s a learnable moment, there’s a teachable moment in here somewhere. Let me know something about your life.’ Those are the people I try to be around. I don’t really let the other people into my circle very easily.”

On his current role in WWE: “I work as an ambassador for the company, technically. I’ve always worked with the talent development team and the marketing team as far as […] all of the charities that the WWE endorses and sponsors. I kept hearing all of these stories about people being too prideful to clean the locker rooms and buildings that we frequent. Veterans feeling like some people were too full of themselves to take advice. When I talked to Vince about this role, I said, ‘I’m hearing a lot of negativity.’ And he said, ‘You know what man, there’s a lot of entitlement.’ And I was like, ‘Why? Y’all didn’t allow us to have any entitlement. What changed? What’s changed is the mentality of the entertainment. I’m not happy with that. I’m not good with it. I’m basically trying to reprogram everybody that I walk past and say ‘Hey man, this is really the mindset that you need to be in being here. It’s not so much me going, ‘Hey, you do it my way or the highway’ as ‘It’s my way, it’s everybody’s way.’

On his advice for younger wrestlers: “You should be prideful and thankful that you didn’t grow up in the time where I came into the building where people didn’t want to help you. People helping you was helping them take your job. And now it’s so completely different. Everybody’s trying to mentor you to take over the business and be responsible for the business after us old guys are gone. And they don’t get it. There’s some of them that do. The Seth Rollins of the world. Guys that understand, that were young boys. That carried bags and cleaned the locker room and if I said, ‘Man go get me a bottle of water’, they wouldn’t think it was demeaning, they would just go get me a bottle of water because I was thirsty. That’s the mentality that we’re trying to build with these young guys. I relish the opportunity to do that.”

If you use any of the above quotes, please credit The Jim Ross Report with an h/t to 411mania.com