Paul Ellering Recalls Talk With Ole Anderson That Led To Him Becoming a Manager

Paul Ellering turned to managing once he was done in the ring, and he recently recalled how a conversation with Ole Anderson led to the switch. Ellering is best known to modern fans as a manager of such teams as The Road Warriors, Jake Roberts, the Authors of Pain and the Final Testament. Before all that though, he was an in-ring performer from the late ’70s to the early ’90s that included runs with the AWA, Jim Crockett Promotions, and more.

Ellering appeared on Busted Open Radio and during the conversation, he looked back on his move from wrestling to managing and how Anderson facilitated it. You can see the highlights below (per Fightful):

On How He Moved From a Wrestler to a Manager:

“I was wrestling Robert Gibson in Columbus and I ruptured my Patella tendon. Jerry Owens takes me to the hotel, we’re going to go the hospital the next morning. Who’s there but Dr. Jimmy Andrews, who was head of the Birmingham clinic. He operated on me the first time and I was rehabbing for about seven months. Ole [Anderson] calls me up and he says, ‘You ready to get back to work yet?’ I go, ‘Yeah, I guess I’m ready.’ I worked really hard to get back, I hadn’t done anything in the ring though. After I wrestled on TV, Ole says, ‘You know, maybe we should give the leg just another month or two, it seems like you’re favoring it.’ I said, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’ He said, ‘Did you ever think about being a manager? Be careful because you get stigmatized as a manager, then that’s where you’ll be the rest of your career.’”

On Having a Dream Years Earlier He Would Be a Manager:

“Even before I got into wrestling, I was in college and I had a premonition dream that I was a wrestling manager. This was five years before I even thought about wrestling. When Ole said that, I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ The rest is history.”