Perry Saturn Recalls The Radicalz Leaving WCW & Joining WWE

Insight with Chris Van Vliet recently interviewed former WCW and WWE star Perry Saturn, who discussed the major moment of the group collectively known as The Radicalz (Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Saturn, and Eddie Guerrero) leaving WCW in early 2000 and making the jump to WWE. Below are some highlights from Insight:

Perry Saturn on Why He Felt It Was Time To Leave WCW

“We all felt that way, and watching matches and stuff now, we were wrong with a lot of the things. Every now and then, Eric would tell them that you have to talk about this, and they wanna talk about the guys in the ring. To us, that was happening all the time. If Eric hadn’t got fired, I’d have never left. I loved working with Eric. Eric really liked me and always took care of me. But we worked all the time. The mid-card guys did everything. In the beginning of the month, first day of the month, they give you your booking sheet for the month.

“I’m on the road the entire month, so I have no idea when I’m going home. I have to wait to the next booking sheet, and then they’d want to try to elevate one of us, and the group of guys would say, ‘Well, the house shows are down. These guys can’t draw.’ Well, no, the house shows aren’t drawing because you guys aren’t making the house shows. You’re the main event guys, so sh*t like that was frustrating. But our problem when we left was because Benoit and Sullivan, you know, and we were all getting residual heat for that.”

On How Quickly The Radicalz Joining WWE Came Together

“Bro, that happened so f*cking fast. I had an internet guy, Jeff, and he called [Bruce] Prichard to see if they were interested. While that was going on, Bill Busch had this meeting telling us that anybody who doesn’t want to be here, they will release them. So we were saying we want to be released, and they were trying to talk us out of it. Prichard called me back an hour later and said we want you in Connecticut now, and I’m like, okay, well we got to get out of the building here first. Vince Russo was the booker, and he’d book and have us going over. Mike Graham or Kevin Sullivan would take the match, and they’d have us do the job. We’d get to the back, and Vince would go, ‘What are you guys doing?’ So we said okay, we don’t want to work with Sullivan or Mike Graham anymore.

“You know the cartoon Foghorn Leghorn, but the little chicken hawk that wants to fight everybody. That’s Mike Graham. They’d get him drunk in the middle of the day, so he comes up to me and pulls a knife out on me in Cincinnati, Ohio, says he’s going to kill us all, motherf*cker is mad, never drew a dime. I called the police and filed a police report. Now we take that and go to Time Warner’s Human Resources Department, and that was it. Bill Busch tried to talk us out of it, and I got worked up and started yelling at him and sh*t. He wasn’t going to talk us out of it. And once the police came to the building to interview Mike Graham, Bill Busch said, ‘Okay, you guys got to go.’”

On How Close He Was With the Rest of the Group

“For a couple years, I worked with these guys all the time. Went out with them, traveled. Those guys were friends a lot longer than I was their friend, but we all respected each other and stuff. They were starting to do the Horseman angle with Dean and Chris and Arn and Flair. Arn couldn’t work anymore. Those guys went to Flair without telling me and wanted me to be the enforcer, so we started to do that. We were getting close, and very similar personalities. Me and Benoit were more similar. Dean’s really mellow and sh*t, but Dean is so professional. If I wanted to be a pro wrestler, a real professional, I’d watch him and do what he did. Eddie and I’d worked over 200 times, I think.”

WWE later released Saturn in November 2002. Perry Saturn recently launched a new YouTube channel discussing wrestling and his career.