Scotty 2 Hotty Recalls His Chemistry With Dean Malenko, Linda McMahon Banning Him From Doing Top Rope DDT

Scotty 2 Hotty recently looked back on his match with Dean Malenko at Backlash 2000 and how Linda McMahon forbade him from ever doing a certain move again afterward. The WWE alumnus spoke with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp for a new interview and discussed the match, which saw him battle Malenko for the WWF Light Heavyweight Championship. You can check out some highlights below, per Fightful:

On his match with Malenko at the show: “I remember being there. It was in Washington, D.C. and I’m getting together with Dean that day and we didn’t really have a whole lot. We’d wrestled so many times at that point, it felt like we kinda missed the boat on the whole match. We were on Velocity or whatever that Saturday Night Shotgun slot was at that time. Metal or Velocity or Jakked. There’s been so many times it’s been rebranded over the years. We must have wrestled every week. We’d get to TV, we’d be wrestling. So by the time we got to Backlash, it really didn’t even feel special. But like you said, twenty years later, that’s the match that everybody talks about and the finish everybody talks about was that DDT off the top. I dodged a bullet that day, man. I was lucky.”

On being told by Linda McMahon to never do the move again: “Actually, when I came back through the curtain, Linda McMahon was standing there. She pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ Linda McMahon said that. That was sick. I feel like I dodged a bullet because if you look at that, there’s no way I didn’t break my neck. I did have neck surgery the next year, so that may have played into it.”

On his chemistry with Malenko: “Dean and I was just a perfect combination. I think it sums up pro wrestling. If you had Dean Malenko versus Dean Malenko, it’s eh, okay. If you had Scotty 2 Hotty versus Scotty 2 Hotty, eh. But when you take black against white, and two different things, that’s where the interest comes from to me. That’s part of the art. I think as we grew up we saw all these larger-than-life characters, you go, ‘Oh, I want to see this guy wrestle that guy,’ that’s what makes it fun. I think back to the territory days, you have all these territories coming to the WWF. So you have all these different styles and characters meshing, which made it fun. The negative of the Performance Center is everybody is being trained under the same roof by eight to ten of the same people. So it’s basically all the same style and I think you lose something in that.”