Sean Mooney Says Bray Wyatt Is Hampered By Overscripting, Talks His Time in WWE

– Former WWE announcer Sean Mooney discussed wrestling’s problem with overscripting promos and his time in WWE in a new interview with Wrestling Inc. The highlights are below:

On being one of the voices of his era of wrestling: “Yeah. You know what is really interesting about this whole – I don’t want to say resurgence, but in a sense, it really is with the WWE and that Network that they have. It is amazing how it’s just burst open again because a lot of people remember that period being one of the greatest in professional wrestling history, and I think in a lot of ways for me it was looking back. Looking at what happened in the 80s and 90s, which is what this podcast that I do now; joined by ‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan is really all about; celebrating that time. I was out of wrestling for a long time. It wasn’t because I had any reason to look back on it and have regrets doing it, it’s just that I went on and did other things when I left in 1993. I still have a lot of friends that are in WWE still and stay in contact with them; but within the last few years as I mentioned with the Network, people are being able to go back and look at all this stuff on the Network, it is just amazing. I really initially was blown away by it because people just started to contact me, but now I really embraced it because I understand what that meant to a lot of people. It wasn’t what I had meant on television, but it was because I was part of it; it’s as though I had a part on this great show that people loved in the 80s as I was one of the players. I still have people who come up to me and say that they used to watch me every week on some of the shows that I was on. It’s just really cool to have that response from people still. I’ve been gone almost 25 years almost so it’s really great.”

On his podcast with Hacksaw Jim Duggan: “We drop every Wednesday morning at 7AM eastern time, and it’s really been a great adventure so far. Initially when Court contacted me, I was curious as to what it would all be about. Then when I started talking to him, and we talked over weeks, he asked me if I had an idea on how I would like to do one of these podcasts if I wanted to do it, and I talked about maybe having a co-host with someone I had worked with. I started thinking about it; I want to approach this completely different than most of these. I wanted to get somebody from that era who was on a different side of the curtain to me and give a perspective from what I experience from television production being in the WWF and everything I had watched behind the scenes, and also get somebody who was pretty much from the other side – not just from the wrestling perspective, but from a Superstar perspective as well.

“When you look at Jim Duggan and I, we come from really different worlds. I didn’t come from the wrestling world. At the time I was working with MLB in New York when I had auditioned for the WWF, and Jim is old school wrestling, who came up through the ranks, from all the independence and Mid-South, and so I think when you bring us together, there are a lot of things that we talk about that I still wonder till this day from the boys perspective, and then I think initially Jim looked at this experience going through it in his life, when he gets in an interview situation, it’s one person asking him questions, well that is not the way we work, initially it was more of a shoot interview, but now we are going back and forth with the real idea of this is if someone were to drop in on this conversation, they would hear just two guys talking about something that they loved and that is the way I approach this every single week because I am still wide-eyed and learning a lot of new things about what went on then that I didn’t have the opportunity because we had different perspectives back then. I was never one of the boys, and now I am asking all these questions that I had thought about back then, which has definitely been a great experience for me.”

On not being a wrestling fan growing up: “Well, it wasn’t that I wasn’t a wrestling fan; I just never had the opportunity to see it. I lived in Tucson, AZ, where back then it was a small city, a small town in a lot of ways. We didn’t get a lot of independence coming in or stuff like that, so I didn’t really get a chance to see it so when I moved back to New York, that was in the early 80’s when I started working for MLB Productions, and I just remember how huge it was becoming at that point. You have to think about it being 1982, where Vince [McMahon] really took the chance and did WrestleMania and that whole co-promotion with MTV and how it was exploding, and New York was the hub of it. That was when I started getting educated in it and started to become a fan, and then the opportunity came up and I never looked back.”

On his adjustment period to wrestling when he joined WWE: “Ah man. Well, that’s one thing in my career – because I’ve done so many different things covering sports. I was a huge Baseball fan when I went to go work for Major League Baseball. I loved Baseball and followed the Dodgers because we didn’t have a pro team at the time in Arizona, so we had to adopt other cities; one thing I’ve always done is do my homework – till this day, no matter what I’m doing, I make sure I know that I am prepared. I had two weeks to prepare to go to WWF. You didn’t have the internet back then so you had to find different ways to do it, and I had some wrestling magazines. My friend was working up there was sending me all kinds of WWF Magazines to get familiarized with the talent. When I got up there I was prepared; I knew everybody and knew all the storylines going on because it’s like anything else, I took it very seriously and I wanted the opportunity to get in front of a camera. That is what I wanted to do.”

On if he had a hard time backstage with the talent: “If you remember at that time; Vince, and his genius of having a goal to where he wanted to go. He knew he couldn’t do it with the people that had produced wrestling at that point. He knew I had to take it to another level and way beyond, and the only way he was going to do this is to get the best production people he could get. At that time – you also had old school wrestlers coming in. You had other guys, who didn’t really come from wrestling generations, and then you had people from the television world – network television world from all over the country colliding all at once. It was really a kayfabe world. When you walk into the locker rooms and they’re speaking carny; you didn’t take your shoes off on a flight because they were merciless.

“It took a good year and I’ve said many times before; if it wasn’t for Gorilla [Monsoon] and it wasn’t for Alfred [Hayes] it took a while for me to earn their trust and their respect, but then they really took me under their wings and helped me tremendously. Everyday from that point on they told me that I wasn’t one of the boys. I could be friendly, you can be friends in a sense, but never think you are one of them, and that was the best lesson I ever got, and I never forgot that until the day I left WWE. There was a lot of stuff that happened, and Alfred told me that they were going to do things to me, and it wasn’t vicious to the point where it was, but it was pretty intense, but I never said a word; I took it and after about a year I was ‘in,’ not one of them, ever, but I was in and was respected, which is the best way that I could put it. ”

On guys today being hampered by over-scripted promos: “Well, we were talking like Bray Wyatt, who I think is great. His promos that he cuts, it reminds me of Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts. I call it the slow burn and some of the stuff that they do; and some of the guys that they are pushing are up there. Roman Reigns and these other guys I think are great, but it’s kind of like having a Governor on them; if you take these characters and allow them to develop. You think back to some of those people that were instrumental in developing The Rock, and a really good friend of mine who worked closely there said that Vince McMahon had gave him the idea, but in order for him to own it, The Rock took it and ran with it. I’m not involved with how they do that anymore, but I don’t think they have the ability as much to develop that on their own and really own it, which is how they become those people. The story like Stone Cold Steve Austin; who would have really say to him that his is how you are going to do this; you are going to be a heel/babyface, and be able to cross the line whenever you want and people are still going to love you. He basically said you know what, screw it, I’m just going to do it and look what happened. That is kind of my view today. I’m not really in it so I don’t know the inner workings; I’m looking at it from a total fan’s viewpoint.”

On if he’s kept up with wrestling: “No, I really haven’t, and as much as I would have liked to, but I’m raising three kids an awful lot, but I still – to be honest, there was a period where I just didn’t like where it was going and I certainly have paid a lot more attention now with the Network; but I must admit, I spend a lot of time looking back now. I told Jim Duggan on the podcast that I wanted to look because we did a whole segment on Sensational Sherri and her contribution to the Professional Wrestling world. I believe the greatest match she was ever involved in was at SummerSlam 1989, with Hulk and Brutus, Zeus and Randy Savage. I watched the match and then thought I should watch a different match and then I ended up watching almost the whole thing, and that happens to me a lot now. I like looking back at the older shows like Prime Time Wrestling; there’s just so many great stuff on there that I totally blanked. People send me these gifts of these stuff that I did that I had totally forgotten about.

“Somebody sent me something, and this was brought up just recently on the podcast, where Sherri and I hosted a show together with my ‘evil twin’ Ian. She used to beat the stew out of me every show. I just kept saying, thank God she liked me, because I couldn’t imagine what she would have done if she didn’t. There was one show in particular where I end up tied to this chair and I have a card on my feet that says a message on the bottom. When I lift up my feet she flips up the chair; it’s out there somewhere. I have it on my twitter feed; I landed on the back of my head, so I am really enjoying seeing some of this stuff. All those stuff on Coliseum Home Video, the crazy on cameras with Alfred Hayes and I did. I forgot about a lot of these things. I’m enjoying a lot of these and hope others are as well; so a lot of those memories are slowly coming back now and now I can share them on the podcast with people. There was one where I was on the roof with Sgt Slaughter, General Adnan and Colonel Mustafa where they take me hostage at the Stamford Television facility and just all the fun that we had.”

On working with Bobby Heenan: “He didn’t turn it off, really. It was who he was. He was just so quick. In any situation he had he would come up with a line that would drop you to your knees. Gene [Okerlund] was like that too; he had a rolodex of lines, and I laughed every time he said it no matter what it was. Bobby was just so quick; in any situation, he would come up with a line that would drop you to your knee a lot of time. Bobby was quick with situations.”

On if he imagined Raw would ever get as big as it is: “Oh gosh, to what it is today? I knew they were onto something because it was different. The idea to make it more intimate with that small house that they did. I thought that it was going to be exciting; I liked the idea of the live, and then the more intimate with the small crowd. It wasn’t like taking it back to the studio. I mean, here you are in a small theater, not sure how many people it held, maybe a few thousand at the Manhattan Center, and I knew they were on to something; if someone said it was going to turn into something this big 20 years later I would have thought no way, and that they were kidding. We knew that night there was something special about it.”

On what Randy Savage was like backstage: “Randy was as intense as he was on the microphone as he was backstage; you had the same person. That whole thing with Elizabeth and how he was really protective, yeah, that was a shoot. Randy was like that, and it took a long time for me to get close to him where he could really trust me, but he was a really good and honorable guy, with how he conducted himself and how professional he was. Everything that he did was not only to make money, but just the way he conducted himself in and out of the ring. There was a few times, like there was the one time when he was the King, and he got in a little stiff with me in an interview, and I knew that I had to say something because this is just – you knew you had to stand up for yourself, and I didn’t know what he was going to do to me, whether he was going to smack me or what, but I said, Randy, look, that was really not good. He had said to me that I had to bow to the King, and when I told him that he kind of mumbled and said that it was a good point, but from that point forward we were good, but I remember thinking how at any point this could go sideways, because he was one tough SOB, really.”