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Tully Blanchard Explains Why He Quit NWA And Was Released From WWE

July 20, 2018 | Posted by Joseph Lee
Tully Blanchard Matches

In an interview with Robbie E’s Why It Ended podcast (via Wrestling Inc), Tully Blanchard spoke about why he originally quit the NWA and why his run in the WWE didn’t last long.

He said: “It was not the fact of getting paid, it was signing contracts. When [Ted] Turner was hiring and buying the company, he was signing people to big contracts and other people had got the contracts, and they didn’t sign Arn and I to a contract. So, it was job security as well as money. When you’re the people who are selling tickets, when it’s a sellout when the Road Warriors are beating you up, and it’s not a sellout when they’re beating somebody else up. [Jim] Crockett was negotiating with Turner to sell his company to Turner, and Turner was doing interviews with the key players, which I was one of, and we were instructed to be honest with everything. And I said, ‘ok, I will.’ So they asked me some questions, and I was honest with the answers, and Crockett didn’t like my answers because the people at Turner asked him some questions that I guess were uncomfortable to be answered. And I wasn’t smart enough to just sashay around the questions. I answered them. I’m just a plain old simple guy. So they politely kicked me off the plane, and told me I wasn’t loyal, and so I said that I don’t need to work here. And Arn and I dropped the titles the next night in Philadelphia.

He added that he and Anderson had a meeting at his house while with Crockett. Vince McMahon told them they had a job any time they wanted. Blanchard said he was going to go to WWE by himself, but was glad Arn went with him. They lost the titles to the Midnight Express and said goodbye to the roster. He said the locker room was “cold” when he came in after talking with executives.

Blanchard called the move to WWE a lateral one and said he asked Jim Barnett to bring back the original Four Horsemen. They asked to leave WWE at Survivor Series 1989. Arn got there but Blanchard failed a drug test for “licking the bag” of cocaine to “look like a party animal” after buying it for women. They planned to go to WCW and were offered $750,000. AT the time, WCW didn’t have a drug policy so he “did not see anything coming down the road that would be harmful.” WCW eventually backed out of their offer. Ric flair called him on November 13, 1989 at 1 AM after WCW found out he was caught by WWE’s drug policy. He said that Arn’s salary was also cut down and he had issues with Arn for a while after that. After losing his job, he said he felt like everything was “crashing”, but he “surrendered to God” and felt calm. He mainly works in ministry but appears at conventions. He also briefly wrestled in ECW in 1995 and the Heroes of Wrestling show in 1999.

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Tully Blanchard, Joseph Lee