WWE Hall of Famer Jake “The Snake” Roberts appeared on an episode of the Six Feet Under podcast, where he discussed several topics, including what it was like working with Andre The Giant and how he made their matches work.
Roberts said, “You know, I thought that there was just no way in hell I could make that match work. Because you look at Andre boy, and no matter what you think, you’re not even close. 500 pounds is 500 f**king pounds, brother, and he’s a huge son of a bitch. Beyond huge. There’s nobody like him. There never will be. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘How in the hell are we going to make this believable?’ Well, if not for Andre selling that snake the way he did, it would not have been believable. And to show you just how far that can go, we were in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Andre got me in a headlock, guzzling my ass. Shows you how good this guy was. He’s guzzling me, and all of a sudden, he is gone. He’s let go of me. He’s gotten outside the ring, and he’s, ‘Whoa!’ Doing this s**t. I’m like, ‘What the f**k?’ You know? And I roll over and look. And here’s this girl, about 11 or 12 years old has gotten the snake out and coming across the ring after Andre. Most guys would have went, ‘Get that bitch out of the ring.’ You know? I’d have probably done the same thing because I wasn’t a thinker. Andre was a thinker. He saw that as a perfect moment to get out of the ring. He gets out of the ring. Now he’s got to get his heat back, right? Because he just chickened out, right? Gets the microphone: ‘Arrest her! Arrest her! Get her out of the ring!’ Well f**k, Andre says, ‘Do something,’ people do s**t. The cops came in and grabbed the girl. She’s crying her eyes out. Andre is laughing. ‘Ha ha ha, I show you!’ What f**king heat he had. That’s how good that guy was. He can make s**t work. When they told me that I was going to be wrestling Andre, I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s either the kiss of death or whatever,’ because I just didn’t see it working at first. But he made it work.”
On how he connected with Andre:
“My connection with him was playing motherf**king cards. Cribbage. Yeah, we loved playing cribbage, and he loved it. And we’d play cribbage every night. So I was there to see the presents brought to him from different guys. Warrior coming in with a case of f**king wine every night.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
