WWE Hall of Famer Arn Anderson recently spoke on his podcast, “ARN,” about a variety of professional wrestling topics. Here are the highlights:
The first time he saw Rey Mysterio wrestle:
“I think the first time I saw Rey Mysterio, I want to say it was on ECW TV. He wrestled Psicosis I want to say, but I watched it. I was watching it on TV and I went ‘This is a 12 year old kid. How can they let him in the ring’, because he looked 12 years old. For the life of me, I could not accept that he was competing in our business on this hardcore television show . I went, ‘Somebody’s gonna kill that guy. Someone’s gonna kill that kid. That’s a little kid.’ I would say he made me look like a fool. He made it. Rey made everything and he figured out a way to use his entire body to knock a guy down so it made sense.”
How he started using his spinebuster in matches:
“It literally happened in the ring. I shot a guy off and caught him in a bear hug down low and I just kind of had him sitting up to where his upper body was above my shoulders. It was like an epiphany. I swear, it was like an epiphany. I didn’t come up with this in practice or training. I was just like, ‘What would happen if I just rotated this and landed on top of him.’ I said, ‘Just go with it’, and I literally just hit one on the fly. It was like an epiphany that popped into my head about how to do it. When it landed and I saw that he wasn’t dead and I wasn’t dead, it became something that night.”
Recommending Randy Orton to use the Ronnie Garvin stomp:
“I was the one who showed Randy that from my experience with Ron. It was Ron’s stuff, but I just showed Randy. I said, ‘In today’s world, this will work for you’, and showed him what Ronnie did. ‘He’s retired. He’s out of the business. It’s all yours buddy.’ He revamped it a little bit, but mostly it was the Ronnie Garvin stomp, now the Orton stomp.”
You can listen to the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
