Former WWE star Mustafa Ali appeared on Insight With Chris Van Vliet, where he talked about a number of topics, including his feud with “Speedball” Mike Bailey in TNA, which saw an angle in which he claimed Bailey attempted to assassinate him.
Ali said, “In TNA, I had a feud going on with Mike Bailey. Weeks, and I’m talking weeks before a real life event happened, we came up with this idea where after I’d been torturing Mike Bailey for weeks, I’m beating up his friends and stuff like that. I’m pulling up into the arena in an SUV and I have a campaign manager with me, Campaign Singh. I’m like, ‘These idiot voters, they love me, watch this.’ He’s like, ‘Sir, I don’t think that’s a good’ — ‘Shut up, they love me.’ We have all these fans [cheering] and I’m shaking their hand. As I’m shaking their hand, appears Mike Bailey within this crowd. Mike Bailey grabs him by the throat, he’s trying to pull me out of the SUV, secret service jumps on him and I’m like, ‘Drive, drive, drive.’ We drive away, later that night in a promo, I say, ‘Mike Bailey tried to attack me in what the public has deemed an assassination attempt.’”
On requesting TNA to edit that part out of the segment:
“We taped it. The week that’s going to go live, which is a Thursday, earlier that week, the incident happens with Trump, the assassination attempt. So I’m sitting watching this, ‘Oh no.’ Some people had nothing to do with it, right? A genuine coincidence. So I have to text TNA like, ‘Guys, I don’t—’ because some people are gonna think we’re parodying it or making fun of it. No matter how you feel about someone, death is death. I personally don’t wish death upon anybody. So, I made the call like, ‘Hey, I think we should edit this.’ We ended up editing that part out, you know? It just goes to show you the volatile and sensitive nature of this character. I’ve just got to evaluate it and see if it’s something I want to continue doing long-term because of an incident like that.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
