The Blue Meanie Shoots On CM Punk, Burying The Hatchet With JBL, AEW Backstage Brawl & More! - Exclusive
While many may remember the insane, hardcore, and downright extreme moments of Paul Heyman's renegade ECW promotion, it's hard to not appreciate the multiple comedic moments the Blue World Order brought to the promotion. Of the men that comprised the faux-NWO faction, one of them embraced his blue personality to its own extreme: The Blue Meanie. Sporting wild blue hair and an even wilder blue goatee, The Blue Meanie quickly won over ECW fans and caught the eye of the WWE.
In 1998, The Blue Meanie officially made his WWE debut and would go on to entertain fans for the next two years. Meanie was released by WWE in 2000 but returned to the promotion in 2005 for the now legendary ECW: One Night Stand PPV. While the night should have been a happy homecoming for the ECW original, it was instead turned into a nightmare when he was legitimately attacked by JBL in the ring. In the years since, the two men have buried the hatchet and have even made podcast appearances together.
In this exclusive interview with Wrestling Inc. Senior News Editor Nick Hausman, Meanie opens up about his situation with JBL and discusses the tensions that recently boiled over in the AEW locker room at All Out.
CM Punk's Post-AEW All Out Tirade
Meanie, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me here today.
Good morning. How you doing, man? Thanks for having me.
So, Meanie, I'm really thankful for you taking the time to chat with me. Obviously, I became a little bit part of the news like a week or so ago.
Yeah.
Well, let's just kind of get your 10,000 foot take on it. First, you know me, you saw the video I'm sure of Punk going into full Punk mode. What was going through your mind? What did you think about what we saw after All Out?
Look, first off, I love Punk because you know where you stand. There's people like, "Yeah, brother. Yeah, brother," and behind your back they're like... With Punk, you always know where you're standing. That's why when I met him back in 2003 at the Norm Connors shows I was like, "There's something about this guy I dislike." There's people, "Hey, how are you doing?" And if he's in the mood, he doesn't hide it, but the question is about the media scrum. And dude, I think it's unfortunate.
Mostly everybody else who did media scrums had their matches on earlier in the night. They had the time to go get out of gear, get washed, recover from any kind of injuries. Punk, who had just won the AEW world title, went to the media scrum still in his gear, still had blood on his face, still had tape on, and now we know he probably suffered a torn tricep during the course of the match. So he's sweaty, he's bloody, he's injured, and he's probably still in full go mode. When you go into a match mentally, you're in a zone, so you're ready to go. There was really no time for him to decompress so to speak where you go into the locker room and just go...
No chance to just recap, go into locker room, see Moxley, "Hey, what'd you think? Here's where I could have done this, here's where we could have done this." No chance to just decompress. It seemed like he went right from the ring, right to the media scrum basically where he's enjoying his muffin and having some of his drinks, but I think if they had given him a chance to just f***ing decompress... Sorry about the language.
They should have let CM Punk decompress
It's okay.
If they had a chance to just let him decompress, clean up, wash off, and maybe go like third or fourth in that media scrum. I forget how many people were after him, but just let him just come down from that high of being in the ring in go mode, I think we would have had a different outcome, but also the unfortunate thing for me personally is I like Punk a lot, I like Colt Cabana a lot, and it bums me out that they're no longer friends. Like I said, I met both of them in 2003, I worked for Norm Connors and I fell in love with them. They were bright eyed, bushy tailed. Punk is as bright eyed and bushy tailed as Punk could be, and I mean that in a good way.
I know.
But I watched them wrestle and I was like, "Man, this is some cool s***." To the point when we start running shows in Philly for 3PW, they were the first guys I thought of. I brought them out and had them on the first ever 3PW shows and stuff like that, and it bums me out that... They always say never do business with friends and family, and this is probably one of the prime examples of why you don't do business with friends, but it bums me out. So, whatever the fallout with Punk and Cabana is, I usually try to mind my business on that because business is business, money's money and I never try to talk money. To me, money's like a taboo subject. I don't want to know what anybody else is making. I don't want anybody else to know what I'm making because then we just get along.
But to get to the point, there was some kind of whisper campaign that Punk was holding Cabana out of AEW, and I'm pretty sure that built up in his mind to where, where are these reports coming from? Who's reporting it? What's this, that, and the other thing? So, he knows there's a pay-per-view coming up and with pay-per-views come media scrums, so you get to face your critics. Recipe for disaster is the term I'm looking for, there's a recipe for disaster. You pull a guy straight out of a ring where he's still highly emotional, he's highly injured, highly bloody, highly hungry. Those muffins were spot on. Now, he's going to a room full of people who he probably read the reports of saying he held Colt Cabana down, and what better way to address the issue head on than to face your critics and a lot of ways people go, "Oh, well couldn't he have done this in private?" Yeah, Punk probably could have done this in private. Also, if he handles it in private and it gets taken care of privately and not addressed publicly, then the rumor will still live on.
CM Punk is CM Punk
Now, you like others I've talked to have just said, "That's Punk being Punk." Are you surprised that it escalated the way that it did after the scrum?
I'm a bit of what they call a chaos junkie. If it's not happening to me, I'm kind of amused a little bit, not in a bad way. Not that I want it to happen, but I'm the fly on the wall. I'm the voyeur. I'm the guy who goes to the mall, sits on the bench, and watches people. I'm not rooting for it, but if it's going to happen...
A lot of people say you could make a lot of money here off of what Punk said because there's obviously tensions in the room to just get into an actual shoot where you all hate each other and don't want to do any business, that's a surprising escalation for me in pro wrestling. I don't know if that is for you or not.
I don't know what all the particulars are between the Punk camp and the Elite camp so to speak and people go, "Oh, it's a work," and I always say this when something happens, if it's a work, who's benefiting? And, I don't see a window where anybody benefits from this, where Punk just won the belt for the second time, and the Elite, the Bucks and Omega are the first ever Trios champions. The next TV show, they're stripped of those belts and suspended. So, now they have to go through a whole process of crowning new Trios champion, the whole new process of having a tournament for the world title, and it puts a blemish on the world title. For a little while there, the AEW belt was pretty protected. Now, it's kind of just like, "Okay, he's a champ. There's an interim champ, he's champ again. Now he's suspended and injured," and they had this whole tournament for the Trios title, and now they had to go and figure out what to do with the Trios, and it couldn't be a work because you just totally buried the return of MJF.
I'm not saying it's a work, I'm just saying it's a great...
From what I've read, I try to follow it the best I can, and I see people going, "Oh, it's work," but it doesn't benefit anybody.
I'll tell you on my end, if it's a work, considering my close relationship with Punk and Cabana, he was having to really delicately lace in some worked comments to a deeply shoot series of comments because there's nothing that he was saying, looking me in the face, that I didn't feel was 100% how he felt and truthful. None of this feels like a work to me.
The Work In The Shoot
Well, here's the best part, watching that thing you could tell that the comments about Cabana, the Elite, Hangman Page were real, but then when they came to MJF, you could kind of tell they were worked shoots.
Dude, that is so crazy because I had the exact same conversations. I go, "If there was anything that was a work in there, it's where he's saying, he goes... What did he call him? He's like, "Why do you keep making me work with these losers?" Or something like that.
I work with children. I'm old, I'm hurt, and I work with children, but he called MJF a prick, which-
That's right, a prick, yes. "Why do you make me work with these pricks?" Yes.
That was the work shoot.
If there was any nugget of that was a work in all of those shoot comments, I am 100% with you, it was calling MJ... Because I think he likes Max, right?
I believe he does, and there's money to be made with that feud. They did some amazing storytelling. There's some things I wish they did different like when he turned on Punk and Punk bled, and he does the line about the devil. That should have been the go off the air shot. End your TV show with that shot, and then people will be like, what's going to happen next week kind of thing, but what Punk and MJF were doing was masterful.
And, Max idolizes this guy. It's so obvious.
He's great.
He channeled Raven in that dog collar match. He was sitting in the corner like Raven. He wanted to be Raven in the Raven Punk feud.
Burying The Hatchet With JBL
Anyway. Brian, obviously, you say you like to be the fly on the wall. You have, of course, not always been the fly on the wall. Now when we set this thing up, first of all, you really dislike that people think that you and JBL still don't like... It's well known I think at this point that you guys are on good terms again, and that it's water under the bridge for whatever happened, right?
We're great friends, which is a beautiful thing, and that's why I kind of relate to Punk on this whole issue of exploding and being like, "Hey, this is the deal me." It's been well known that me and JBL had our issues from '98 to 2000 when I worked there, and when I left I spoke my mind and then it came to a head at One Night Stand in 2005. Well, WWE brought me out to Sacramento, me and JBL talked our issues out and we turned a really ugly shoot into a work, and we both made some money off it, and that's the power of just being able to stand across from the person you have an issue with and just say it, but that's in 2005. And in 2022, there are people who still go out there and go... If I say something, somebody will post a JBL meme or, "Oh, that's the guy who got beat up by JBL." Look, we've posted pictures together, I've been on the man's podcast, yet I don't know how much more proof I need to say, hey, we're cool now. We get along, there's no issue.
I'm sure Punk and Cabana had their issue, they split off, they splintered, they went their separate ways, and now Punk still has to answer for stuff that happened between him and Cabana, even though everything that happened between him and Cabana should stay between those two, whether it's the whisper campaign to say he held down Cabana, which I don't know if it's true, but then now you got fans chanting Cabana at him while he's in the ring. It's just like somebody yelling JBL at me or posting JBL at me. I get it, there's a point where you're like, "Enough, it's over with. That's the past. I'm moving forward." You can live in the past, I can send you a link to Amazon to buy a calendar for 2022, so you could live in the present or we could just move on with the issue.
The issue's been dead, it's been dead and buried. Let's move on, but people still want to bring up that thing because it's the only little bit of wrestling knowledge they might know, and it doesn't affect me. I know where I'm at, I know we're cool. I just block and delete or whatever, just move on, and that person's just yelling into the void so to speak. When I saw Punk say, "All right, the Cabana thing, it's been dead and over with for years now. Why is this still coming up?" I'm like that with the whole JBL beat you up thing. It's just we made up, we're friends, we're cool. He almost got me into the Royal Rumble. He got me on his show, he's got me on his podcast. He's done all these cool things for me since then, since we've made up. Why is it still a thing?
How to squash a beef
I'm interested because I think the way Tony Khan is handling the situation is almost as interesting as the situation itself in some people's mind. With you and JBL, and the immediate... This guy attacks you obviously, how does WWE handle that situation internally? Can you just give us a little insight into how it was handled, I guess, at the time?
Well, right after the incident at One Night Stand, Johnny Ace came up to me because he thought I gigged. I was like, "Really? I look like Mr. F***ing Potato Head over here." But, once I gave him the Cliff Notes of what's... He handled it. He said, "That's unacceptable." Earl Hebner found me, doubled my pay. They brought me out to Sacramento and they put us in a room. There was a point where I was walking around and Triple H saw me and was like, "Meanie, are you all right?" I was like, "Here's the deal, me and JBL have this thing. I'm working him tonight, it doesn't feel right." He says, "Wait one second."
Triple H comes back and goes, "Come with me." He brings me in into Vince's office. Me and Vince have a one on one. I say, "This is where I'm at." He goes, "Meanie, I assure you that if John does anything, he will be fired," and that was it. That's all I needed to hear, and we went and talked after that, had a man to man, shook hands, and we were cool. I think when it comes to AEW, and I like Tony Khan a lot. I've known Tony since the 90s. I like him a lot, and if we're going to learn from history and mistakes that were made, one of the biggest mistakes Paul Heyman ever made was his lack of ability to delegate power to other people.
He needs to say, "I'm Tony Khan, I need to focus on this." Jim Ross, I love you on commentary, but if you could... Look at all this stuff... JR has been around since the 70s. He's been through everything and he's probably handled every situation. He was in talent relations when I was in WWE.
What better person to get two guys in a room and say, "Let's hash this out." Tony Khan needs to delegate some power to other people, whether it's JR, Tony Schiavone, he's got a wealth of people who've worked not only in front of the camera, but behind the scenes. He needs to have like a veteran's committee or talent relations where wrestlers can go and talk their grievances out. If there's an issue, sometimes it just takes talking it out and getting it out of your system to work through it, but all these little things have been said and built up on separate sides and private that it finally came out in public.
WWE Is About To Go Extreme
All right. Last question here, Meanie. WWE is coming to Philadelphia with Extreme Rules and you are extreme by nature, it is in your DNA-
In some ways, yeah.
You are Philly, that is in your blood, that is also in your DNA. New management at WWE, fun outside the box thinking, can we expect any kind of BWO influence come next month at Extreme Rules?
Hey, man, I would love to say I am, but then again, who knows. Tommy Dreamer, he always laughs because he would always have me on his House of Hardcore shows in Philly. He's like, "Just come out and do something," and he's like, "Your reaction is just ridiculous." If you want me to come out and just get the unexpected cameo reaction in Philly no less, that'd be awesome. But hey, Mania is here in two years and last time WrestleMania was in Philly, it was WrestleMania XV. ECW wasn't officially under WWE's umbrella, and every year WrestleMania, when they go to a town, they have some sort of acknowledgement to the territory of the time, whether it's World Class in Dallas, the Freebirds in Georgia or whatever. Wherever they go, they always... Now that ECW's been officially under the umbrella for WWE, it'd be nice if they did nice little nod to ECW WrestleMania weekend, whether it's at access or a little cameo, maybe a gimmick battle royal.
I think a ring would look nice on your finger.
You've got to put a ring on it like Beyonce said.
I guess.
That's not for me to decide. When you say, "Oh, I want a thing," it looks disingenuous.
I said it. You didn't say it, I said it. Put the heat on me.
I would not be opposed. So, acknowledge ECW, WWE, while your biggest show of the year is in Philly and acknowledge something that, quite frankly, I think inspired the Attitude Era.
Fair enough. Meanie, I want to thank you so much for the time today. A fantastic conversation, it flew by. Where can people go to find you support you and the show, all of that?
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