Gene Okerlund Recalls Some of His Toughest Interviews

In an interview with the Wrestlesplotch podcast, legendary WWF, WCW and AWA announcer ‘Mean’ Gene Okerlund recalled some of the toughest interviews he ever had to conduct in his long and storied career. 

Hulk Hogan – “Back in the AWA, he was becoming a megastar and we really clicked, our interviews were dynamite, and so easy to do, but there was one that was pretty rough.  It was the day after a long night slamming tequila and doing blow in a Minnesota strip club.  After the bars shut, Terry (as I liked to call him) introduced me to something called Juvy Juice which was just the best, just really, really good stuff.  The problem was that we had to do an interview the following morning to hype his big title match against Nicky Bockwinkel. But brother let me tell you, it was a rough!  We were both so hungover, we took it in turns to throw up. I tell ya, that interview could have won the Oscar for best editing. How the boys in the back managed to cut it to make it suitable for Saturday morning TV was just unbelievable”

Roddy Piper – “Hot Rod was a crazy crazy guy, super charismatic. We had a TV taping in Pennsylvania one

day and it was after I spent a night of smoking crack and drinking absinthe with Roddy, Sky High Low and Velvet McIntyre (a game girl if ever there was one, but thats a story for another day).  The next day, I'm interviewing Hot Rod for TV and I could barely focus on the autocue. Thank goodness Piper was a pro, all I had to do was introduce him and let him go while I focussed on not shaking too much and trying not to sweat through my tux”

Steiner Brothers – “This was in the heyday of WCW and we were doing some pre-tapes for that nights Nitro when, right in the middle of Rick Steiner telling the camera what he was going to do to Harlem Heat,  I noticed my hand growing bigger and bigger until it turned into a pineapple. It was only later that I learned that his brother Scott had spiked my morning scotch with angel dust.  We still had another three hours of interviews and a Slim Jim commercial to get in the can, and to this day I don’t know how I got through, because I was freaking the fuck out.  Aaah good times, good times”

Ric Flair – Ah, Flair, the greatest of all the talkers, but he didn’t always make it easy. When I got to WCW in ’94 I was thrown straight in and my first interview was with Ric, to promote his upcoming tag match where he and Vader were squaring off against the Hulkster and the Macho Man.Big time bout.   What fans didn’t know was that we had to do the whole interview via satellite on location in Tijuana, in front of a makeshift curtain. You see, Ric, being the party animal that he is, had kidnapped me from my hotel room the previous night, blindfolded me drove us down to Mexico where we proceeded to do just an ungodly amount of coke of strippers asses. We were rolling on something, I don't know what it was but it made everything kinda blurry and superfocussed at the same time - you know what I mean.  So we were doing the promo and Ric was on fire, probably because he was tripping balls, but what people don't realise is that behind the curtain there was a live donkey show going on featuring two of Tijuana's finest young ladies, a mule of some sort, and bizarrely, Paul Roma in a lucha mask.