WNS Podcast with “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase.
A new show is available every Wednesday.
Available at WrestlingNewsSource.com and Facebook.com/WNSPodcast
On his upcoming tour of the UK and what UK fans are like in comparison to US and Japan:
Well, wrestling fans are wrestling fans by and large. The only place I would say that it’s different is Japan. For years Japanese people don’t seem to show a lot of emotion. In the US and UK you got me people whistling, screaming and hollering and doing what they do cheering for the good guys and cussing out the bad guys. I guess it’s a cultural thing in Japan but over the years that’s even seemed to change a little bit in Japan where they’ve kind of come out of their shell so to speak. But by and large, fans are fans wherever you go. They are stimulated by all the same things.
On what it was like training under The Funks and working in the Amarillo area:
I’ve known The Funks most of my life. The Funks are two of the people who trained me. I’ve had many mentors I’m telling you. Because I grew up in wrestling. My father was a mentor, he died when I was 15 in the ring. He and Dory Funk Sr. were very good friends. When my dad died, we were In Texas. He had a heart attack in the ring in Lubbock on July 2, 1969 and three years later after I had signed a scholarship to play football in Arizona I was watching TV and wrestling comes on. It’s wrestling out of Texas. It’s The Funks and they’re coming to Tucson. I go, I visit them, Terry talks me into taking a recruiting trip to West Texas State. And all of a sudden I’m not going to the University Of Arizona anymore, I’m going to West Texas State and everybody kind of looked at me and went “Why would you choose a smaller school over the University Of Arizona?” And the answer is simple: Wrestling. Because in the back of my mind I knew one of my other loves was pro wrestling. And if I went to Texas and played football there then I could do both. I could pursue my other passion in the off-season. There were a lot of wrestlers that came out of West Texas State University which is now called West Texas A & M. The Funks, Bruiser Brody, Stan Hansen. Tully Blanchard, Tito Santana & myself were all on the same team. Let’s see who else. Bobby Duncum, Dick Murdoch, I don’t know who I’m missing but anyway a lot of guys. Dusty Rhodes. He’s another one. There’s a lot of guys that came out of the wrestling in Texas. I started under The Funks there. I refereed during the summers before I ever wrestled. Then I started my career in the summer of 1975 in Mid-South under Bill Watts. And in reality, I spent the better part of the first 12 years of my career in Mid-South. I went to New York in 1979 for a while. I went back to Amarillo and wrestled in the Amarillo area. Even went to Kansas City for a while and I went to Atlanta as well. But in the first 12 years from ’75-’87 when I went to the WWF, most of my time was spent in Mid-South and that was because it was a great territory. Bill Watts was a master of the art of wrestling and the psychology of wrestling. The WWE, just recently, got all of the library of Mid-South so I guess they can finish my DVD now.
To listen to the full interview go here:
http://podcast.wrestlingnewssource.com/WNSPodcastEP82.mp3