On the X-Pac 12360 podcast this week, Sean “X-Pac” Waltman broached the subject of Silver King’s unfortunate passing by recalling his own time wrestling in Mexico. The WWE Hall of Famer also discussed the Tom Magee documentary that recently debuted on the WWE Network and talked with Conrad Thompson about Undertaker being pulled from Starrcast II. Excerpts from this week’s show are below:
Sean ‘X-Pac’ Waltman Remembers Silver King, Recalls His Time In Mexico and Discusses New Measures That Should Take Place For The Safety of the Talent
Okay so in 1991, I started going to Japan for Universal Pro Wrestling which was the precursor to Toryumon and Dragon Gate…. I was the first American to go to Universal Pro, and other than that it was just their Japanese talent and all luchadors. All the greats; Dos Caras, El Hijo Del Santo, Blue Demon Jr, you name it. Just every tour there was just the best {talent}. And it was at a time when Mexico had devalued the peso, so shit was tough down there. So yes, I got to know those guys really well, we spent a lot of time together, Silver King, Texano {Los Cowboys}, and they were one of the greatest teams of their era, at the time I think they were one of the top five teams in the world…As a matter of a fact, you watch me as 1-2-3 Kid and matches I had with Shawn, you’ll see me do the Silver King spot where I run parallel to the ropes, jump off the second turnbuckle and vault over to the side down to the guy on the floor. That’s Silver King’s all day long, I think he invented it, and I stole it…And when I lived in Mexico and worked for AAA and Silver King came to work there, he used to give me rides and stuff sometimes, it was so great. When I lived in Mexico a lot of American guys go down there and they’re just so lost and they don’t know anyone, and I had this relationship with all these great guys in Lucha Libre and I am so grateful for it and they were so good to me…. I just felt so bad, I think about the family, I think about the mother, I saw Wagner post a picture of those two with their masks on and his mother. I still have matches, and I’ll be 47 in July and I have tag matches now for this very reason. Sometimes it’s tough out there, if you don’t think that I don’t fucken think about this happening to me, you’re wrong. Not that anyone necessarily thinks that, I do. Shit can happen really bad out there, you know we’re going out there trying to do this and we love this. And it’s so rewarding for us too and we love doing it for all of you but this is what can happen. And let’s not blame or start blaming people for whatever but let’s have some safety measures in place…at least for sure having an EMT on hand I don’t know if that means an ambulance is there too, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. Because we’re out there, we, mostly just all the other guys, cause I am not doing this as much anymore, but risking their lives, it’s the least you can do.
Sean ‘X-Pac’ Waltman Shares His Thoughts on Tom Magee after Being A Part of the Holy Grail: The Search For WWE’s Most Infamous Lost Match documentary on the WWE Network
Back in I can’t remember what year it was but at a TV taping in Tampa, Florida it was Tom Magee versus Ted DiBiase. And Teddy had just a really good match, I mean it was one of the better matches of the whole night. And I really thought that Tom was going to be a big star and that we were going to see so much more of him. When we didn’t for a while, I was like ‘WTF ever happened to this guy? Like, he was doing amazing things.’ And just his look, it was right up Vince’s alley, but if he wasn’t in there with a guy like Bret or Ted DiBiase or someone of that caliber, it wasn’t pretty. And it’s cause he wasn’t a wrestling person, Tom Magee, he came from the strong man world and bodybuilding, he took number 2 in a World’s Strongest Man, it’s incredible, the guy’s credentials before he got into wrestling….but he didn’t have that love for it I guess. And that makes a huge difference. So that being said, he didn’t have the aptitude of a lot of people that come into wrestling. When you watch this match with Bret, or DiBiase and there was one that he had with Arn; and to me I look at that and I go, if they wouldn’t have given up on this guy and they had somebody to work with him every night like that, i just think they could have gotten a lot more out of Tom Magee.
Conrad Thompson Talks About Having The Undertaker Pulled Off Of Starrcast II
Without question there have been bumps at every single turn, I kinda expected that nothing would go as planned. Bruce Prichard, when I was doing the first one he said, ‘Just so you know, I know you spend a lot of time planning and preparing and crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s but nothing is going to go as planned. So don’t get your hopes up.’ I just thought well that’s a negative way to look at it, he was like ‘No, no, I didn’t mean that ugly, just curveballs are going to come your way. So one month out things will get bad and two weeks after they’ll get a little worse, then you’ll think you’ve got it all figured out and the day before everything will change but you’ll live through it.’ And he was right. Lots of curveballs, but we lived, and there’s been curveballs people know about this time…At the end of the day I try to find the positive in everything, now what fans know most of all is I was willing to put my money where my mouth was and I thought it was a good idea to try something big and something new and something different and it got everybody’s attention and it got everybody talking about Starrcast {II} and in the end it didn’t happen. But overall, I had a handful of refund requests and that was it. I think a lot of people were like ‘Hey, we still are excited about what you’re putting together and this was a cool thing but it wasn’t the only thing.’…I was a little bit {shocked} because I paid a deposit, we had a signed contract, we have a deposit paid, we’ve worked out transportation, I mean all the little nitty-gritty details that would have to be worked out I am thinking are good like they sent me the images to use and approved the images we were gonna run and they approved the sort of way we were gonna break the story, and shock the world that he was coming, so we talked about all that stuff in great detail. So I really legitimately believed that I’d done everything by the book. I didn’t think I had done anything sort of underhanded. You know I had a contract and he was actively soliciting bookings on his social media handles and he might still be so I couldn’t have predicted at the time that this would be the way it wound up. But once it was, they were like ‘We’ll get you a suitable replacement.’
You can listen to the full show embedded below:
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