Mayor Glenn Jacobs, better known as WWE superstar Kane, was the guest on the latest episode of Sean Waltman’s X-Pac 1-2-360 podcast. On this week’s show, the two discussed their time tagging together, how Kane has changed over the years, and why some of his earlier gimmicks failed.
Check out some excerpts from the show below:
On teaming up with X-Pac:
It was great. It helped me out tremendously. Because up until that point Kane had just been like a emotionless monster and what that did for me, our tag team, was it really helped round out my character because it showed that Kane has feelings and all that stuff which I never had before. It humanized me enough that people could relate much better, but all that stuff it really helped my character in, in my career. And all the stuff we got to do man, it was a blast, and like you said a lot of times when you have tag teams that are bookends having something that contrasted so much and was so unique and we can have great matches with anybody.
His favorite evolution over the years:
The first one by far, because it was new it was different and it was exciting for me personally. And that was the time too, that was when everything was just going. Forget about being the hottest thing in wrestling, you’re the hottest thing in Entertainment, it was much bigger than just professional wrestling we were the hottest thing in the Entertainment world. When you could go around for 2 years or however long it was and sell every place out… legit everywhere we went… it was just amazing and from a character stand point, that was just the best time…to me that was just the best time because you had this character and everybody knew what it was all about and everything was fresh and good.
On why Fake Diesel and Isaac Yankem failed:
Conceptually Fake Diesel sounded pretty cool, but it just didn’t take off that way and I don’t think the audience really ever got behind it but again for me it got me more experience and I was determined to make that succeed. As for the Isaac Yankem character , it didn’t succeed the way I wanted it too. It was due to me, with the fake Diesel character it was the fact that it was never meant to be. But I felt I had done my part to make it as successful as I could of made it. …
Isaac Yankem came out in a time where WWE was shifting philosophies, where we were going from a purely PG product and giving into much more edgy and the Attitude Era was still a couple years away. But I was kinda the last of the over-the-top characters we had…Frankly, I never got into the character I always make the pun that I couldn’t sink my teeth into it. {laughs} It wasn’t me, and I couldn’t make it work plus I was still pretty green at that point, I was still trying to figure out my way around through this whole thing. And here I was in WWE… and I am in the ring with these guys that I’ve watched on TV…you know, ‘ Oh gosh what am I supposed to do?’ And you can’t have that attitude I mean you have to have the attitude of ‘I belong here’ and I didn’t have it at that point. It was certainly not my favorite character but now they’ve made a wrestling action figure out of it so I have to like it.
His new wrestling school:
Tom [Pritchard] was here in Knoxville and Tom is one of the best trainers in the world. He was in WWE for quite a while as the head trainer at the developmental center. He’s trained people like Kurt Angle, The Rock, and all these other folks and from looking at this as a business person I was thinking ‘it’s just a shame that Tom is not training because he’s really good at it and he’s really in demand, he goes all over the world doing seminars and that sort of stuff.’ For me again as a business person and looking at the whole thing, ‘What’s the competition? Of course Lance Storm has a great school up in Calgary and Booker [T] has a great set-up down in Houston and of course nothing can compare to the Performance Center in Orlando. People ask me ‘How do I get into WWE?’ Well you gotta go the Performance Center at some point, the question is how do you get ready to go to the Performance Center? And that’s the first stop for a lot of people and I thought that was a niche that we can fill and geographically it’s kinda lacking in our area so I just thought it be something that would take off. Especially Triple H understands that you need a pipeline and they need talent coming in and Paul [Levesque] gets that, he was the brains behind the Performance Center which is just an unbelievable facility and he goes all around the world and helping in some cases other promotions groom their talent. So I think that anytime he sees the opportunity to grow that talent pool of people, they can pull from, they’re gonna be supportive.
Make sure to check out the full interview for even more.
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