Michelle McCool was the latest guest on Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia and the first part of the interview focuses on McCool getting to reunite with her former colleagues to help give support during the Ashley Massaro tragedy. She also discusses not being able to appreciate her WWE accomplishments while being an active member on the roster and how her dating The Undertaker caused some conversations backstage. Quotes are below:
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo for Wrestlezone.com)
Michelle McCool on her skin cancer scare getting blown out of proportion and Mark Henry reaching out:
“It was a place that I had cut out on my back. It was a little skin cancer spot, but I posted it on Instagram and said, “Kids, wear yo’ sunscreen!” and I felt bad because even Mark Henry called me from Busted Open Radio the next morning. He calls me Cooler, he’s like, “Cooler! What’s going on? We’re so close, are you okay?” I’m totally fine, it’s a big deal, I want people to be cautious about it, but it totally blew up.
On reuniting with her Squared Circle Sisters in support of the late Ashley Massaro:
“For so many years you can work with people and (1) not really know them that well because you’re in the hustle and bustle and the stress of the business we’re in. So when something like this happens and you’re able to be vunerable and open up and just say, ‘Look, I’m here for you.’ You hate that it takes a tragedy like this, but it has been nice for everybody to reach out and just kind of come together, support Ashley and her daughter and just raise some money for her and as tragic as it is, it’s been nice. It’s been nice, coming back to girlfriends I haven’t talked to literally since I left.”
On dating The Undertaker backstage and not appreciating her accomplishments while in the moment:
“I’ve got no clue. I’m the absolute worst at that. Just in general. And then being the business then when it was very stressful, like I said, it wasn’t as cumbaya as it is now, or as it seemingly is. We fought and crawled our way onto the TV screens week after week and then it also wasn’t cool at the time to date a top guy so I had to struggle with the heat of being with Mark and ‘that’s the only reason that I was on TV and blah, blah, blah.” And that’s what some of my coworkers were even saying. They would tell me one thing in the locker room and then go out and of a sudden something would get cut or ‘you’re no longer doing this match with this person’ and it’s like, ‘Well why?” Steph [McMahon] would say, ‘Well so and so complained, they don’t like the storyline, they don’t like this.’ So it was always hard for me to enjoy those moments when there was so much stress on the outside taking place what felt like a 100% of the time. So you’d win up but you didn’t really appreciate it because you’d have so many people that were so mad and despite what anybody would say I was a team play always pitching ideas, not just for LayCool, but we’d have to have somebody to work with so I’d pitch ideas for the other people too and I’d go to the arena early, work out. I can honestly say, I can look myself in the mirror and know that I worked my tail off, so I wish I would have been able to appreciate those moments a lot more, so it’s nice to hear. I just wish I could have soaked it in at the time.”
More will be posted from this interview, but you can listen to the entire episode of Chasing Glory by going here.
