Booker T recently spoke with Wrestlezone’s Kevin Kellam ahead of the ‘Deep Impact’ event co-promoted by Booker’s Reality Of Wrestling and IMPACT Wrestling. During the interview, Booker talked more about his issues with Matt Riddle criticizing Bill Goldberg recently, saying Riddle needs to take a different approach and be more understanding of the wrestling business.
Booker previously addressed the initial criticisms on his ‘The Hall Of Fame’ podcast with Brad Gilmore, saying Riddle needed to ‘work on his game’ before he criticized anyone else. Booker expanded on his initial remarks, saying new talent needs to understand that these veterans aren’t coming in to take money away from them, and
“The wrestling business has always been a brotherhood. People can say what they want to say about Bill Goldberg, but Goldberg wasn’t a guy that got into the business and went to a wrestling school like myself. He wasn’t a guy that grew up watching it on a weekly basis, but he came into it with an opportunity and he took it. He turned out to be an awesome, awesome draw and the fans love Goldberg. Goldberg drew so much money in this business—I can only imagine how much money [it actually was] for the business—as well as the fans that loved Goldberg coming up, that’s worth a whole lot.
As far as one’s worth in this business, let’s look at the Honky Tonk Man. He’ll go down as the greatest Intercontinental Champion of all time and you can’t remember a whole lot of Honky Tonk Man’s matches as far as how great they were. But he drew a lot of money, and that’s what the business is built on the whole time. Matt Riddle coming into professional wrestling from MMA like that needs to understand what the heritage of this business is built on and what it’s going to continue to be made of forever more. Guys like that just need to understand more so about the ‘business’ as opposed to the wrestling side, and that’s just my opinion.”
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Booker added:
“Hopefully—it wasn’t said to offend him or anything. I always say ‘know how good you are.’ You’ve got to know if you’re better than the guy standing next to you, and you’ve got to know if you’re main event ready, if you’re the guy that the fans want to see in the main event of WrestleMania.
Until you get to that level—I remember a lot of the young guys used to say when The Rock would make his appearances back on the roster, every now and then you’d see it on social media that some of those guys are hot about The Rock coming back. But the one thing these guys need to understand is, The Rock—when he came back, the crowd was full. When The Rock came back it was sold out. The Rock came back their paychecks were just as good as well. Understand that and embrace that as opposed to trying to fight that.
I don’t think he’s trying to take money out of your pocket or anything like that. We want the next generation to flourish more than anything, and I think that these young guys need to understand that and get on the bandwagon.”
Check out the full interview below:
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