Radio Review: Sting and Joe E. Legend
Show: "Get in the Ring"
Station: Available on the internet at getinthering.tv
Date: February 9, 2003
Hosts: Sir Adam and The Phantom
Report by Jamie Peltz, PWTorch.com correspondent

Get in the Ring Radio celebrated the second annual WWA PPV day with Sting and Joe E. Legend. Lifelong fans of Sting, Sir Adam and the Phantom were really at the top of their game for this interview, and you can hear it for yourself at www.getinthering.tv. Hear how upset they get when their engineer accidentally hangs up on the Stinger. Your entire family will crack up after hearing this one! Tune in every Sunday at noon Eastern 1240 AM WGBB in NY/NJ or broadcast live on the internet at www.getinthering.tv , this Sunday come aboard the Ho Train as the Godfather joins GIR!!

-An enthusiastic Phantom intro'd Sting and said he had four cups of coffee to get keyed up for the interview. He then embarrassed himself by wishing Sting's daughter a Happy Birthday. Sting informed Phantom that her birthday was two weeks prior, Phantom blamed Joe E. Legend who had told him the wrong info.

-Sting said it felt really good to be back in the ring against Lex Luger after being out of the sport for 18 months. Sting said he has gone public with the fact that he is willing to "entertain" offers to return to a full time schedule with the WWE. Just before last year's WrestleMania and after Sting was in negotiations with the WWE, but a deal was never cut.

-Phantom talks about Sting's style changes over the years. Sting says he would love to be able to come back with the '80s spiked hair, but just doesn't have enough hair left on his head. He goes on to say his natural hair color is black, and needed to use a mixture of battery acid, turpentine, and a little bleach to get the blonde color he was famous for.

-Vampiro sent word through the GIR boys to say hello to Sting, and Sting's says their feud, "just didn't work." He doesn't know why, he gave it everything he had and he even wanted to take the fall from the rafters, but WCW opted for using a stuntman. He felt that the storyline was cool, but "too many people were involved turned out to be a real cluster. I told Vince Russo we had this big angle and if we can't close it with something big it will end up being a big fart. And that's how it ended up."

-The boys reminisce about the time when Barry Windham dressed up as Sting, and Sid Vicious pinned him at Halloween Havoc '90. They thought the shock value of that was cool, to which Sting agreed. Sting loved being able to add creatively to his character, especially when the Crow gimmick just started to get over, "Hall and Nash, me and Luger, Hogan, all of us had the creative juices flowing with no real hidden motives at the time, everything was working great and then all hell broke loose." Sting agreed that his match with Hulk Hogan at Starrcade '97 was a cluster. The match finish changed so many times during the day of the PPV, and Sting says that he never pulled a power play during that time. He agrees with Phantom that he should have gotten the clean win over Hogan, and that was what was originally supposed to happen, "but we don't have to get into the dirty stuff"

-Talk turns to Sting's patella injury he suffered in '90. That was his only major injury and when it happened "it was just a dull pain. I'm running to the ring, and turned around to see who was in the front row. Because I thought some fan took a pipe out and whacked me in the knee. I reached down with my left hand and felt my knee and my kneecap was way into my quad. The left leg from the knee down was just swinging around. I told Wahoo McDaniel and a couple of the other guys around, man Flair coming my knee is blown don 't let him jump on me. And Flair got over the top of everybody, and I kept saying Ric, Ric my knee!"

-Sting would love to wrestle Triple H, Steve Austin, and Undertaker now, because he faced all of them before they became household names. He knew that they had to potential to make it big, but WCW could never create new characters "If you couldn't create it yourself, it was never going to happen." He credits Goldberg as the only guy that WCW was able to create a money drawing character out of. Sting feels Goldberg has potential to be a breakout star in WWE, depending how they use him. Phantom says that he and DDP were the two guys who seemed to bring the best out of Goldberg. Sting enjoyed facing Goldberg on Nitro and fans still tell him he brought Bill to his best match.

-Sting feels that the Black Scorpion gimmick was another example of an angle that captured the fans minds, but ended on a sour note. They started the angle without really having an idea of who would be the Scorpion, and Ric Flair was the last minute decision. Sting would have loved the Scorpion to be the Ultimate Warrior. Sir Adam asks Sting if the Warrior gets a bad rap, or is he as strange as the wrestling fans believe. Sting says he really didn't get to know him because he only spent 12-14 months with him at the beginning of his career, but remembers him being very intense and very paranoid.

-Sting loved working the WWA tour and got along with everyone. When he was asked if he would return for the next tour, Sting said, "one of the prerequisites is that everybody who was on this tour is going to be on the next one, we just had a good group of guys."

-Sting liked working with the big guys, Paul Wight and Vader. He had some good matches with Vader, and Sting takes credit for "taming him." "He came from Japan and knew only one style." Sting says he was "black and blue and walking crooked for the first six months of the feud." Sting tells a story of the first time they wrestled at a WCW TV Taping in Gainesville Georgia, and Vader was puking under the bleachers and a worker who knew Vader told Sting he was nervous because he's wrestling him.

-Sting loved the chaotic nature of Nitro, and enjoyed the fact that Bischoff stayed live every week. He felt that in the heyday of Nitro "everything we did was good," and blames allot of its downfall on "guys with hidden agendas." He feels too many guys were staying home "milking a sprained ankle, then you had other guys pounding the pavement driving revenue and ratings providing a paycheck for those guys. And I was one of them, and I got kind of bitter about that towards the end they had all the injury clauses in the contracts so that was good that's not to say that some of the guys were given contracts that were absurd." Sting never bothered himself with other workers contracts, and just concerned himself with his own deal. He never understood why guys would get mad at how much money Goldberg was making, they claimed he never paid his dues, but Sting felt he did pay dues in football. He felt Bill had a look and "bottom line the people believed in him."

-Sting feels that Triple H's Horseman-like group is a way WWE is trying to bring back some of the old WCW/NWA fans that haven't been watching wrestling as of late. Sting disagrees with Triple H and says that shows like Confidential and Tough Enough won't affect the business in any way. The fans want to be entertained "there are so many people in the audience saying: "I think they are really hot at each other' or they really meant that' do you know how many times I've been asked 'hey man is it real or is it fake' fans want to believe. It's like watching a good movie."

-Sting says, "I loved working with Muta. I thought I was going to do something with him in Japan recently but that fell through."

-Sting says Jeff Jarrett flew out to California a year ago to talk to Sting about joining his promotion, but a deal couldn't be made. He hopes they are able to do something that will become big. "This country needs two promotions," Sting said. Sting recently spent a day with Nikita Koloff, and Nikita never mentioned to him that he did two shots with NWA-TNA. Sting feels that it's a tough call with NWA-TNA's use of colorful language, and SEX regarding his faith. He was surprised he had to hear it from Rick Steiner and GIR about Koloff , and says that he is going to give Nikita a call and talk to him about it.

-Sting left the show, and Joe E. Legend joined. Phantom yelled at Joe for giving him wrong info about Sting's daughter's birthday and thinks he was doing his Just Joe character from the WWE. Joe was laughing the whole time Phantom was yelling at him. Phantom says "you made me look like an idiot in front of Sting" to which Joe replied, "Well think of it this way, you look like an idiot to a guy who wears paint on his face."

-Joe has been in talks with NWA-TNA, and the GIR boys ask about a report in the TORCH that Mike Sanders has stolen Joe's "Hey" gimmick. This is the first Joe's heard about it, but isn't that upset because he ripped it off of someone else - Eddie Watts. He says the gimmick is basically when he pins a guy and the guy kicks out he pops up and screams "HEY!" By the third time the whole audience does it with him. He said despite hearing horror stories about him, he enjoyed working with Mike Sanders during the WWA tour.

-Talk turns to his WWE signing. Joe met with Bruce Prichard and Vince McMahon and pitched them an idea about Legend being a cult leader. "They weren't too high on that," he didn't want to say he "was God or Jesus I was just a messenger, and Vince really seemed to like that (sarcasm) then it went from a religious thing to being a paid street informant so I was borderline Huggy Bear I guess, I was glad Vince never said, "You're Fired!." He didn't name the guy, but Joe felt the writer that the WWE gave him didn't know how to start a character, he knew how to continue one, and calls him "a boob." After a while he had the idea of Just Joe "snapping" to which the WWE agreed and had him go down to Memphis to work on the character. He calls Memphis "the armpit of Earth, brutal." The day WWE bought WCW, they got rid of Joe and Jason Sensation, because "they wanted to save money on taxes" transporting Joe from Canada. Phantom says he remembers reading about their releases and couldn't believe that WWE was still paying Jason Sensation up to that time, especially since he wasn't seen in almost four years. Joe puts over Jason as an entertaining guy.

-Joe didn't see Triple H using his power behind the scenes during his WWE stay. He says that Triple H was very approachable, and happy to talk to the new guys. Phantom says that he would hate to see what happens if Stephanie and Triple H break up to which Joe responds, "They'd probably give him a Just Hunter gimmick."

-On Brian Gewirtz, Joe thinks, "He's a big fan of the comedy aspect, and Ha Ha's a lot of the guys who want to be taken seriously. And he looks like Bud Bundy, he's a Shetland Person."

-Joe is a big fan of Raven's work, calls him a genius. In the WWE Joe talked to him about his idea of Just Joe snapping and Raven added a few minuet points that "made the character better, more three-dimensional." Feels that Raven needed more TV time devoted to his character to really get him over, and the WWE just didn't want to devote it to him.

-Joe was best man at Rhyno's wedding. He's also good friends with Christian, and has heard "I'm not hated in the WWE, I guess that's good." He's working Puerto Rico, talking to two promotions in Japan, and is hoping the NWA-TNA deal comes through for him as well. www.joelegend.com

***

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