WWE Hall Of Famer Road Warrior Animal recently spoke with the folks at Hannibal TV for an interview. Below are some of the highlights.
On how he found out about his longtime tag-team partner Road Warrior Hawk’s death: “Well, I was actually vacuuming my pool and the phone rang. I thought Hawk was doing really good, and it’s my buddy Bob on the phone. ‘I said hey Bobby how you dong?’ He said ‘Hey you talk to Mike today? Hawk?’ I said ‘No, why?’ He said ‘Has anybody called you today?’ I said ‘No why? It’s Saturday, it’s the day off, why would anybody call me?’ He said ‘Joe, Mike died last night.’ I said ‘What?’ ‘Yeah he died,’ he said. I sat down on the steps of my deck, man, and I cried like a baby. I said man not only did I lose my partner in wrestling, I lost a brother and I lost a friend. As messed up as he was, I loved the guy. I was a proud man to say that. Hawk and I were like glue stuck to each other, made a lot of money together, to this day we’re still touted as the number one tag team ever in wrestling. Even with the new guys. And that said something for what we did. He died and it was like someone took a stake and drove it through my heart. It was bad man, it was a bad time. I heard that there was some kind of medicine on the table, I don’t know what it was. I know he was moving his wife, they had a condo on the beach and they kept getting pelted by sand or a storm, so he wanted to move into a house. He moved and he wanted to move all the heavy stuff so his wife wouldn’t have to lift it. He goes ‘Honey I’m going to go and lay down for a little bit. My back is sore, let me rest for three hours then get me up so I can finish.’ She was there to wake him up at three o’clock but Hawk was gone. That was it.”
On his cause of death: “They said heart failure, yeah. I think his heart was worse than he was telling me and it was only a matter of time when he got diagnosed. In Australia, when he had his heart problem, I thought it was a matter of time. Once he got the green light and they told him he was healthy he went right back. You can’t do that, not with a bad heart.”
On his best memory of Road Warrior Hawk: “Man the greatest memory of Hawk, that’s a tough one. I got a lot of funny ones, I got a lot of good serious ones. I remember Hawk doing the war games, being the last guy in and literally knocking out Arn Anderson, Tony Blanchard and Lex Lugar with three clotheslines. Bam, bam, bam and all three are laid out. Cause Hawk was waiting, five guys go in at two minutes at a time, and Hawk was the last guy who had to wait literally 30 minutes to get into the ring. It was like a ticking time bomb. That was a pretty good one. Another one man, greatest moments of all, just the way he never had any kids of his own but he was great with my kids. He always thought of my kids as his kids. My son James was in high school and was becoming a stud football – Hawk was as proud as I was. My son Joe, playing hockey and my daughter Jessica, he was proud of all my kids man.”
Check out the complete Road Warrior Animal interview above or at YouTube.com.