Wrestling

Bully Ray Discusses Previously Talking to Vince McMahon About the Bully Gimmick in WWE

on

Bully Ray, formerly WWE’s Bubba Ray Dudley, was recently on the Chris Van Vliet Show to discuss a wide range of topics over his career. One topic was about how close we were to see the Bully Ray character in the WWE. Bully Ray is the heel persona he has used outside of the WWE which includes his reign as TNA World Heavyweight champion in 2013. Bully does add later in the podcast that there were talks of moving forward with the heel gimmick but instead of using the term bully he’d be “The Intimidator” Bubba Ray.

Vliet asks Bully Ray how close they were to getting the Bully gimmick in the WWE:

48 hours. There’s a lot to the story and I’ve told 50% of the story. There’s another 50% that maybe one day I will tell. It’s not the right time for the world to know, but I will say this: I had three meetings with Vince. Sit downs, one-on-one, and not just Vince giving me the obligatory 5 minutes. These were real talks. And I’ll never forget, Chris, sitting there with him. I said, ‘Vince, I’m not doing the Dudley thing anymore.’ I said, ‘I’m done with this.’ I’m like, ‘Your version of the Dudleys doesn’t work for me anymore. You told us what you what you wanted on day one. You paid us very handsomely. We did what you wanted us to do. […] Okay, Vince, no problem.’ But after a year, I didn’t like the way the Dudleys were being stepped on. Now, Vince owned the name so Vince had the right to do whatever Vince wanted to do with the Dudley, but I wasn’t into it anymore. So I went to him and I said, ‘I’m done with this Dudley stuff. If we’re going to continue to do the Dudley stuff I’m going to split, but I do have something I’d like to pitch to you. And he looked at me and said, ‘I know all about Bully Ray.’ For the first time in a long time, I got stopped in my tracks, because you don’t expect Vince to acknowledge something that happened in another company. That kind of told me that everything I did over there got back to him, which is kind of cool. So we had the Bully discussions, and we had the Bully discussions. He couldn’t get around the word ‘Bully.’ Because of the Be A Star Program.

Bully Ray lays out the long term plan he had for the character:

So I told him, I said ‘Look, Vince, here’s how we go about it. We do the Bully Ray thing for a year. When we get to the end of the Bully Ray story or run, that one babyface – that uber babyface – makes Bully Ray understand the error of his ways and why you shouldn’t be a bully. And now Bully Ray can go do all the Be A Star talks with all the younger kids. It was an in the ring and out of the ring kind of concept. And he goes, ‘My God I love it. That’s great. But in the year it’ll take to get to that, I’ll get killed in the media.’

You can view the whole interview here:

Twitter: TimRoseJr

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply