John Layfield (@johnbradshawlayfield) and Ron Simmons (@ronsimmonsofficial) are retired professional wrestlers and WWE Hall of Famers. They sit down with Chris Van Vliet in Minneapolis, MN to discuss the formation of the APA, how the door became a part of their backstage set, Ron Simmons’ historic world title reign, John Layfield winning the WWE Championship as JBL, how “Damn!” became Ron’s catchphrase, JBL’s rivalry with Eddie Guerrero, the most brutal Clothesline From Hell and more!
Great to see you guys together too. I feel like I should have built a door back here, right?
Ron Simmons: Well, we’re gonna give you a pass on this one
JBL: “I’ll tell you a funny story on the door. They’re building the APA set, and they got the door. Ron goes, ‘That’s good.’ He’s got that deep voice. They go, ‘What do you mean that’s good?’ He said, ‘That’s good.’ They go, ‘It’s just the door?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, that’s perfect.’ They’re looking at it, going, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute…’ So they left the door, and then they realized this is a pretty freaking cool gimmick. But that was Ron’s idea.”
Ron: “It just resonated with the people. And hey, and even now, they still love it.”
Was the idea to build a whole set?
JBL: “I think they were going to, but when they had the door, they had the door frame up first, and Ron goes, ‘That’s good.’ I’m looking at him going actually, that is pretty funny. They were sitting there going, I don’t know Then everybody else started thinking this could be pretty funny if they just have a door.”
I love the idea of you have to still knock on the door
Ron: “It didn’t take any time to catch on. With the Undertaker and Rock coming up, and guys like that coming in, and I might add, who enjoyed doing it, because they thought it was a pretty good idea, and so it quickly caught on real, real fast.”
When you went from The Acolytes to the APA, when did you realize you had lightning in a bottle?
JBL: “Pretty quick. One thing we realized, right away, we started getting over. When everybody was crowding for the camera when we’re with The Nation, with The Minsitry, with Undertaker and all the guys, everybody’s crowding for the camera. Meanwhile, I thought, why would we fight for the camera? We can stand at the back and be noticed by everybody. We’re two pretty big guys at the time. We would just stand at the back and just stand there and let everybody else fight for the camera, and people were starting to notice that these two big guys don’t care, which really didn’t. Then when we got with APA, it just started working. I don’t know if we noticed it with the fans right away, but we noticed it with the boys. The boys will always tell you if something works or not, because they’ll tell you how much they like it, because they watch everything, and the boys are a great indicator. The boys were like, ‘Dude, that was funny, that was great.’ Or, ‘That was a lot of fun.'”
Did you ever have arenas where they would tell you you couldn’t smoke? Because you guys were smoking cigars while you’re playing poker. Was there ever arenas that were like, I know this is the gimmick, but no, or if they did, you did it anyway. Is that a common occurrence every time?
JBL: “One of the greatest things ever. Jack Lanza was who was a wonderful human being. They finally started banning smoking. He’d go to light a cigarette. Somebody told him he couldn’t smoke, and if he thought they were an asshole, Jack would sit there and for the next two hours he’d put a cigarette in his mouth and go to light it, and then go to talk to somebody and never light it. He’d make all these guys sitting there waiting to write him a ticket, and he just he just messed with them. I tell you, one time we were in the Staples Center, and they told us a lot of times we did the show earlier in the day, and so we could edit it and make it appear as if it was live. They go, ‘Guys, you got to go live. You got to get this right this time.’ I said, ‘Why are we about to go live?’ They go, ‘You’re slurring your words.’ We had sat back there and got drunk. People asked if it was real beer. Yes, yes, it was.
For the first ladder matches and stuff. We didn’t have stunt coordinators. We were just guys doing stuff and hoping it worked. The first ladder match was Shawn and Razor. I think they had one ladder. If that thing had broke, good lord, what a disaster that would have been. But when the Hardys and the Dudleys and Edge and Christian first did that stuff, they had no template for it. We had no template for it. I mean, here’s some beer, drink beer, and have a bar fight scene. I remember one time we’re doing a bar fight scene. I’ve got Bull Buchanan. I’m gonna throw him through a wall, and we gimmick the wall, and Bull says it’s the wrong wall. And I go, ‘I’m sorry,’ and we go through a wall. We land in a toilet. He went through it!”
Ron: “Which, by the way, was this Tim [White’s] wall? So you went through the wrong wall, the one which Timmy did not want torn down.”
When you had those bar fights, did they give you, like, all right, you can damage this amount of stuff, but don’t go over that. Like, our budget for demolition here is $5,000 or whatever.
JBL: “It was just opposite with Tim White because he would tell us he had a jukebox that didn’t even work, and we threw a guy through the jukebox by Tim’s request. He got a digital jukebox to replace it. He had an analog television that didn’t work. He goes, ‘Guys, would you guys break my television?’ He got a flat screen TV to replace it.”
Ron: “He rebuilt his entire bar.”
JBL: “Vince told us, I had no idea that I was going to rebuild Tim’s entire bar. So no, we had no parameters of what we could do or what we couldn’t do.”
Ron: “By the way, [Tim] wouldn’t even give us a drink. Goes to show you how tight his ass was.”
Ron, at what point did you know that Damn had gotten over?
Ron: When we were working together, and I’d pull a muscle or do something, or somebody would do something stupid in the ring, and I’d just stand there, ‘Damn!’ Because something that just happened that we didn’t agree on, or I didn’t agree on, right? So the people, and we would go back to the towns each time. So the people in the first 10 rows could hear me. They just start saying, ‘Damn.’ So I look at them and I said, ‘Hey, man, what the hell are they saying that for?’ I think you say that when something screws up or something goes wrong. So the writers they got wind of it right and said, ‘Look, the next time that Booker T and John Cena were having an exchange in Chicago, just walk out there simply say, ‘Damn’ after they finish with their exchange.’ When I did that, the people sat there for a moment, then they just went crazy, and that’s when Damn was born.”
How long after that did you get a T-Shirt?
Ron: “Instantly [laughs]. My only thing about that was that if I had known something like that, 30 years ago, I would have never taken a bump. Just walked out there and said, ‘Damn!’”
Michael Cole recently told a story where he was driving you guys around for a little while. How did Michael Cole get paired with you?
JBL: “We liked him. People say, ‘Oh, you had somebody driving you?’ Yep, not because you didn’t like him, because you did like him. We liked Michael.”
Ron: “Once again, they knew that. We’ll go out and just wanted to have fun and love being around people as much as we could. Sometimes, with Cole, I understand him. Sometimes the job got under his skin, so it was a good thing to get away from that. So that was a good avenue for him to come with us. He had a couple beers, and we shoot the sh*t. Because yeah, he gets in there with us, and it’s not just the business; it’s just having fun.”
I feel like the APA gimmick could have lasted forever. Why did it have to come to an end?
Ron: “You know, we did it for 5 or 6 years. It was good though, at that point it had come to that because it come to the point where we were on top with doing it and we had a lot of success with it. Myself having already gone through being world champion, had good singles thing behind me. He had been through the ropes. His thing was struggling coming up through the ranks, man. The time was perfect for him to go on and do his thing. It was perfect timing for him to go on from there, from that momentum we had, and to go on and do what he did.”
Has there been talk of putting the APA in the Hall of Fame together?
Ron: “I don’t see why not. Why wouldn’t it be?”
Ron, when you won the World Championship, there is pure joy. Take me back to that moment
Ron: “Listen, and this is true. Okay, I don’t think there are many months that I don’t go back and just look at that clip. Because it’s one I can honestly say that in this business, like I said earlier, that it was a real moment in this business. That’s why I came across as it was, as it did with the boys, with myself, with the fans. In this climate we’re in now, where we’re telling everything about this business, which I still can’t bring myself to do, although everything has been said, I still got a problem with seeing stuff. That’s just the way I was taught. This was a guarded fraternity, and you were very lucky to get in it. Because if you weren’t accepted by the guys, you weren’t gonna make it. I still struggle with doing that today. But for me, man, it was coming in on a spontaneous thing, being told at the last moment that something like this was gonna happen. No one knew it, no one at all. That’s where you got the realism of it because no one would have never suspected that at a house show.”
JBL: “We do appearances now probably once or twice a month. The only reason I do them is because I want to see Ron. I want to go spend the weekend with Ron. We either watch college football, do something. We just have fun sitting at the table, talking to fans the whole time. I have a lot of fun with Ron, and I miss Ron and being around the camaraderie of the boys and all that. But at these appearances, I don’t think there’s been one, and I don’t know how many we’ve done, that some fan has not come up to Ron and said that moment when you beat Vader was one of the most important moments in my life, and I can’t tell you every single autographed session every weekend. Somebody, at least one person, will come up and tell Ron how much that meant to him, that he was the one that broke that barrier, and that meant the world to them because wrestling was their thing. They needed Ron.”
John, you had a successful career as a tag team competitor, and you were great in the mid card. But did you know that the JBL character was going to take you to that next level?
JBL: “I knew I’d have the opportunity. I knew because they made the character for Eddie Guerrero, so I knew I had the opportunity. They called me specifically for the match at the Staples Center in six weeks, eight weeks, whenever it was, and I just got lucky. Yeah, Brock had left the company to become UFC champion.”
Ron: “No, [JBL] didn’t get lucky. Like I said before, which is cool. I understand where he’s coming from. Well, he had put his work in. Germany, Japan, traveling all around, doing the things that people don’t get to see, living in and out of a car, sleazy ass hotels and motels and that kind of thing. He had gone through multiple partners, and in and out with a single thing. It was an absolute perfect moment for that. Any other phase, I believe, would have altered that run that he had. The timing was perfect. He was prepared for it.”
JBL: “Ron had set me up perfectly with the way that with the APA quit, and all of a sudden you needed somebody for Eddie Guerrero.Vince called me and asked me if I wanted to take a shot at it, and so I knew I had the chance. Now whether it’s going to be successful or not was up to what was going to happen in that match.
Do you have a favorite Eddie Guerrero story?
JBL: “Oh my God, he used to call me all the time. Eddie loved the JBL character. He called me one time, it’s like 2 o’clock in the morning. ‘Ese, I got something for you.’ He’s a groomsman in my wedding. Ron was my best man, and Eddie was a groomsman in my wedding with Undertaker, a bunch of other guys. And I go, what is it? He goes, ‘Tell them my ancestors come over here in a boat, not an inner tube.’ I said, ‘Eddie, you’re gonna get me killed. You’re actually gonna get me killed.’ He goes, ‘No, no, no, good stuff, good stuff, good stuff.’ Eddie used to give me the craziest stuff. He came up with the idea of the throwing the guy back across the border. That was Eddie’s idea. Eddie came up with the idea of his mother having a heart attack in El Paso, but it was a great story because we’re backstage and we’re not selling any tickets at Staples Center. People aren’t buying me yet. And Chavo [Senior] came up with an idea. I think he kind of came up with an idea. It’s a little bit off what he and Piper did back in the ’70s and in the Coliseum. I think that’s kind of where he got it. I don’t know because I never talked to him about it. But they said, ‘Hey, we got an idea.’ So I’m back there. It’s just me, Chavo Senior, Eddie’s brother, not his nephew, and Eddie. They tell us this idea. We’re in El Paso on Mother’s Day weekend, we’re going to honor our father Gory Guerrero, and it’s Mother’s Day. We’re going to give mom some flowers. We want you to give mom a heart attack. I’m like, oh my god. There’s like 10,000 Latinos in this. I knew how rough it was going to be, and I’m sitting there. But the best part was Chavo telling this story. He goes, ‘Then you can get like a little heat on mom.’ But he’s only saying that to stir up Eddie. Eddie goes, ‘Chavo, I’ve told you he’s not going to touch mom. Mom’s 70-something years old. John’s not going to.’ He goes, ‘No, no, no. Big John’s a good worker. He can just hit with a little clothesline or something.’ Eddie goes, ‘Chavo, no, John’s not going to do anything to mom. He’s going to hold her while she goes [down].’ He goes, ‘Okay. How about just a boot and mom gets a little color?’ In El Paso on Mother’s Day! Eddie gets up to fight his brother. They’re about to fight. Eddie knows they’ve been fighting since they were kids. I’m like, you got to be kidding me! I’m in a freaking Guerrero fight here. I’m the only one there, and they’re like mad at each other.
When Eddie’s mom went down, what happened was I grabbed her like that, and what I did was I was allowing her to grab my hand and go down. It looked like I was manhandling her, but I was allowing her. I’m gonna take care of her. I’ve got every Guerrero brother in the world backstage. I’m not worried about these 10,000 fans. The Guerrero brothers, I was worried about. I’m allowing her to go down. And I remember sitting there and thinking there’s not a Guerrero that can’t work. I mean, she looked like she had a heart attack. I’m sitting there and I’m in on it, obviously, and I’ve got her down.”
The whole place, there was heat. Ron’s been there in buildings like this, and all of a sudden the place just gets silent. You could have heard a pin drop in the building. The place got silent.
Ron: “It was the silence of hey, we’re all gonna attack his ass!”
JBL: “Oh, it was unbelievable. And Eddie’s on the ground, and he goes, ‘Ese, you better get the f*ck out of here.’ We had extra state troopers around the ring. We had cops going, ‘John, you’ve got to go!’ Because you could feel the place was about to riot, but we got to get it on camera. There’s no reason to do it if you don’t get it on camera. I didn’t tell them that, but that’s what I’m doing. I’m making sure we got all this stuff filmed. They’re going, ‘John, you’ve got to get out of this building.’ So they got me to the back, and the place is literally, I mean, you could feel it bubbling. By now, they’re starting to get loud and they’re getting ready to come over the rail, and these cops are trying to get me out of the building. They got me in my car, and my car is running. They take me to the city limit sign, and the police did. I stopped, and I said, ‘Guys, nobody followed us. I’m good.’ They said, ‘Do not come back.’ The police at the city limit took me aside and said, ‘Do not come back. We think you will be killed. Drive all the way to Odessa.’ Which we had planned anyway. I had to drive all the way to Odessa to fly out. I drove by myself because of the police in El Paso. Two years later, we worked there, and they wouldn’t book me there. They thought I’d be killed. They thought something would happen to me. I had that much heat. It was crazy. It was absolutely nuts. But I tell you a funny story that I hardly ever told. I go about three miles after the cops had stopped, and I look up, and there’s a border checkpoint, which is not a big deal. They had them inland in Texas. Not a big deal, except for the fact all my stuff’s in the trunk, and I’m in wrestling trunks and wrestling boots and no shirt. I pull up to this border checkpoint, and it’s a Hispanic officer, and I’m not going to tell him that I gave Eddie Guerrero’s mom a heart attack. This guy might shoot me out here on this road. I just left a building that may be rioting right now. And so the guy that comes up, he goes, ‘Is there an explanation?’ I said, ‘Do you really want to hear it?’ He goes, ‘Just put your shirt on!'”
Is there someone that took a particularly stiff clothesline from hell?
JBL: “Oh yeah, Shane McMahon, almost killed him. Shane told me you got to hit me harder than you’ve ever hit anybody in your life. Ron goes, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it!’ So, I mean, we’re at SummerSlam. Shane’s running around. He’s running full speed. I’m like, you got to be kidding me! I hit him so freaking hard. I never hit anybody like that in my life. But he told me, he was threatening me. ‘All right, you got to hit me. You got to hit me. You got to hit me.’ It’s all he kept telling me all day was you got to hit me the hardest clothesline I ever hit. I hit him, and as soon as I did, Ron goes ‘We’re fired.'”
Ron: “I just told him, ‘Go back there and start packing. I’m just gonna go back in and start packing my sh*t.’ The only thing I just recall seeing was this part of Shane’s right here disappearing so fast. I was just standing there shaking my head like it’s been a good run. It’s been a good run, man. Nice knowing you.”
What did Shane say when you got back?
JBL: “Oh, Shane thought it was the greatest thing ever! Shane’s nuts. Shane thought it’s the greatest thing ever. ‘Oh, that’s awesome! That’s awesome! It’s so good.'”
Did guys know what they were getting into when it was a match with the APA?
Ron: “Well, look, man. Here’s the thing with us, and same with him. I was taught when you are in that ring, you doing your best portrayal of realism. It ain’t about getting out there and throwing 1,000 punches, but you throw one, make that sh*t look good, all right? That’s exactly the way I tried to work. Now some would call it stiff or whatever you’d like to call it, but I called it as real as it can get, and that’s the way we both worked, and that’s the way he was taught. A lot of people didn’t like it because they thought it was stiff or whatever. But guess what? We never did anything that we couldn’t take. We never injured anybody, never hurt nobody. That’s called taking your time to learn what you’re doing. Because that’s the way we’re taught. I can hear his words now. If you’re doing this, the people right there that’s sitting at ringside have got to look real hard to see that you didn’t hit him. That’s the way I was taught, and that’s the way things were back in the day, man. That’s why you had a lot of arguments, and people got into these conflicts back in the day about reporters asking you, ‘Hey, is that stuff real?’ Hell, that’s the way guys worked. That’s the way guys and girls worked back then.”
We talked about Ron winning the world championship. What was that night like for you, John, when you won the world title?
JBL: “It was a dream come true. I’d always wanted to be the guy. I’d always dreamed of it, and I’d been the man in smaller territories and things like that. I just didn’t know if I’d ever get a chance, and fortunately, Ron helped boost me into that position, and a lot of mentoring that Ron had obviously helped me as well. But all of a sudden, I got this title, and a lot of it happened. Taker told the story in Chicago when I got fired from CNBC, and I cut the promo instead of going out there and begging for mercy and saying I’m sorry. I went the opposite way and said, ‘Anybody who doubts me as a great American would be like calling Mother Teresa a whore.’ It’s about as strong as it could be. You couldn’t say anything I said back then now, and Undertaker was standing back there with Vince. Taker has told the story as well. And he said, “‘m I going to put the title on him?’ Taker says, ‘You think?’ That was what did it was that promo in Chicago. I knew that was sink-or-swim night, and then I had the right guy with Eddie Guerrero. The perfect guy.”
What are the APA grateful for?
Ron: “The friends I had growing up, for having the sense to understand the gift gave me, and the friends I have here.”
JBL: “To have Ron here, to live the dream, and my family.”
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