Rob Conway (@therobconway) is a professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Nashville, TN to discuss having early matches with John Cena and Brock Lesnar in OVW, how he was selected to be in the La Résistance faction with Sylvain Grenier and René Duprée, fans hating the group, why he doesn’t like his “Just Look At Me” theme, being fired on live TV by Vince McMahon, getting beaten up by WWE legends, and more!
What’s keeping you busy these days?
“You know, it seems like there’s not enough time in the day, and I don’t really feel like I do that much. I mean, between taking care of three dogs and working out and doing wrestling appearances, still feel really busy.”
You’re still wrestling, right?
“Occasionally, I like to do appearances more than I like to do wrestling, but when the time comes, I can still get out there and take care of business and entertain a crowd.”
So it went from the love of bodybuilding to maybe I could do this wrestling thing, and you probably didn’t know it at the time, but be a body guy in wrestling.
“Yeah, I watched wrestling as a kid. We went to the Louisville Gardens, starting in fifth grade, and I just never aspired to do it, because I mean, how are you going to become a pro wrestler when you’re a five-foot-nothing, 100-and-nothing-pound kid from New Albany, Indiana? I liked the Macho Man. Well, I grew up on Jerry Lawler. But I was always attracted to the idea of being larger than life, so it was like the ultimate warrior in Lex Luger. I didn’t know if anybody was good at wrestling, I just know that that guy looked big and strong, and looked like he could take the other guy.”
It’s fair to say you’re a body guy in wrestling?
“Fortunately and unfortunately.”
In what way?
“Well, once you’re a body guy, there’s a certain expectation that people have when they meet you, and they will give you their opinion, whether you want it or not. So, right now I try to keep my body fat between, 9 and 11%. Right now, I’m a little on the leaner side, but if I was to gain a few pounds, people feel confident just walking up, going, ‘Dude, you used to be in such good shape.’ Or ‘I liked it better when you had this hair or this mustache.’ If I was never on TV, I was just in an elevator, they wouldn’t say a word to you. But once they’ve seen you on television, everybody feels like they can just give their opinion about whether it’s your music or your hair or how much body fat you have or your trunks. It just comes along with the territory.”
There’s this idea from fans that if you’re not on TV every single week, you’re not wrestling. So like you left WWE almost 20 years ago, you’re still doing this now. Do you have an age in mind that you want to wrestle until?
“I never really think about it. I think you just know when you don’t, [want to] when you’re driving to or flying somewhere, and you’re just thinking, man, I don’t want to do this. I think that’ll be the time, because it’s still fun. I still watch it on television. I still watch a lot of the older stuff, I’m still a fan of the stuff that got me into it in the first place, the early 80s, and then the mid to late 90s, when it got hot. The nWo and DX. People used to just see me and say, ‘Hey, man, are you a wrestler?’ Because I’m like 210 now. I was like 240 pounds with big hoop earrings. I just looked that part, and that’s why I was like, am I a wrestler? I went to a WCW live event, which I didn’t know there was such thing as live events. I just thought everything was TV. So I went, and there was no pyro and no Nitro girls. It was just a live event, but I got down close enough. I was trying to size myself up to Bagwell and Scott Steiner, and they were probably leaner than I was at the time, but I was similar height, similar size, and I didn’t really think about the wrestling aspect, you had to learn how to wrestle yourself. I’m as big as these guys, I could do it.
You were in OVW. You, when all of the massive names were in OVW, I’m gonna go over a few names here, because you’ve had early matches with all of them. Very early matches with Randy Orton in OVW.
“Now the first time I met Randy, I remember I knew his dad was, and stuff like that. We were at a gym, and me and him are still good friends, but he claims that the first time I met him, that I walked in the gym, they said, ‘This is Randy Orton, he just got signed.’ He stuck his hand out, and I looked him up and down, and walked right by him. That would have never happened. That sounds like something he would do, but I don’t know how [that came up].”
Do you remember how it actually went?
“No, but I can’t imagine me in this lifetime not reaching out and shaking somebody’s hand, but then when I first wrestled him, he’s a natural, but he was not in the best shape. When I wrestled him, he was so tired that I was basically having to pick him up to clothesline myself. The office kind of got on him, and I think the next day, I saw him on the stair climber at the gym, and then within a month he was in fantastic cardio shape.”
You had early matches with Brock Lesnar. Do you remember your first impressions of seeing Brock Lesnar?
“Yeah, a lot of times we would get new guys, and I don’t know how you are, but everybody tells me, oh, my boyfriend’s really big, or my husband’s big, or my brother’s big. I see him, and I’m like, where they at? So one of the guys, he said, ‘Hey, man, there’s this dude here, he’s huge.’ So I was driving to the show, and I got there, and I saw him. I went holy crap! This guy’s legitimately huge. Early developmental, they started sending us big dudes, I mean, because they would find these blue-chip athletes, and not all of them panned out. But Brock, with his work ethic and his build. He wasn’t a wrestling fan, he was just a great athlete that was bound and determined to be good at anything that he wanted to do.”
Do you remember early matches with a guy named The Prototype, John Cena?
“Yeah, another guy that, oddly enough, he was the first one at practice and the last one to leave. Not the most talented athlete. By far, the most talented promo guy I’ve ever seen. I still feel like what you’ve seen on television, he’s got way more to give from a promo standpoint, like he, because he was a babyface all those years. In OVW, he was a heel the whole time. I was driving with him on his debut in the WWE. It was the two of us, we stayed in the hotel, went up, went tan, got to the building, and Michael Hayes sat down with us and said, ‘John, you know what you’re doing tonight? He was like, nope. He goes, ‘You’re going against Kurt Angle.’ He was like, okay. He had like Zach Morris type of hair, was like long shaved on the side and long on top, it’s blonde, and they said we want you to get a haircut, and it was before we had the people backstage to do it, so I had to give him the rental car keys, so he’d get his hair cut. He was a babyface that night. I don’t think he’d ever been a babyface. He was always a heel as the prototype.”
He didn’t know he was wrestling Kurt Angle till he got to the arena?
“Yeah, and then he did like three or four moves that he’d never done, I think he did a victory roll. I mean, heels don’t do those moves. As a prototype, he wrestled a lot bigger than he did as John Cena, because he, as John Cena, he has to sell. So as a heel, you’re pretty indestructible when you look like him.”
I think fans are going to be blown away by the fact that you’re not French, you’re not French Canadian. Because you were in La Resistance. I think people assume that you’re French Canadian.
“Yeah, I never spoke French. The biggest rib we played, one time Sylvain would come out and sing the national anthem when we were at a live event, and he said, ‘Tonight I’m going to give you a special surprise. My partner, Robert, is going to sing it.’ I was like, I’ve been listening to him sing it night after night. Now, I don’t know what the words are, but I figure I could make the same noises. He’s not a good singer, so I could make the same noises, but before I even started to sing, the other team’s music hit to interrupt us. So, yeah, I’m from New Albany, Indiana. I was born in Louisville. Lived in New Albany my whole life. But yeah, we’d be at live events, and obviously not TV, and people be like, ‘Go back to France!’ I’d turn around and go, ‘I’m from Indiana, idiot.’ Or they’d tell us, ‘You’re gonna lose, and I’d say, ‘We’re gonna win with the flag in seven minutes.’ Just one person, and they’d be like, what?!”
How did you get called up to be part of La Resistance?
“So Renee had already been in OVW for like a year or so, and then Sylvain came, he was a referee at Hulk Hogan versus The Rock or something. He was learning to wrestle, but he was already under contract, and they sent him to OVW, and he wasn’t real popular with the other guys, because he got into the business from not going the indie route and stuff like that. Back then, they were a little tougher on the Tough Enough guys and stuff like that, because everybody, for the most part, was still coming up through two or three years of the grind. But I hit it off with him, he’s a fun guy, and so they were going to bring me up, and I went to TV, and I had hair like I’ve got now. It’s a little bit longer, blonde hair, curly. I wore white and pink trunks, and they brought me up specifically to team with Stevie Richards, and Victoria was going to be my girlfriend, and they were going to call me the Golden Boy, and I was going to wrestle Tommy Dreamer, and we already had the match planned out. That was my TV debut as an actual character.
About an hour before the show starts, John Laurinaitis came to me and says, ‘Hey, Robbie, we should change your match tonight, and you’re not on the road next week.’ Because I’d already got an itinerary that I was going to be on four nights a week, and that’s pretty much there goes your dreams. But [they said] we are going to bring you to TV next week. We think we got something better. I was like, okay. So they called me during the week, you see that number, and you think either something good or something terrible. They told me to get a military outfit, so I went with my dad, he had got drafted in the army, so he was in the army at one point, and we went to army surplus store, and I got the nicest army outfit you could imagine, even said R. Conway on. I think I made myself a sergeant. We don’t want to be like a four-star general at 29. So I got to TV, and they said, ‘Let’s see it, and I showed it to them, and they said, ‘That is beautiful, but we can’t use it because the army is one of our sponsors. So the seamstress backstage, her husband was retired from the Air Force. I’m not sure, that must have been where they live, because she brought that uniform. So I debuted in the uniform with La Resistance that night, but first they set me down in a chair and cut off all my hair. I actually sat with Robbie Roode, Tyson Dukes and Showtime Eric Young, that’s first time I met him. So yeah, I had an outdated Air Force uniform on, and they gave me tickets, and there was a girl backstage, it was an extra two, so we went through the front with the ticket. I sat in the front row with my cell phone, just in case they decided to do something different, and I ended up coming out of the crowd and leaving the Dudleys laying and joining La Resistance.”
People hated you guys!
“They never stopped hating us. They broke us up way too soon, like you took one faction that had more heat than anybody and broke us up into three not that strong of characters. So I felt like it was kind of a demotion when they broke us up. Went from being all the shows, being on pay-per-views, to having bad music, and being on middle to low card, having bad music.”
You didn’t like your theme song?
“I don’t think anybody actually likes it. I think they get a kick out of it, because it’s kind of funny, but if you were getting ready to bench press 300 pounds, you wouldn’t say, let me throw on Just Look At Me. Let’s say, a month before I come out with La Resistance, the crowd is going crazy. You switch it to that lounge music, and I think Stone Cold could have walked out to it, and people be like, who’s this guy, and why is this music like it is?”
There’s people online that say that’s their favorite theme song of all time. So, you hate it?
“I’m just not a big fan. I call it a crowd killer. At the gym that I go to, like, sometimes I’ll walk in and they’ll switch the music, and I’ll look up. They’ve got my action figures and stuff up, but yeah, they know when I look at them like, come on.”
Did you have any say in what that music would sound?
“I had absolutely no say. As a matter of fact, the first time they played it, I was in Gorilla, and I think Kerwin White had just had a match. When they played my music, I thought they were playing his exit music, and Jerry Briscoe was like, ‘That’s your music, go. ‘ I was like, oh no.”
But you got to a point where you were clearly embracing that theme song, you were singing it as you were walking down the aisle. Whether you like the song or not, it’s become synonymous with the Rob Conway character.
“I mean, when you’re a professional. I’ve wrestled people that I don’t get along with, stuff like, but when you’re out there, you do make the most of it. I mean, it’s your time to shine, and you know your entrance, even though I didn’t like the music, is the only time that, for the most part, it’s 100% focused on you.”
Why does the singer of your theme song have a French accent?
“Everybody thinks it’s Randy Newman from Toy Story. They all think that they used to think it was him, now they call it a knockoff of his. But the thing is, when I first heard it and went out, I was like, is there any way we could speed it up a little bit? Jim Johnston, I guess, got upset about that, so it’s like now I had heat with the office because I didn’t like my own theme song that I had no part in and have anything to do with.”
You said that you think they broke up La Resistance too soon?
“Absolutely.”
Where should this have ended up going?
“I don’t believe we would have ever stopped getting heat, because that’s what we were good at. I grew up watching professional wrestling. I didn’t grow up watching sports entertainment, so when I grew up, and when I got into the business, it was still considered pro wrestling. The heels are heels. You want to be entertaining, but if you’re that hated, you shouldn’t be selling t-shirts and stuff like that. That was kind of what I got into, so all of us had the mindset of getting heat, not trying to do cool moves. I could do cool moves, I just didn’t do them, and if you do something like that, you got to put it in the right spot. Randy Orton is a heel, he throws a beautiful dropkick, but he has to do it when the babyface starts making a little comeback, and then he hits that dropkick when people don’t want to see it.”
How did you get these opportunities to train at the Performance Center?
“Originally, I was talking to Randy Orton. He was like, ‘When are you going to come back here and get your job back?’ I was actually at a show in Las Vegas, Morrison was on it, and Brian Cage and Bubba came out during my match. So it was late at night, but it wasn’t that late there, because I probably wouldn’t have answered my phone had I been at home because of the time difference. I said, man, I don’t think I could wrestle four nights a week, and he’s like, ‘Well, what would you want to do?’ I said, maybe coaching? I’d like doing that. He’s like, ‘Do you want to talk to Hunter? You want me to talk to him?’ I think it’d be a lot better if you talked to him than me, because I hadn’t seen him in years. But it took about six months after that, but then I got an opportunity to go down there and see it, and be a part of what they’re doing now, compared to me being there at the very beginning of the developmental, so I’m not saying it’s better, but it’s a lot more elaborate, it’s a lot nicer of facility. But to say it’s better is hard to say because of the guys that we produced out of OVW.”
When La Resistance broke up, now you’ve got the opportunity to be a singles guy, were you promised anything at that point in time that your character would go on to do whatever?
“Not really. They didn’t say, ‘Hey, you’re going to be the Intercontinental champion or anything like that.’ But I had talked to Vince at one point, and this is going to seem outlandish, but Sylvain was there, and this is when we were still in La Resistance. I know Vince liked me as a wrestler. We were in La Resistance. He pulled us aside one day. He said, ‘Rob, I consider you to be just one tier below Bret Hart as a worker.'”
How difficult is it for you when your identity is tied into being a WWE superstar? When you’re a pro wrestler, that ends for most people that ends without them wanting it to end. You get released.
“I’ve always said you want to be done with the business before it’s done with you, and that’s sad when people that I don’t want to say they hang on too long because you can’t really hang as long as somebody’s willing to pay you, and you can physically go out there and do it. Why wouldn’t you do something you love? But it’s when you want to do it, and nobody wants to hire you anymore. I think that would be a sad existence to be wanting to do something that nobody else wants to see you do anymore.”
You had a segment where a ring full of legends beat you up. How did you get selected to be that guy?
“Well, I know earlier in the day it was either going to be Randy with them and me, I think, with Piper, so I think Randy did something with Piper that night, I believe, or maybe it was Mark Cuban. But they didn’t know which one they were going to do, so I ended up being with the legends, and so we had to rehearse it, most of those guys hadn’t been in the ring in a long time. So just getting in the ring, going up the steps, and getting in, and having that many people. We didn’t use to rehearse a lot of stuff back then, they do a lot more now, and why wouldn’t you? They’re there all day; why not get it right? So we did a rehearsal, my music played, I walked all the way to the ring, and they stopped it, and said, ‘You forgot to cut your promo.’ I was in awe. I’m looking at these guys, thinking wow, I’ve forgotten I was supposed to talk. I remember Stephanie coming up and going, ‘Hey, I know that you love the business, and you have all the respect for these guys, but you’ve got to be a jerk. They know it, they’re pros.’ So then it went pretty good, you know, went about as good as it could, and then the funny part about it is that Kevin Von Erich was in there going to give me the claw. At one point, he was like ‘Which one am I giving the claw to?’ I was talking to Ted DiBiase. He’s like, ‘The one that doesn’t look like the rest of us.'”
When you got beat by Jeff Hardy in 21 seconds, did they tell you a number, did they say the match has to be 20 seconds or less?
“No. So the backstory on that is that I had done a show in OVW with Renee, and he hit, I believe, Ryback before he was Ryback with the flag, and the flag wrapped around and hit me in the face. So I ended up breaking my nose and having a deviated septum, so we had a little time off for Christmas. I had nose surgery to get myself because I could hardly breathe out of one side. So they contacted me and said, ‘Hey, we want to do this thing, we’re going to put you and Sylvain back together on SmackDown. But we’re going to have you get fired on TV.’ So the wording has to be, I will quit Raw, not the company, if I don’t win. So I said, well, I’m not cleared to wrestle. I just had surgery like five days ago. They’re like, well, we’ll just fly you in and have our doctors take a look at you. So originally the match was supposed to be just like a normal three or four or five-minute match. The match was irrelevant, it was the promo, and to get Vince. I was like, man, I can’t get hit in the face. I wasn’t in great shape. Still taking pain meds. So then the match kept getting shorter and shorter, and I was like, what about this? How about I just start off on him and shoot him in, and he does the sunset flip out of the corner, 123, and I’m like, oh no. They’re like, okay. Everybody likes Jeff, but I mean, if he had hit me in the face, I don’t even know what would happen if I would have started fighting back. So we were doing everything we could just to just get from I’ll quit Raw to losing to Vince saying you can’t quit, you’re fired. Then I was already getting gear made to wrestle on SmackDown with Sylvain.”
What happened?
“Just so you know, my contract ran over in January, so I got fired on TV January 1. Well, because my contract rolled over, I was not on the road, so I was sitting at home getting paid full paychecks, and they had to keep me off TV till after WrestleMania, because the whole ‘You’re fired’ was to spark the angle between Vince and Donald Trump. So if I showed up two weeks later, he didn’t do a very good job of firing me. So after WrestleMania, then I was supposed to start on SmackDown with Sylvain, because together we were gold, separately they didn’t really do that much with either one of us. So I was getting gear made. So whenever WrestleMania came and went, and they didn’t call me up to do it. I started thinking, man, I’m getting paid, so if I had already made my guarantee, then I’d be sent at home not getting paid. But the way it worked out, I was getting a full paycheck. I was thinking I would either do something with me or let me go. If they did let me go, it’s not like if I did six months later I wouldn’t be like, yeah, I’ll come back. Who’s gonna say no to that kind of money?”
But people think that Vince firing you on TV was essentially real
“It kind of hurt my stock, so to speak, because most people get fired, released, and then 90 days, and you can start on TV. Well, I was off TV until I got released, I think, in May, and they kept paying me till August, but I’d been off TV for nine months. People thought I got fired on TV. So it literally was like I’m the only guy who got fired on TV and really seemingly got fired.”
What is Rob Conway grateful for?
“Health, my family and friends, and having a good support network.”
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