10 Funniest Wrestling Shoot Stories

There’s this misconception amongst wrestling fans that ‘a shoot interview’ is some kind of badass clearing of the air, someone sitting down to go off like a gun on whoever he likes.

Well, ‘a shoot’ is just wrestling speak for something real: something that’s not a work. If Chavo Guerrero Jnr., Zack Ryder and Chris Jericho sit down with RF Video and talk earnestly about their receding hairlines, their hair plugs and how they feel like new men… it’d be a fate more bitter than death to listen to, but it’s still a shoot.

Shoot interviews are weird things: the majority are duller than a Belgian butter knife. Many professional wrestlers are trained to keep an audience hooked on their every word, but you honestly wouldn’t know that from watching their shoot interviews.

They’re all over YouTube, but mostly unedited or in longform format, from ten minutes to an hour or longer. Fancy rooting through the hundreds of episodes of Austin’s podcasts for the best backstage stories? Be prepared for how dull a Rattlesnake can be without 10,000 fans to rile him up and a script to work from… and he’s one of the more entertaining podcast hosts. Jericho sounds like a teenager working on hospital radio.

Fortunately, we’re here for you. Separating the wheat from the chaff and the beans from the meat, this article has scoured the world (yes, the world) to bring you some of the funniest anecdotes found from shoot interviews.

In the late eighties, long before they became the boss at WCW and the other people’s champion, respectively, Eric Bischoff and Diamond Dallas Page worked at Verne Gagne’s American Wrestling Association in Minneapolis. The man who would become The Bisch was an on-air interviewer and occasional commentator, recruited out of the sales department because he happened to own a suit, while nightclub impresario Page Falkenberg Jnr. (as he was back in the day) moonlighted for the AWA as a manager.

One night Bischoff and a few of the boys were at a bar in Rochester, Minnesota, and Page was… well, being Page. ‘Diamond Dallas Page’ was a persona that fit him snugger than his white leather trousers and snakeskin boots. If you’re imagining a cross between Burt Reynolds and David Lee Roth, you’re not far off. Bischoff and DDP rubbed each other the wrong way that evening, but the altercation didn’t turn physical until the hotel later on. The pair of them managed to avoid anything nastier than some shoving to and fro, and returned to their rooms to sleep it off.

The next morning, Page was visited by a suitably chastened and horribly hungover Bischoff, who admitted he’d been “a real a**hole last night.” Bischoff announced that there were two ways they could deal with it, and proceeded to reach into his own mouth and remove a false tooth on a plate: he could either accept his apology and shake his hand, or punch him in the mouth now. Either way was good with him.

The way Page tells it, it was the best possible comeback to defuse the situation: he laughed and shook his hand. A few years later when they were on the WCW commentary table together, Page remembered the incident and warmed to the rookie announcer, making a point of teaching Bischoff how to call a match. The rest is history.