13 Questions With The Honky Tonk Man
2. The Honk-A-Meter
I remember the story line in 2008 in which Santino Marella vowed to break your record and become the greatest Intercontinental champion of all-time. WWE inserted a graphic on screen which displayed the duration of your reign (64 weeks) and Marella’s as it increased each week. Of course, Marella didn’t come close: he dropped the IC title after 12 weeks and one day.
“It was set up very well, it was done very well. I pitched them the idea after I saw it and I went over and did that thing with him at Cyber Sunday. I said, ‘Let’s take this to WrestleMania, and I’ll do the time-honoured tradition.’
“[Santino Marella] was very talented. I’m telling you, this when they were starting to heavily script stuff, and he would have three pages of dialogue. They would hand him the script at 3:00 p.m. and he would go out there and hit all those words. He didn’t miss any of it.”