14. His Name Was Inspired By Eddie Murphy And Johnny Rotten
One day at work I was making a list of potential names while listening to Never Mind The Bollocks by the Sex Pistols, and I thought Johnny Rotten (the lead singer in the Sex Pistols)... Thats a pretty cool name. Man, I should just be called Johnny Rotten! That should be my wrestling name! It soon dawned on me that I couldn't just rip him off directly, so instead I came up with Sid Rotten and Johnny Vicious, again not exactly the most original, but that was the sort of direction I wanted to go in. As I was writing down all of these different names a lady came into the video store I was running to return the movie Beverly Hills Cop. She told me there was something wrong with the tape because lines kept going through it, and our store policy was that when a customer brought a tape back that they said was defective we had to watch it through to make sure it was rentable again. I popped the cassette into the video player then carried on doing my job, renting out and returning videos, filling the shelves and of course, thinking of ideas for my wrestling name. The whole time I was doing this the movie was playing in the background, and occasionally I would catch some of the lines. One name that kept coming up was Axel Foley, the main character in the film, played by Eddie Murphy. There is a famous scene in the movie where Axel meets a flamboyant artist called Serge, played by Bronson Pinchot, who keeps calling him Achmel. I overheard the dialogue where Murphy tells him, My name is AXEL Foley! and it hit me: Axel was a pretty cool f*****g name. I went back to my pad and wrote Axel Vicious, but I thought, Nah, thats no good. I picked up the pen again and crossed out the name Johnny and replaced it with Axel, and boom, Axel Rotten sprung off the page. I tweaked the spelling to Axl ala Axl Rose from Guns n Roses, and I finally had the name that stuck with me for the rest of my wrestling career.
The author of the highly acclaimed 'Titan' book series, James Dixon has been involved in the wrestling business for 25 years as a fan, wrestler, promoter, agent, and writer. James spent several years wrestling on the British independent circuit, but now prefers to write about the bumps and bruises rather than take any of them. His past in-ring experience does however give a uniquely more "insider" perspective on things, though he readily admits to still being a "mark" at heart.
James is the Chief Editor and writer at historyofwrestling.co.uk and is responsible for the best-selling titles Titan Sinking, Titan Shattered, and Titan Screwed, as well as the Complete WWF Video Guide series, and the Raw Files series.
