Actor and pro-wrestler David Arquette was a recent guest on the Wrestling Inc. Daily to discuss his reign as WCW champion, and the backlash he received from fans because of it. Highlights are below.
Backlash he got from fans for winning the WCW championship:
It was really 20 years building up to it. I’d gone to Staples Center events, WWE events. Whenever I’d be traveling, wherever I could, I’d go see a match, and then some fans would be cool and say, ‘what’s up champ?’ Just have fun with it, but then a lot of people just really hated me. I took Christina one time, and she’s like, ‘I can’t believe you come to these things. Like people are so mean to you. Like you’re sensitive person. It’s weird that you’d come, and it was always just eating at me. So it was just something I knew I had to address.
Says he agreed to do it because of Ready to Rumble promotion:
When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘this that’s a terrible idea. We can’t do that. There was a storyline that they were setting up between Jeff Jarrett and Diamond Dallas Page. So he was saying like, ‘listen, you don’t have to do it, but if you don’t, the promotion [for] ‘Ready to Rumble’ and ‘Ready to Rumble’ essentially is dead now, and that’s it. You won’t wrestle anymore. You won’t be traveling with us, and I was like, ‘wait, I get to travel with you?’ I found out that yeah, you get to stay on till the PPV that was like two weeks away. So I get to travel and wrestle kind of live my dream for two weeks. I was like, ‘OK, I’ll do it’ because I wanted to have that experience of being part of the thing.
On a conversation he had with Booker T about winning the world title:
I just never knew that I was going to be such an outcast, but after I won the belt, I was sitting in the locker room [before] one of the next times I was supposed to go out, and Booker T was getting ready and I said, ‘how many times have you been champ Booker T?’ He said, ‘I’ve never been the champ,’ and that really hit me,” Arquette admitted. “I was like, ‘oh damn.’ Then it made a lot of sense like why people were so upset, and I got it a lot more. I just thought of it more as like a kid. You know what I mean? I fell in love with wrestling as a kid. I kind of looked at it, to that point, the way a kid looks at it. So it wasn’t as serious and really deep as I learned it to be.