Mark Henry shared a story about Vince McMahon calling him when the WWE Hall of Famer’s mother passed away during a recent episode of Busted Open Radio.
The story started when he was asked whether it’s strange to work for AEW after all the years he spent in WWE. This led to Henry telling the story about what McMahon said to him.
“The one that was the most effective to me is my mother died and Vince knew I was a mama’s boy. My mother came to shows. And he saw that there was, you know, I was definitely a mama’s boy. And when she died, he called me. He might have been like one of the first two or three people that I answered the phone. And he said, ‘listen, I don’t want you to say nothing.’ He said, ‘You deal with this the way that you deal with it. Don’t worry about work.’ He said, ‘You come back when you get back if it’s six months from now, if it’s a year from now.’ I was thinking to myself, like, what? Like he — they never called me. For three and a half months I stayed at home. I got my check every week. And there was a level of respect that I gave him for the rest of my career because of that day he called me. Bosses don’t do that. You have a death in the family? In a week, they call and go, ‘Hey, are you okay?
Can you be at work on Monday?’ That’s the way bosses operate. This dude was like, no. And I’m not the only one. He hates this. Vince is gonna hear this [and] he’s gonna be a little pissed because he don’t want nobody to know that he has compassion, that he actually cares about the people that work for him. He’ll act like he don’t because he’s just the old curmudgeon. He just tries to act like a tough guy. He is a tough guy. But he wants the image of the tough guy more than enforcing it and I always take that, you know, to my grave, like, you know, like he did for me what I know a lot of people will never get.”
H/T to
WrestlingNews.co for the transcription