Mr. Kennedy, also known as Ken Anderson, recently appeared as a guest on the wildly popular INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, the pro wrestling veteran spoke about helping train Tiffany Stratton, his memorable ring entrance with the lowering microphone, viral moments with The Undertaker and more.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On the first time he met Tiffany Stratton: “So she was friends with Greg Gagne. Greg is a family friend, and Greg reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this girl, she’s a power lifter and she does gymnastics and stuff. She’s a super athlete, really good look, and I want to train her. Can we come?’ So she started coming and, right away, day one, she’s one of those people. I was saying earlier, we take our time to get to the flip bumps and stuff like that. But Alex Findley and Tiffany Stratton, day one, they’re doing perfect flip bumps, landing perfectly. Gable Steveson, show him how to bump and then get up a certain way. He did it. I said, get up this way, and he started getting up the wrong way. I said uh uh, then he reversed himself, back down, and got up perfectly the right way. But yeah, Tiffany, day one, there’s some stuff people just have instincts for, I think she’s one of those people. However, the funny thing was, I don’t mean this in a negative way, she didn’t have any charisma as far as she just did the work. She didn’t have the character stuff down. I have her first promo. I’ll have to ask her someday for her permission to put it out there, right? Because it’s not good.”
On always being able to catch the microphone in his entrance: “I didn’t. There’s a really funny video, because they used to mess with me. They drop it real slow sometimes, or sometimes they just drop it. There’s one time where they dropped it fast and I missed it, the thing goes swinging. I just look up, there it is. I just knew where my mark was. It was one of those things too. I think for the most part, every day it was different in every ring, or in every arena. So I’d just get in there and check it and make sure. Or they’d come up and say, hey, it’s a little farther to the back today.”
On a stiff chair shot from The Undertaker: “It didn’t hurt. I feel like WWE has erased that from their [history], you can only find that on YouTube. Every once in a while it gets scrubbed and taken down, because I’ve tried looking it up a few times, and it’s actually kind of hard to find or to get a good copy of it.”
On how did that not hurt: “Because instead of holding both legs, you hold just one set of legs. Get your thumbs inside. Then when you hit it, it just opens up. It just kind of folds. It wasn’t bad. He was one of the lightest guys I’ve ever worked with on anything, nothing he ever did connected.”
On the exploding microphone with The Undertaker: “Magic! No, there was a guy in WWE, that was his job, magic department. If you go backstage, it says magic. It was like he was in charge of anytime there was a special effect that something needed to explode or blow up. He was the guy that did it.”
On how it didn’t seem safe: “It was. The way he rigged it. He just said, as soon as you go to pull it back, we’re going to set it off. I think we tried it during the day. It was fine. It didn’t hurt.”
