Pro-wrestling star Scott Garland (fka as Scotty 2 Hotty) recently spoke with Fightful about a wide range of topics, which include Garland reflecting on his time working with Dean Malenko in WWE. During the interview, Garland discussed his chemistry with the Man of a 1000 holds, as well as the controversy that surrounded their showdown at Backlash 2000. Highlights are below.
Recalls his match with Malenko at Backlash:
“I remember being there. It was in Washington, D.C. and I’m getting together with Dean that day and we didn’t really have a whole lot. We’d wrestled so many times at that point, it felt like we kinda missed the boat on the whole match. We were on Velocity or whatever that Saturday Night Shotgun slot was at that time. Metal or Velocity or Jakked. There’s been so many times it’s been rebranded over the years. We must have wrestled every week. We’d get to TV, we’d be wrestling. So by the time we got to Backlash, it really didn’t even feel special. But like you said, twenty years later, that’s the match that everybody talks about and the finish everybody talks about was that DDT off the top. I dodged a bullet that day, man. I was lucky.”
Malenko defeated Garland with a top rope DDT. Afterwards Linda McMahon told him to never attempt that move again:
“Actually, when I came back through the curtain, Linda McMahon was standing there. She pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ Linda McMahon said that. That was sick. I feel like I dodged a bullet because if you look at that, there’s no way I didn’t break my neck. I did have neck surgery the next year, so that may have played into it.”
How good the chemistry was between himself and Malenko:
“Dean and I was just a perfect combination. I think it sums up pro wrestling. If you had Dean Malenko versus Dean Malenko, it’s eh, okay. If you had Scotty 2 Hotty versus Scotty 2 Hotty, eh. But when you take black against white, and two different things, that’s where the interest comes from to me. That’s part of the art. I think as we grew up we saw all these larger-than-life characters, you go, ‘Oh, I want to see this guy wrestle that guy,’ that’s what makes it fun. I think back to the territory days, you have all these territories coming to the WWF. So you have all these different styles and characters meshing, which made it fun. The negative of the Performance Center is everybody is being trained under the same roof by eight to ten of the same people. So it’s basically all the same style and I think you lose something in that.”