Jerry Lawler on Working Randy Savage, Commentary Career

WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler recently spoke to Crave Online, promoting his recently released WWE DVD. Within the interview, Lawler discussed a number of topics in reflection of his more than 40-year career in the professional wrestling industry.

Lawler brought up one of his favorite moments with “Macho Man” Randy Savage, back before the two made it big in WWE:

“One of my favorite memories of that is when Randy Savage knew that we were wrestling in Memphis and I would leave my home in Nashville like at noon and drive down to Memphis for the matches that night. One Monday, Randy Savage brought a camera crew down to my house in Nashville and he gets out of his car and they’re filming him and he says, “This is Jerry Lawler’s house. Lawler come out here” and he’s banging on my door and he says, “Look at this. This coward Lawler is afraid to come out and face me.” He’s cutting this big promo knowing that I’m not home, of course. Then they went back and showed it on their television show and made it look like he came down to my house and I was afraid to come out. Then he and Bill Dundee actually crossed paths at a truck stop and they came to blows and got in a fight.”

“They had to be pulled apart or something there so it was a pretty heated rivalry but finally, because of financial reasons, Randy’s dad came to us and said “Look we can’t continue on so is there a possibility of us working together and having some matches together in co-promotions?” and that wound to me and Randy Savage having a match at Rupp Arena. We sold out Rupp Arena, 23,000 people which, at the time was unheard of, in a Loser Leaves Town match. Right after that was when Randy started in the WWE.”

Additionally, Lawler discussed how his career in commentary came together:

“You know what’s great is the WWE Network now has all that stuff, all of those old things that are onJerry Lawler DVD pic the network and available on-demand 24 hours a day. It’s so cool. Every single day I’ll have people sending me tweets or messages where they just watched something and they’ll remind me of some funny line or something I said back during the Attitude Era and I’ll either say ‘Oh my gosh! That’s hilarious” or “How did I get away with saying that stuff during live television back then?'”

“I actually started my very first venture into broadcasting before I even got into wrestling. I was on the radio. That’s what I thought I really wanted to do other than artwork.”

“I thought man, I wanted to be on the radio because I met this guy who was a radio superstar back in the day when I was just in high school. His name was Scott Shannon. He came through Memphis and was working for a local radio station here. He went on to become one the top DJs in New York for years and years. While he was here in Memphis, I befriended him by drawing some artwork and winning an art contest he put on about drawing some character on a show. But I got to hang around with Scott and watch him do a show and fell in love with that. I got a job on the radio and that’s really how I got my first wrestling match by telling the promoter “If you’ll let me wrestle for ya, I’ll talk about your wrestling show on my radio show.” So that’s where I think I developed a lot of the communication skills and just the advent stuff of doing live radio back in the day before I even got in the ring.”

Check out the entire interview, here. Lawler went in-depth on his time spent wrestling in Memphis.