Ryback Shares Vince McMahon Stories on Weight and His Entrance

Ryback was a guest on a special episode of the Art of Wrestling podcast where he spoke about Vince McMahon thinking he was overweight and that his entrance was weird.

Ryback first talks about getting permission from Rob Van Dam to use designs on his singlets after McMahon called him ‘fat’ and asked that he used singlets instead of trunks:

“Its’ funny because [Vince] was the one that put me in a singlet because he thought I was fat at one point. I have never been fat at any point in my career but this was a real thing. Word had gotten back to me that I needed to lose 30 lbs, and this was right before I debuted as Ryback. I was in trunks, but they put me in a black singlet, which made me look like a black Big Show. I thought to myself that I had to do something with this, so I got a hold of RVD and asked him if It was cool that I airbrushed my singlet because I had to do something. I had done this the week before and everybody was like, oh that looks good, so I thought, OK, this is going to work.”

When Ryback became synonymous for the singlet, WWE attempted to remove it, which he adadamantly refused to do. He argued with McMahon:

“I responded back that it wasn’t happening, and that he can talk to me if he wants to, but I’m wearing my singlet. I’m in control, I’m not wearing trunks. So, afterwards I started not to trust anything that was going on. Finally, everyone was pissed off so I went to the back and talked to Vince McMahon and said that we needed to talk. I went to his office, we talked, and had a conversation about the singlet. I felt that I won the conversation, but not really since he controls everything. Eventually I went to trunks because I knew I was leaving and it became a mindgame at that point. John Cena approached me later and said to me, ‘Congratulations. You won that conversation.’ Ultimately, did I really win? I didn’t win on TV after that.”

Finally, Ryback shares a somewhat hilarious story about McMahon and Billie Kidman not understanding his entrance:

“One day Billy Kidman came up to me in ‘Gorilla,’ and he goes, ‘Vince was on the headset and he wants you to explain your entrance.’ I was just to the ring to bulls**t with some of the guys, and I asked him what he meant? Kidman responded that he doesn’t understand my entrance. Like, why you do the arm thing, and then all the arms, and then all your legs. I said to him that I am collecting all of the energy in the arena, feeding off the energy off the crowd. I am collecting the left side, collecting the right side and then I am collecting everything and then eject it into my quads because I go I know Vince will understand that. This is really the discussion and Kidman can hear me explain it over the headset while I explain all of this. I inject their energy into me and then I shut down, and then I wake up, it’s feeding time! I had to explain that to him, and then Kidman just goes, ‘That is just so f***ng weird.'”

With H/T to WrestlingInc for the transcription.

If you would like to hear the audio version instead, you can find the video version of the interview below.

AOW Ep 371 Live NYC w/ Bobby Lashley, Ryback & Sam Roberts | Colt Cabana Podcast

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