Marc Mero On What Led To Marriage With Sable Getting Strained
Former WWE and WCW star Marc Mero joined the It's Our House Podcast to talk about his wrestling career. Mero in particular talked about his time in WCW as Johnny B. Badd, which was created by wrestling legend "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes. Mero talked about how much fun the two had creating the character.
"Johnny B. Badd was Dusty Rhodes creation," Mero revealed. "As you know I was just Marc Mero back then trying to make it into the business, and when he saw me he said 'I got this gimmick. Did anybody ever tell you you look like Little Richard?' Now, I thought he meant a wrestler named Richard which I'd never heard of, you know, so he said, 'you never heard a little Richard?' He starts singing like, you know, Little Richard singing. 'Oh, the singer Little Richard!' And the next thing I realized was he had this Johnny B. Badd character in mind. And I gotta tell you, it was probably the most fun I've ever had in the business. When I look back on my career at the laughter the joy we had. Here he is teaching this kid from New York to be this flamboyant personality from Georgia with this outrageous character.
"He would show me how to walk and talk like what he thought I should do, and I'll never forget when he first started he wanted me walk up to the microphone. And he says 'walk with microphone and say 'I'm so pretty I should've been born a little girl" like that. I'd walk up and go 'I'm so pretty' and he's like 'oh no no no!' He kept doing over and over, and I got to tell ya we got laughing so hard we couldn't even finish the promo he was trying to teach because we just busted out laughing over this outrageous character you know. 'I'm a bad man, I'm so outrageous, it's contagious. I love to rock and roll, I strut and stroll and I'm going to drive you out of control.' It overwhelms me sometimes when I think about how blessed I was to work with the American Dream because he made my American dream come true."
Mero came up during a time where drug use ran rampant in the wrestling industry, and Mero admitted he partook in the lifestyle. These days he is clean, having not touched a drug in over twenty years.
"Drugs were never, like, open in the locker room or anything like that," Mero recalled. "It was more you had your certain friends that you talked to about certain things, and I really can only speak about what I was able to do and what I did. It wasn't so much steroids, it was the pain medication that many guys got on and then got hooked on. A lot of the guys that died, it was a lethal combination of different drugs that were found in their system. I have overdosed on drugs before. And I made some horrible mistakes with steroids and drugs and then mixing things and going out and partying a lot. Then after I got out of wrestling and went through my divorce with Sable my life was out of control, you know, and I made some horrible decisions. But the one thing I'm so proud of you know is I have not touched drugs since mid 2000s."
Mero was at one point married to former WWE Women's Champion Sable, who has since gone on to marry former WWE star Brock Lesnar. Sable and Mero divorced in 2003 and Mero believes their marriage was strained by Sable posing for Playboy in 1999, which led to the couple moving out to California.
"At the time it was a discussion that her and I had that we decided to do it," Mero said. "Just a horrible decision. You look back on decisions and think 'what was I thinking' you know but what's done is done. We move on, we make mistakes in life and hopefully those mistakes become learning experiences. But it was not a good decision to make for our life, our marriage, our family, and everything else. Next thing you know, we're at the Playboy parties all the time with Hugh Hefner. We even eventually got a apartment in Studio City in Hollywood and it was just not a good time."
You can watch the full interview below.