Justin Credible On How He Wound Up In WWE As Aldo Montoya, Talks Triple H's Rise To Stardom
Justin Credible joined Inside The Ropes last Thursday where he recalled his tenure with WWE in the mid-1990s. Highlights from the interview are as follows:
How he went from appearing as enhancement talent on Raw to landing a contract with WWE in 1994: "I live in Connecticut, I live 45 minutes from WWE headquarters and I was doing jobs (on TV) and one day the office called me and they said, "We need you to come down to the office and work out with Mark, Undertaker. We have somebody coming in that's gonna do a double Undertaker and we need to train him during the week to look like Mark and do his moves."
"So basically they paid me $150 a day to go up there and be a crash test dummy for Brian Lee doing the impostor Undertaker. We did it all week and on Friday we did a dress rehearsal with Brian Lee in full Undertaker gear and Mark was sitting there and (Vince McMahon) and Pat Patterson, one of the bookers at the time, came down and saw the entire dress rehearsal and at the end, Pat and Vince come up to me and started asking me questions about where I was from, who trained me. But the next question they asked me was, what nationality I was. So I told Vince I was Portuguese and he said, "Ahhh, you're Portuguese, do you speak it?" I told him yeah absolutely and he laughed and said good and that was it. So low and behold I found out later they'd been fixing to do the Aldo Montoya gimmick anyway and they had it written up. So they were looking for a legitimate Portuguese kid to come in and do the gimmick and I was just the in the right place at the right time."
Thoughts on Triple H: "I was there when Hunter came in. I was his first set of matches around the loop. I was real close with (Kevin Nash), (Shawn Michaels), (Scott Hall) and (Sean Waltman). I remember, in 1996, we weren't making much money so Hunter and I would share like a $40 room at Red Roof Inns across the country. I knew he had the passion, I knew he had ability. He just wasn't.....his rise to stardom was very slow for a very long time. He just wasn't getting over. That thing with the bow and the snob gimmick just was not getting over. The office kept trying and trying, he was beating everybody, they were giving him storyline after storyline, but the fans just weren't biting. But Vince kept trying and you know the Kliq thing, the curtain call, Paul went out and he got put in the doghouse. Vince buried him on the road and on TV for almost a full year. For a long time, I didn't think Paul was gonna get to where he is today that's for sure. It's just amazing, time heals all wounds, You know the persistence paid off. He's a hard working guy, passionate about this business. For that I respect him."
Credible also recalls his feud with Jeff Jarrett, being trained by The Harts and discussed the difficulty of appearing as Aldo Montoya character while knowing it would only be a short term character. He joins the show again this Thursday to discuss ECW and his run during the Invasion in 2001. To hear this interview and for details about his appearance on this week's show, click here.