Ryback On Why CM Punk Started To Dislike Him, Vince McMahon Getting Mad For Going Off Script, Rusev
Recently on Conversation With The Big Guy, former WWE Superstar Ryback opened up with respect to whether he misses being on the road full-time with WWE, having friends within WWE, being laughed at by a CM Punk fan at an autograph signing, why CM Punk started to hate him, and Vince McMahon getting angry at performers straying from the script.
According to Ryback, while he does not miss being on the road full-time that much, he misses 'the boys'.
"I miss a lot of the guys, so it's hard. I love watching them. I told you I have a lot of friends there." Ryback added, "it's hard to watch from a competitive standpoint, but I'm like, 'I took myself out of there and I'm okay with that.'"
Ryback claimed that he has many friends who are with WWE despite what the IWC believes. 'The Big Guy' went on to say that he Facetimed with Rusev recently.
"Rusev FaceTimed me the other day when I was at the airport and we just bulls–tted for like 15 minutes. And, yeah, it's weird. I have some good relationships there with different people."
Also during the podcast, Ryback sought to explain his side of a situation that occurred recently where a CM Punk fan laughed at 'The Human Wrecking Ball' at a comic con for not having any fans in his line. As the story goes, Ryback was booked to the Long Island, New York Eternal Con last minute and his appearance was not advertised.
"We got it thrown together last minute. It was definitely an interesting ordeal? deal and ordeal." Ryback exclaimed, "nobody knew I was f–king going to be there!"
When Ryback arrived at the venue and realized he was not advertised, he wanted to walk out of the scheduled appearance.
"My first instinct was just 'f–k it, I'll have a two-day vacation in New York and not do the signing because not being advertised is kind of like? I always want everything to go really, really well." Ryback explained, "it's just perception and I go, 'somebody will say something.'"
And somebody said something, or had a laugh at the expense of Ryback.
"I got the one CM Punk fan guy and I knew it was him and his wife walking by on Sunday and they were a heavyset couple, which is irrelevant, but not because they're f–king marks. And the guy kept looking over at my table and I'm not advertised, nobody knows I'm there, and traffic, three or four people come over, two people, six, seven people come over, and then, you're waiting five, 10, 15 minutes and it's all dependent on when people see you, but it's a constant flow of people in the two or three hours that you're there. This guy happens to walk by when I had nobody there at the table and it happened? Tommy Dreamer is over there, Bubba Ray is over there. We all go through periods of when people are at your table or aren't at your table. That's what these things are, but this one guy is walking by and he's looking over, belly laughing, just hunched over, laughing hysterically. And I'm just thinking, 'I'd like nothing more than to get up right there and snap this motherf–ker's neck.'"
Ryback stated that he thinks CM Punk started to dislike him after he asked Punk to stop doing a gesture similar to the 'feed me more' taunt.
"After I had been up there are started doing the 'feed me more' chants, Vince [McMahon] took away all my stuff, which I wasn't allowed to do the taunt or anything and I was working heel the whole time."
Ryback continued, "it was taken away from me and everybody in the company knew it was taken away from me, told [to] me not to do it anymore for whatever that whole f–king period was. And he started doing this, 'CM Punk! CM Punk!' trying to do the arm taunt with it, and it was both 'CM Punk' [chant] and 'GTS' [chant], it was both, I believe, but people would do, 'feed me more' when he did it and they would try to and it never caught back on again, but I remember it was just so petty, I thought at that time, and it's not whatever, but it's something that eventually after him doing it again, I was in the locker room. I saw it on the monitor. I had my boots off. I was getting changed and I said, 'f–k this' and went into 'Gorilla' [position] and when he came back there just said, 'I don't appreciate you doing this. That was taken away from me. That was my thing. I got it over' and he was caught off guard with the whole thing, like, 'I was f–king doing that before!' And I go, 'you didn't get it over. I did.' And he wasn't happy. That's when he really started to hate me."
Also during the show, Ryback recalled that McMahon would get hot at him for going off the script, even in cases of minor deviations.
"I got in trouble multiple times for doing things much less? just like, off-the-cuff that got great reactions that Vince would get mad at because that wasn't verbatim off the page. When people always say, 'these guys need to go off the script,' they don't understand it depends who you are at times. That hurt me more than anything on promo stuff. And he would get furious with me at that. It was disappointing because it was never a lot."
Check out the podcast here. If you use any of the quotes from this article, please credit Conversation With The Big Guy with an H/T to WrestlingINC for the transcription.
Source: Conversation With The Big Guy