On the latest episode of his “Everybody’s Got a Pod” show, WWE Hall of Famer Ted DiBiase discussed his tenure as part of the WWE creative team.
Joining the team in 2004, he remained in that role for a year and a half before transitioning into an agent position. DiBiase disclosed that the idea to join the creative team originated from Stephanie McMahon, despite his reservations about its suitability.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On the offer to join the creative team: “For the period of time when I went back and tried to be a part of the….I think it was Stephanie’s idea. Not at first, like as part of the creative team, you know. And I tried to tell Stephanie, I said, ‘Stephanie, that’s not my that’s not my gift. I said my gift is that I’m an actor. I’m not the storyteller.’ But a lot of the really great wrestlers ended up being bookers. They ended up being the guys calling the shots, ‘And here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s what we’re going to do next week. And I have this idea to do this.’ And I tried to tell Stephanie, I said, ‘That’s just — Steph, it’s not me.’ I said, ‘If you want me to try it, I’ll try it for a little while.’ But I said in the end, you know, my gift is in the ring, not on the outside. And it took them a while to figure it out, but then they finally figured it out that I was telling the truth.”
On the challenges of the role: “It’s the amount of time. That’s the thing that’s so hard. I mean, I remember the hours that we put in. We would do things like this, for example, we had a pay-per-view weekend. You know, you do the pay-per-view weekend, then you do Monday Night Raw, then we would do Smackdown on Tuesday somewhere close. And so, I had three hard days of TV, and then fly all the way back to Stamford and sit in there and start trying to figure out what it is [next]. And I would be at Stanford until Friday. And then Friday, I would try to get out of the office there at Stanford by like, no later than I think 2 o’clock, because if I didn’t get out of there by 2 o’clock, I was going to be stuck in traffic and I wasn’t going to make my plane home. But it was just — all that to say, it’s hard.”
