During a recent appearance on the “Something To Wrestle With” podcast, JBL reacted to people’s notion that he is a bully.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On people thinking he’s a bully: “There’s a couple of things. One, I was always a heel, so I didn’t want to correct people and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m a good guy.’ I think you just come across as terrible when you say that. It just, I think it kills any type of heat you have. So I mean, there was a story a while back that I was mean to Chris Kanyon because he was gay. And there’s a couple of real issues with that. I mean number one, I marched in the first gay pride parade in Bermuda. I’m a huge advocate for equal quality and gay marriage. I don’t care who you marry, it ain’t none of my damn business. So that’s a big issue. A bigger issue was that no one knew he was gay. So he was there, no one knew. You know, people talk about, ‘The Undertaker did this, or did that.’ Nobody knew, and nobody would have cared, by the way. I mean, absolutely, 100% wouldn’t have cared.
“But if I come out and say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’m really a good guy. Mark’s in the gay pride parade. I’m actually for equality,’ All of a sudden, you just look like a freaking dude by trying to defend yourself or rewrite history. And so a lot of that’s me not taking anybody to task over it and letting stuff run rampant — in some cases, even fueling the flames a little bit. And some of it could be true. I’m not trying to rewrite history, I’m not trying to rewrite my legacy. Whatever I did, I did. And you know, I hope I wasn’t an a**hole but if I was, I’ve apologized to most people. As you live long enough and you have a good time, you do things that you regret. But a lot of these things, are — some are myths, and some are just — it’s me not wanting to get into a fight on Twitter and say, ‘Hey I didn’t do that, or I did do this, or anything about that.’”
On outlasting his generation: “And you know, a lot of it was — you know, we ribbed incessantly. And a lot of it, I outgrew my generation. I lived my generation. You know, our generation, we ribbed all the time and we thought it was fun. And was it hazing? It could have been, yeah. It might have been. Was it too strong? Of course it was at times. Anytime you do stuff like that, inherently you’re gonna get too strong. But I didn’t care if I was the one being ripped. I like Bart a lot in that respect. You know, I didn’t care if I was one being ribbed. I didn’t care if you were the one being ribbed. I just wanted to be entertained.
“We were bored. We didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have a lot of stuff. And so a lot of that just came about by — you know, I think people misinterpreting. I don’t know that for sure. The only person you can talk to is the people that have made these claims. And again, I never wanted to address the claims, because you look like such a douche when you go, ‘Hey listen, that didn’t happen.’; And it looks like you’re apologizing for stuff. And I didn’t think that was what I wanted to do, and certainly not what I want to do — I can spend a lot of my time trying to correct the perception of people I don’t know on the internet. But that’s not going to change my life at all. You know, the only thing that’s going to change is what I’m doing next. And I’ve always had kind of this forward-looking thing and I’ve never really cared what people have said. Sometimes to my detriment. And again, sometimes the true story involved other people, and I’m not going to put that out there because I’m not going to throw anybody else under the bus. There were things I took heat for because I didn’t want anybody else to take that heat, because I thought I was not going to do that to a friend. And I took heat that was more than what I should have taken, but — not more than I should have taken. It’s what you should have taken because you’re a friend.”
