Exclusive Interview with WWE Hall of Famer Booker T | No-Contest Wrestling

The No Contest Wrestling Podcast had royalty in the chair. Booker T, six-time WCW World Champion who claims only five, two-time WWE Hall of Famer, was the guest. Before he arrived, hosts TJ Jefferson and O'Shea Jackson Jr. opened the show with a full unpacking of Brock Lesnar's surprise return on Raw and the resulting demolition of Oba Femi in under five minutes.

That part was a problem. Lesnar hit Femi with four F5s before Femi stayed down. The pair of hosts noted that earlier in the same show, Jacob Fatu had been beaten by three men and refused to stay down at all.

"Logic don't even matter to me in wrestling," TJ said. "But you're messing with my wrestling logic now."

The hosts had been at WrestleMania for what was supposed to be Lesnar's retirement, the Paul Heyman hug, the tears, the goodbye. The Raw return rewrote all of it.

"We're stealing moments from WrestleMania," TJ said. "Brock kind of is Thanos, so. It's nothing. It's gone now."

Then Booker T arrived.

The interview started with the story Mark Henry had instructed the hosts to ask about, the moment Booker T's commentary career began. Booker explained that he used to do off-mic commentary backstage for the boys at house shows, making up new names for wrestlers and giving them invented moves, just to entertain teammates on long international tours.

That earned him his eventual commentary chair. It also produced the most famous Vince McMahon-Booker T moment of all time.

"Vince McMahon came in my headset one time and he told me to say, hey Book, tell him much to his chagrin," Booker said. "And I said, I can't say that. I said, Book, I'm going to lose all my street cred like that. Much to his chagrin, we don't use those kind of words."

Booker did not say the line. He laughed about it on the podcast.

The TNA Main Event Mafia chapter came next. The faction included Booker, Kevin Nash, Sting, Kurt Angle, Scott Steiner, and Booker's wife Sharmell as the Queen. Booker said his "respect" character bit was a complete improvisation that nobody in TNA ever directed him on, either to keep doing or to stop.

"No one ever came to me and said, hey Book, hey we don't like that," Booker said. "Some of my best work happened in TNA."

He shared the story of one taping where Steiner and Booker were doing eeny-meeny-miny-moe on camera, deadly serious, deciding who would do what, and Kevin Nash walked into frame and told Sharmell to control her husband. Booker, in real life, got so frustrated he walked out of the segment, leaned against a wall, and put himself in time out while TNA producer Jeremy Borash tried to talk him back.

The grocery store match with Stone Cold Steve Austin was the centerpiece of the conversation. Bakersfield, California. A real grocery store called Green Frog. Booker said he watched the full segment back for the first time about a year and a half ago, with the wrestler Maven, who had requested it as payment for a Reality of Wrestling appearance.

"I literally cried from the beginning to the end," Booker said. He described the emotional arc of a single piece of professional wrestling footage that he had not appreciated in real time. The match featured every ad-lib Austin made, including the closer, "price check on a jackass."

"How can you create that in one shot?" Booker said. "Today, they would have to rehearse it for a week. It would be 10 cameras. They would have to edit it for quite some time. That was one shot."

The damages bill from the store, the room noted, came in between $10,000 and $15,000. Booker said he went back to the location two years ago just to walk through it.

The wrestling origin story closed the segment. Booker had never wanted to be a wrestler. He had been a drum major. He had served time. He picked up the sport at age 25 because his brother needed someone to attend the wrestling school with him and Booker's boss at the warehouse covered the $3,000 tuition. Two months in, he was already on a Saturday-night Houston TV show on Channel 39.

The hat in a storage unit became GI Bro. The Hulk Hogan comparison became the character. The Booker T who would later carry WCW out of the building on his back was, at first, a kid at the Avalon in Houston going against the veteran Dusty Wolfe, asking him before the match if he might please be allowed to win.

He won by small package. Joe Blanchard, Tully's father, told him it was the best green kid match he had ever seen. Ivan Putski, his trainer, immediately cursed him out for not doing it the way Putski had taught.

Booker laughed at the inversion.

"My confidence went from up here all the way down here in like a blink of an eye," he said.

He never came back down again.