Steve Blackman Reveals Never-Before Told Details About Shane McMahon’s Iconic Fall From Their WWE SummerSlam 2000 Match
Steve Blackman appeared as a guest for an in-depth sit-down interview on the latest episode of the wildly popular INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet podcast.
During the discussion, “The Lethal Weapon” spoke about his memorable match with Shane McMahon at the WWE SummerSlam 2000 pay-per-view, Shane’s iconic fall off the titan tron, who pitched the idea for it to happen, plus the surprising popularity of his “Head Cheese” duo with Al Snow.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview sent to us by Chris Van Vliet himself where Steve Blackman touches on these topics with his thoughts. Also below is a complete video archive of the interview.
On the SummerSlam 2000 match with Shane McMahon: “That was pretty much the plan. I don’t remember much being discussed differently than what we did. Most people don’t realize, it was rare that I’d go out there and talk about the match and stuff in the ring before we go out and do an appearance. I didn’t really walk through much with people. That was a rare one when we went out there to go up to the TitanTron, we actually climbed up and that’s high. And the worst thing was, there was nothing on the floor from the TitanTron until you’re seven feet, eight feet away. Then there was a mat the size of a bed way out here. And I’m like, ‘He’s going to land on that backwards from up there? What if he falls straight down?’ This one guy, he’s one of the stunt coordinators, goes, ‘If he just steps back and falls this way, he’ll land out there.’ I’m like, You’re kidding me, right? I said, well that’s insane to me. So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll do it.’ He didn’t drop, but he said, Okay, he’ll do that. And I said, All right. So we get up there the next day, I hit him with my stick, and he drops. Well, I’m supposed to drop an elbow on him, and I’m like, I have two feet to land there. How am I going to drop an elbow on this guy from 50 or 60 feet, whatever we were. I shimmy down, I might have still been 25 feet up. So I shimmy down halfway and jump from there and landed. But what happened is, overnight, somebody encased the mat with three-quarter-inch plywood around it. So if you have a limb sticking out, it’s just going to snap off. So I had to land right there, drop an elbow on him and try not to completely pancake him. So I landed there, hit him with the elbow and pulled it off. But during the match, our runners would grab props anywhere, and sometimes they were real street signs. I’d be like, ‘Guys, where are you grabbing this stuff? This is a real street sign.’ [They said] ‘Well, don’t ask Steve.’ So he gets out there, he hit me with a street sign one time. If you watch that match, it felt like it ripped the nose off my face. That metal thing just went peeling right down my face. I thought, Holy hell. Then Test and Albert interfered, you know, we had a good match. Everybody was getting beat on in that one.”
On who pitched the Shane fall: “Well, it had to be him. I don’t think it was his dad. It had to be Shane. And never forget we were out there going over it and talking about it. I’m like, I’ll crack him, crack him, crack him. But the worst part was that I was so sweaty from the match for 15 minutes, trying to hold on to those bars. I was just drenched in sweat. I kept worrying about slipping and dropping, so that’s why I stopped where I did, held the bar and then cracked him because I just kept sweating so bad. We were out there, I’ll never forget, Vince is like, ‘You need to get that stick out of the way. If you crack him and your stick’s here, and he drops, he’s going to [fall differently].’ I said, You know what, you’re right. So it’s good you thought of that. I had to crack him and make sure I got the stick out of the way so he didn’t land on it and flip or something like that. It hits me, because you think of crazy little things like that that you wouldn’t most of the time.”
On being in pain throughout his WWE career: “Yes. I think it would be like Monday I’d wrestle and get a migraine, and I don’t mean a little headache where, oh, I have a headache. No, I mean feels like you’re being stabbed in your head. Throw up, lay down, throw up, lay down, go to bed. The next day, sleep all day, wrestle the next day, the migraine again, go through that next day resting. So it’d be like every other day I’d have a migraine. I’m not being funny, but you can’t imagine what it’s like getting forearmed or body slammed when you have a migraine, you feel like a grenade went off in your head. I wrestled Kane one night in a hardcore match. I landed on the back of my head on the floor. My foot got caught. I jumped off the rail, kicked him, my shoe hit him on the chest, and I landed on my back. The migraine kicked in in one second, just shot up through my spine. Every time he hit me, I felt like a grenade was going off, and that was the beginning of the match. We had 15 minutes more to go, and I’m like, Oh my God. I’m just fighting through it, fighting through it. I’d sit out in the hall and just squeeze my head. And then a night in a hotel, I’d literally lie on my side. Sometimes I’d have a baseball in my bag. I’d put a baseball under my back, try to lay on it. I’d find a spot where I could pinch off the nerve going to my head. So finally, after about an hour, I could fall asleep, and then sleep the whole night and the next day I would just be tired from the pain, but I’d wrestle again, and that’s what I went through for years. I’m going to say, 80% of my run. It was brutal. I’m like, Man, if I had that stuff done before I went back, it wouldn’t have got much worse in there. But if I’d had that done and then gone back, I just could’ve done a lot more. There were nights where I wanted to do more crazy stuff, and I just couldn’t. My head hurt too bad. So I just do what I could to get by. But the hardcore stuff worked out great for me, because I could just showcase weapons and speed and things like that. It sounds funny, but I was getting cracked as much as them, but it was still easier on my neck.”
On Head Cheese: “I don’t know how that came about, but it got over. The vignettes were comical. People popped like crazy on them. It’s funny because it got over great for three months, here’s another one, we were going to get the tag belts at that time. And one of the guys in the office said something to, I don’t know if it was Vince or whoever was pulling the shots that night, it’s usually Vince, said, ‘I don’t think we should give him the belts yet.’ And they just squashed it and squashed our gimmick. I don’t want to say who it was, that’s not me, but I’m like, Really, dude? I didn’t find out till a year later. But I’m thinking that’s brutal. So he goes up there and uses some clout to put a stop to it.”
On whether he realized it would be that popular: “I did not. It did. It got a heck of a pop. That place popped. Al was a comical guy, so the stuff that he would have me do and stuff, it was entertaining. I’d get to the arena and they’d be like, ‘Steve, you’re going to milk a cow tonight.’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure, I am.’ I’d walk to the locker room, then I’m on the farm milking a cow. The next week of TV, they’re like, ‘Steve, you’re doing a comedy skit at a retirement home.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure, I am.’ And yeah, that woman’s yelling that unscripted ‘Blackman, you suck!’ You remember that? I just remember her yelling that at me. So it was funny, it was going well, and then someone stepped in and squashed it after a few months.”
