A lot of guys, if they're a face and they see their drawing ability start to falter, they'll turn heel and they're right back on top again. Same thing with a heel. All of a sudden they'll turn into a good guy. Ric Flair has done that throughout his career a number of times.
When you are a face for a long time and you turn heel, your stock value immediately goes up, especially if you're able to pull it off in the ring and on the mic. Then you ride that horse as long as you can. When it starts to falter, and when attendance drops, then you can turn back babyface. And your stock value goes up again.
If you look back at people like The Rock there are times when earlier in his career he was doing heel stuff and he was so entertaining that people cheered for him. The natural thing to do was turn him babyface.
I was a Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes guy. Ric Flair continues to be my favorite wrestler of all time. I loved Harley Race and Nick Bockwinkel and all of those guys, but I'm a big Flair guy.
Tully was the first young, handsome, cocky, well-dressed bad guy. He was our version of Ric Flair before I knew who Ric Flair was. This was before cable TV or any of that, and Tully was our Ric Flair.
Whenever two guys got together, you asked, 'What body part would you like to work?' In my case, it was the arm. Most guys wanted to feed me for that arm drag. We always believed in storytelling, so if I had the arm, the heel would get away for a moment - or heel his way away - and then I would get back to it.
The process is learning to turn your back on everything and everyone and face that immensity. And only after you've done that can you then turn around and face the world again with new, clear eyes.
To a lot of people, I might just be the guy who went No. 1 in the draft. Or the guy who lost his job to Colin Kaepernick. Or the guy who helped turn a 2-14 Chiefs team into a back-to-back division champ... but then couldn't put them over the top.
Well, you know, I was a top heel in the company for a long time and whether I was moved over to a tag team with Mike Rotunda, you know, we were a top heel team.
I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.
Let's put it in old movie Mafia terms. There are guys that are in position to get by but they didn't wait their turn. They back-doored the top guy to get the power. For example, Sonny Corleone went up there, and he wanted to be the top guy. And the Godfather said, 'You know what dude, I'm a star.' That's what I'm doing now, and that's what I was trying to do with what's-his-name.
I probably have over a hundred pairs of high-heel shoes. I collect them. Over however-many years, from, like, the mid-'80s on - yes, I'm that old - I've been in drag several times in my life, and I collect a lot of stuff, and I do have a lot of high-heel shoes that I'm sure a lot of people would be jealous about.
I've beaten a lot of guys where I've been the underdog throughout my career. And, I've made a career out of and I've taken a lot of pleasure in proving doubters wrong. And, you do that enough times and you start to believe in your abilities.
A guy like Ric Flair at 49 could go out and do his character. A guy 49 going out and doing Goldberg again - I don't know what the odds are.
I rose to the top real quick, and I was surrounded by Triple H, Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, Undertaker, these guys who were very well respected in the profession, and they wanted to work with me, so I knew I was doing something right.
If the height of the heel is the same as the length of your foot, it starts to look wrong. And if the heel is positioned badly on the sole, you get into ballerina territory, where the body is pushed into a very strange posture. You can exaggerate the arch only so much.
The matches that I've been involved with as a referee, sometimes the heel likes to get up in my face a little bit and even at 65 years old, I don't put up with that crap. Most times or not, the poor guy gets chopped down a few times.