On calling the Raw of Jerry Lawler’s heart attack and turning face: “First and foremost, Jerry and I are great friends. We’re real close. Jerry and I have known each other for 16 years now and people may not remember but when Smackdown went on the air Jerry and I were its first team for a couple of years. We worked together every week, plus I worked with Jerry when JR was sick. So I worked with Jerry for years and years, I had his first WrestleMania match, but what people remember about our relationship up to the point of the heart attack was the fact that I was a bad guy and he was a good guy and I disrespected his dead mother in the ring and I dragged up stuff about his family’s past and all part of the angle, which by the way was all Jerry’s idea, he signed off on it, but that’s what they remember. So 90% of our audience thought we hated each other. Which I guess means we’re doing a great job. But Jerry and I were real real close. The night that it happened in Montreal, I’ll take you through the story, Jerry had a match, which is neither here nor there, and he came back to commentary and we were calling, I can’t even remember what the match was at this point because everything is a blur, but I do remember, Jerry and I don’t look at each other when we do the show, I have a monitor to my right which I watch and Jerry has a monitor to the left which he watches, the only time we ever really look at each other is when we have an on-camera or something like that, so in the middle of this match I heard Jerry snoring and I thought he was doing like I used to do when I was a heel, especially back in the NXT days, I thought he was making fun of the match in the ring and I thought he was snoring because the match was boring.
“So I chuckled because I thought that’s what he was doing and then I looked over to Jerry to my left and Jerry was laying down on the table, his head was down, and he was literally snoring. At that point I thought this obviously isn’t good, he looked blue. So I jumped up, first thing I did and I’ll never forget this is I hit my mute switch on my box because I was screaming for the doctor. Luckily we had Doc Sampson at ringside. So I’m screaming for the doctor, ‘Doc, doc, Jerry needs you,’ and I hit the mute switch I think out of instinct but I’ll never forget, I remember doing it because I knew something serious was happening and I knew that his family watches the product and I didn’t want them to know at that point what was going on because I thought that if it was me I wouldn’t want my wife or anybody in my family to learn about what was happening from live television. So I hit the mute switch and Jerry at that point I grabbed him to try to hold him up and then he fell out of his chair and then the doctor luckily was there. At that point I just went into instinct mode and I just started calling the match that was going on in the ring and didn’t reference anything that was going on. Then obviously we went to commercial break and during the break they hauled Jerry off in a stretcher and all that. So I’m down at ringside and I’ve got to do the rest of the show for an hour, I had no idea what’s going on. I’ve got my producers and Triple H and others telling me and giving me updates in my headset which I would come back on the air and say, ‘hey, this is the latest we heard,’ and so on and so forth and then at about 10:30 eastern, about a half hour before we went off the air, I remember somebody came in my headset, I can’t remember who it was, and they said, ‘Michael, you need to prepare for the worst.’ I’m like, ‘ok,’ and they said, ‘you need to be prepared to deliver the news.’ So at that point I knew what they were talking about obviously.
“So now we had stopped doing commentary out of respect to Jerry, so now I’m sitting out there with 18,000 people surrounding us and millions at home, no one knowing what’s going on, and I didn’t either, and now I’m sitting there going, ‘ok, now how am I going to deliver this news to millions of people around the world’ and ‘what am I going to say’ and how am I going to say it and how am I going to keep myself composed, and all that is running through my head and then almost like it was scripted, and I hate saying that because of the business we’re in because it wasn’t obviously, but when we went off the air on Raw we had got an update that Jerry’s heart started beating on its own and I was able to deliver that news going off the air and that was such an emotion moment.
“I remember after we went off the air, I went to the back, Jerry had already gone to the hospital, I went back to the locker room and called my wife and I said, ‘did you what’s going on?’ And she’s like, ‘oh my god, I did,’ and at that point I broke down because I think it all just hit me there. I think it’s the news background. I think its ones of those things, you’re trained. I have seen a lot of atrocities in my life over the years in Africa and Bosnia and places like that and I think you’re just trained, but this obviously different because it’s a real good friend of yours that it happened to on live television and I realized that I had a service and that was to update the fans what was going on with Jerry. Then at that point, we thought he was going to pull through and obviously he did, thank god, and now he’s still a pain my ass like he is every other week, but it was just an awful time.
“I remember on Wednesday, two days after it happened, I was actually in the gym at my home in Texas and I got a phone call from Jerry’s girlfriend, Lauren, and she said, ‘Michael, I’ve got somebody who wants to talk to you,’ and it was King. I was like, ‘Holy cow, King, how the hell are you calling me two days after you basically died on national television?’ I guess he had been reading some of the press and stuff and he said, ‘Michael, I’m so sorry.’ I asked why? He goes, ‘well, I killed your heel heat.’ So I guess he had watched stuff that was said and everything else. So after that I became baby face. I think it was the right time, the heel run had run its course, I think it went on much longer than it should have. So what had happened was the company collectively said, ‘if we’re going to turn you this is the time to do it.’ Since JR had been taken off Raw and I became a heel, the one thing I thought the company was missing was that straight guy who was able to deliver the show the way that it needed to be delivered, like the Jim Ross and the Gordon Solie’s, Gorilla’s, they didn’t have that voice of reason in the booth. This was the perfect opportunity to allow them to do that and as a company we collectively said, let’s run with it, and we did. It’s been fairly successful. I still have a lot of detractors out there, a lot, but it’s getting a little bit better.
“It was weird too because, I hate that it happened under these circumstances, because I really would have liked to have that face turn and done something like save somebody in a match or one of those cool things you always dream of. This is quite the way I wanted the face turn to happen, but I’m also glad it happened this way because I think it added some legitimacy to what I do. But it was cool to actually get tweets and messages of support from fans when for 15 years 90% of what you receive is ‘you suck’, ‘I hate you’, ‘you’re the worst ever’, and you just don’t respond to that stuff, you just become callous to it, it’s just like, ‘ok, they don’t like me’. But I’m still here and I’m still on the air.”
Read more: http://www.pwmania.com/michael-cole-talks-john-cena-turning-heel-3-hour-wwe-raws-jerry-lawlers-heart-attack-more#ixzz2PRtjHAZd
