[1992-08-08-WCW-Saturday Night] Interview: Jake Roberts

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

This should have been a game-changing signing for WCW considering how hot Jake was at the time. Great promo, not that that's a surprise.

[Tim Evans]

Drugs are a evil evil thing. Awesome promo by one of a kind. Likeed the shot at Hogan and his father.

[shoe]

Roberts cuts a great promo. He was so hot how they introduced him.

[El-P]

Great evil promo indeed.

[Kevin Ridge]

Ventura was giddy through out this whole interview.

[WingedEagle]

Ventura builds up Jake, who talks about his father telling him to say his prayers and eat his vitamins, and then Jake spit on that. Hell. Of. A. Promo. If you put this on a Clash or PPV instead of a Saturday night it should've been huge. I still wish we got his debut attack on Sting. Such a shame his run was short because he came in on fire.

[PeteF3]

Jake hasn't missed a beat. He calls out Sting for lying to kids by telling them that training, prayers, vitamins, and being good are all you need to get through life--and then invokes children in ghettos whom Sting has let down. It's not something that got a great deal of focus during this feud but that is some HEAVY shit for a wrestling promo and makes me wish he could have gone after Hogan full-force with this stuff had both men stuck around. No way that would ever happen because of the other elephant in Hogan's room that I'm sure Jake would be prohibited from invoking, but it's fun to think about.

[garretta]

Jake picks up where he left off promo-wise, taking shots at not only Sting, but Hogan and his father, who happened to be a high-ranking WCW official at the time if memory serves. Put me down as another one who wished Jake's attack on Sting had made the set, if only for the image of Sting being covered with a cross.

 

Jesse hasn't been this happy to see a heel since the debut of Randy Savage in the WWF seven years before. This is the most heelish he's been yet, and against a guy I thought he was on good terms with, relatively speaking (Sting).

 

I'm not sure if it was Jake's drug habit that led directly to his firing. I'm sure his reputation and lifestyle didn't help, but I'd always heard that Jake had been signed before Watts came in to a contract that he (Watts) thought was way too much, and thus he simply informed Jake that it was being cut in half. Predictably, Jake bailed the first chance he got, which is exactly what Watts wanted since he never liked Jake anyway. Tale that for what you will.

 

I'm not really sure that surfer Sting is the right type of character to go up against someone as dark as this version of Jake is. He seems too happy-go-lucky to engage Jake in the type of promos needed to make their matches compelling. Time will tell, of course, but I think Sting needs to jump ahead in a time machine about five years and grab the trenchcoat and the bat in order to make this fight fair.

[flyonthewall2983]

I'm not really sure that surfer Sting is the right type of character to go up against someone as dark as this version of Jake is. He seems too happy-go-lucky to engage Jake in the type of promos needed to make their matches compelling. Time will tell, of course, but I think Sting needs to jump ahead in a time machine about five years and grab the trenchcoat and the bat in order to make this fight fair.

 

Crow Sting would have definitely faired better. You got as much earlier that year with the brief feud with Undertaker that saw Jake's exit. I heard that the plan after was to program him with Bret, which would have resulted in some good matches but may have ended up the same as the sole program he was involved with at WCW.

 

The only course that Sting could go to counter is just tell everyone Jake is crazy and ignore the hidden, ugly truths in what he's saying. There's a catch-22 in wrestling I see over and over when a heel actually says the truth, the automatic response is to make it about something else. Or at least make it about his nefarious actions which neutralizes the morality in whatever he otherwise says.

 

There was a lot of that goody-two-shoes mentality in both companies in the early 90's, with brief shafts of unbearable light of truth like this (Jake even makes a nod to AIDS paranoia in this without saying it) that makes you realize why something like ECW was needed for that segment of the audience that saw well past all of that, even without the assistance of the headlines wrestling made during this time.

[dawho5]

Jake with a great promo that takes shots at both his dad and the Hulkster.  In a perfect world Jake would have at least had some control over his bad habits and had an amazing career.  I'll settle for the amazing tidbits that he did leave behind.  Such a great heel promo.