In an exclusive for WrestlingNews.co, Steve Fall interviewed former WWE star Duke "The Dumpster" Droese on his WWE career. Droese has been retired from full-time wrestling since 2001 and he recently appeared on MLW TV earlier this year. Scroll down to watch the entire interview.
Duke The Dumpster Droese on Shane McMahon creating trash man WWE vignettes:
"Shane McMahon. Me and Shane did them all together. We went riding around Stamford, Connecticut all day and shot these vignettes at the dump and on the back of a garbage truck. He was working in the studio at the time. At that point, he was kind of working in every different facet of the company, kind of one by one, you know, because he was obviously going to be the heir apparent to take over one day. That was the plan, I think back then. I think he was just out of college. He was maybe 22 or 23 years old. We sat down and he told me the name. He told me some ideas he had. I told him some ideas I had and we made it work. We just kind of put these vignettes together and it was pretty funny, I think, the way we did it. That was a real garbage truck on in the middle of its route in Stamford, Connecticut, that, I guess he set it up or something, but we just met up with them out in front of a house they were picking up garbage at and we just started riding with them and doing vignettes in between them picking up trash cans."
On working with Triple H and dealing with Kliq politics
"As far as the Kliq and all those guys, yeah, I mean, they had a lot of heat, but I kind of understood what they were, and you know, yeah, there were times when he would get his friends over with pushes. I didn't politic with the other wrestlers enough to try and wrestle them. I left it up to the office and that was a mistake. You can't do that. You got to get in there and talk to guys like Undertaker and Bret Hart and say, 'Look, I have an idea of a way that you could work with them that would be appealing to them', and I didn't have any of that at the time.
On Jerry Lawler hitting him over the head with a trash can on TV and Lawler being told to apologize:
"It definitely changed things because when it happened, we just kind of, we did it. You know, it was live TV. We just asked like one agent that we knew would say yes, it was Jack Lanza, and he was like, 'Go ahead and just do it.' So when we went out and did it, they freaked out. They really freaked out about it and when I got in the back, I remember Shane McMahon came running up to me and he goes, 'What happened?' And I was like, 'What happened?' I was like, 'We just wanted to spice it up and give it some heat.' They were acting like it was a negative thing and then they had Gorilla Monsoon and Macho Man come back on immediately and apologize for it, and then they did that stupid skit with Lawler on the show the next weekend on Superstars where he was apologizing and it was just like, I remember sitting home watching that going, 'This isn't really good. This doesn't help the angle. This doesn't make it, fire it up and give it more heat', but I never really said anything. I said, they know what they're doing or whatever. It's interesting because we got so much flak about doing that garbage can spot, but they just had WrestleMania 10, where these guys beat the hell out of each other with a ladder. You look for logic in some of these situations in the professional wrestling business and a lot of times there is no logical reasoning. You know, they just say things to say them and if you're not the guy that's supposed to be in the middle of something big, sometimes they would try to control that. It took a lot for me to realize those things, but that's kind of how it went down."
This interview is exclusive to WrestlingNews.co. If you use these quotes, please include a link back to this page.
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