Heath recalls meeting The Fabulous Freebirds when he was child.
Doc Gallows and Karl Anderson welcomed Heath onto their Talk’n Shop podcast and they all shared stories from their respective careers and childhoods in relation to wrestling. Heath mentioned that he was able to run into Michael Hayes and Jimmy Garvin after a show when he was 8-years-old.
Michael Hayes invited Heath’s mother to a bar at his hotel. Heath was urging his mother to go so she could hang out with The Fabulous Freebirds. She declined the offer.
So listen, after the show we’re walking out [Heath and his mother]. Next thing you know, him [Michael Hayes] and Jimmy ‘Jam’ Garvin pulls up in this damn car. He was along that ride. So get this, so Michael Hayes pulls up, my mom’s walking and next thing you know, you hear, ‘Hey babe!’ You know, my mom turns around and looks and I look and I’m like, ‘Oh sh*t. It’s The Freebirds.’ He literally said, ‘Hey, I’m staying at the Marriott down the street. Come by the bar,’ like that. I do this, ‘Mom! Let’s go.’ So on a real note, my mother looked like Demi Moore back in the day. Everybody said that. So like he’s hitting on my mother, me being eight… so here I am as an eight-year-old non-intelligent kid wanting to hang out with The Freebirds. So my mom is sitting there like, ‘Oh no, it’s okay. Good show,’ this and that and Michael’s like, ‘Nah babe, seriously, Marriott, meet me at the bar’ and then they drive off, you know? And I’m looking at my mom like, ‘Mom, let’s go. This is so cool. The Marriott’s right there. I think that’s the Marriott.’ No man, we went home. Great decision by my mom but you know, that shoot happened.
I, in all consciousness, all in faith told Dr. Tom [Prichard] about it. So Dr. Tom Prichard, when Michael Hayes would come down to evaluate talent at FCW, so Dr. Tom thought it was funny to bring it up and then Hayes was like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember her’ and I’m just like, ‘If you don’t shut the f*ck up man.’ But Hayes literally — everybody would always run around and joke, you know, Hayes is my real father, that type of sh*t, you know? Redneck-redneck bullsh*t.
Elsewhere during the conversation, Doc Gallows told the story of when he was ringside when Nexus made their debut on Monday Night Raw. Gallows said Ryback was hitting him with stiff punches to the face and Gallows tried calling Ryback by his birth name to get him to stop.
I had a little brother run and you guys [The Nexus] debuted that night, it was [John] Cena versus [CM] Punk, I remember that and I’ll tell this story, our good Deep South alumni friend Ryback is a large man and he was so pumped up and this is — you know how New York [WWE] is. They think you can’t smarten up the boys so it’s more real which makes no f*cking sense.
They’re like, ‘Hey, at the end of this main event, something’s gonna happen.’ So they got all these motherf*ckers hiding in some trailer and they’re in there telling them, ‘Whoop these guys asses!’ Whatever. So who comes to me? My three hundred and twenty pound friend Ryback who is getting back another chance to be on TV, and Skip Sheffield is nervous as a motherf*cker, right? And he’s a big, strong dude. So I remember he double legs me, I’m like, ‘Oh, we gotta sell for these guys.’ They’re cutting the ring up, they’re beating the sh*t out of Cena, they’re beating the sh*t out of Punk. I’m just a f*cking brother out here on the floor. So he gets on top of me, I’m like, ‘Oh, here comes my friend.’ I cover up because I know this is his debut, we’re on live TV, they’d like you to lay it in. Here he comes, I mean he’s moving my hands and just punching my face in. I’m going, ‘Ryan!’ Call him by his real name, ‘Ryan stop! Stop!’ He’s just beating the sh*t out of me. So the only thing I could do as he’s mounting me but he’s not like a real fighter so he’s kind of just crawling all over me and he’s got this big ballast nut sack and I’m trying to get my hand under there and I just start squeezing the f*cking sh*t out [of it] as hard as I can because I’m like, ‘He’s punching my face in.’ I’m getting beaten up, right? And he starts going [screeching noise] but he’s still punching my face in. I’m like, ‘This is where you stop punching my face in motherf*cker.’ So his nuts had to be black and blue. He may never admit that. I had a black and blue face. I was just trying to twist his nuts off so he stopped punching. Give me a little brother stomp. They’re shooting the guys in the f*cking ring.
Heath, Gallows and Anderson are currently with IMPACT Wrestling and they were all in action at IMPACT’s Turning Point special. To check out POST Wrestling’s review of that show, head over to this link.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit the Talk’n Shop podcast with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
