Richards said he would accept Anderson’s apology if he reached out.
From 1999-2008, Stevie Richards was a part of WWF/E. He recounted several injury-related experiences during his time in the company as he was on René Duprée’s Café De René podcast.
He dove into a situation that involved both Chris Adonis (Masters) and Arn Anderson. Richards’ nose was broken by Adonis to the point where it was under his right eye and he had to get dental work done as a result. Richards added that Adonis was under a lot of pressure because he was being told that this was his big moment and could not afford to make mistakes.
Once they got to the back, Adonis was visibly remorseful about what occurred but Richards claims that Anderson told Adonis, “Don’t worry about it. It’s only Stevie.”
My nose — he [Chris Adonis] swung this way, my nose was under this [right] eye. Literally and now all these teeth needed root canal and some veneers and stuff like that. It was — the bone got broken. It was literally as hard as someone could hit me because he was aiming for my chest and obviously, two things happened: One, he had food poisoning which I didn’t know or I would have been acting a little bit different in the ring and not so aggressive with him in the ring. Number two, and René’s been there, he was being talked up so much into a frenzy about, ‘This is your only shot. If you f*ck this up, this is it.’ Arn Anderson, ‘Hit Stevie as hard as you can. He can take it, doesn’t matter’ and I’m on center, ‘Yeah, it kind of matters’ [Richards smiled]. Arn, you know, the one thing I’ll say and I don’t think he meant any malevolent thing by it but once again in the bubble and Arn can — he never denied it but he never actually admitted it either. When Chris was literally crying after, because like René said, it was an ugly scene. There was blood everywhere. My face was just a bloody mess and I remember Arn going up trying to console him right in front of me and said, ‘Hey man, don’t worry about it. It’s only Stevie.’ I swear, and I lost a great deal of respect for him that day and I forgive him because I know he didn’t mean it but I’ll never forget it… I hold nothing against him but I think his way of consoling Chris was just — the words weren’t exactly — I think they could have been chosen a lot better because that’s the problem with wrestling too is your value as a human being is determined by your push or your lack of push and I think that’s the way the statement was kind of put to Chris. I don’t hold it against him. I never really had two words with Arn except he gave me the finish after that and I said, ‘Thank you.’ It was very quiet. You know, for me not to talk to somebody, or for me not to interact with them or be friendly, it’s very business. ‘Thank you sir. Oh cool.’ One word answers but I don’t think he ever got the impression that I was truly bothered by that statement. The first time I ever said this by the way on a show… If Arn called me and he said, ‘First of all, I have no recollection of that,’ I would honestly believe him because he’s seen and he’s had to deal with so much. You know, it’s all a blur and he wouldn’t even need to apologize but I’m sure Arn being the guy he would, would call and apologize, I would accept it and say, ‘Hey man, sorry I had to even tell the story but, it’s the truth.’
Richards recapped the time he delivered a chair shot to the head of John Bradshaw Layfield. The chair shot left a hole in JBL’s head and Richards shared that initially, he was not comfortable with hitting Layfield due to their height difference.
JBL then wanted to turn the situation into an angle and advised Richards to say in an interview that the chair shot was a receipt for The Blue Meanie. That led to The Undertaker approaching Richards to explain why the roster at the time could not take any more losses. Undertaker was planning to confront Richards until JBL explained that he told him to say what he said to the website.
Well I think June was [ECW] One Night Stand and I think this was July or August [chair shot on JBL] so there was some time between the thing that happened, you know, and One Night Stand between those two guys [JBL & Blue Meanie] and then the match when Meanie got signed, b.W.o. came back for a short time which would honestly, if you don’t see that they were trying to avoid a lawsuit and hired Meanie for two months and then kind of, you can calm all that down with them getting in the ring to see that, okay, we’re — there’s no light to stand on with a lawsuit after that so WWE did the smart thing. Honestly, if I were Meanie, I would have sued and you know, I would not have taken the bait on the deal because it wasn’t what we were all about. Now I will say that I’m not proud of the fact and even though people always come up and say that was something that should’ve happened, I wasn’t proud and René [Duprée] said it earlier, when you’re in the ring with me, you knew you weren’t gonna get hurt so there’s a level of trust so there was a little bit of a trust that was lost for a little bit. Not heat-wise, I didn’t have heat. But guys didn’t trust me because I was always known — and they never said it but I knew it and I wouldn’t trust somebody that looked like they took liberties like that, which I did not. Seriously, the conversation that happened was I didn’t feel comfortable with the chair shot to begin with because John is much taller than me and unless he leans all the way down or he’s on his knees which I kind of pitched, like dude, if you’re on your knees, I can get a clear shot with the seat of the chair. He said, ‘No, no, no. Just lay into me, it’s cool. It’ll be fine’ and the way — René knows the way I overthink stuff fundamentally in the way I place everything very analytically. I was like, I’m gonna try to reach and that’s what I did. I tried to reach as far as I can with the shot and the bar still hit him on top of the head and dude, he had a hole in his head. It was not something that, you know… people can judge it on the outside whatever way they want. I know the way John was and he was pretty rough with me too, for a while, for months and months. He and The A.P.A. and even the locker room hazed me quite a bit and in the ring, there was liberties taken but that still doesn’t mean that I should have done it and I did not do it and as a matter of fact, John called after that and said we should make this into an angle. So he made the website interview me and made me say it was a receipt. He was in on it.
However, you wanna know who wasn’t in on it? Undertaker. Who came up to you next Stevie? He was gonna come up to me and confront me and he saw John first and to his credit, he should have. Dude, you actually went to the website and said you did it on purpose and hurt one of our talents when at the time, they had a thin roster with lots of injuries, lots of people out. So him being the locker room leader, he was gonna — I don’t think anything physical was done but he was gonna read me the riot act. John stopped him and said, ‘Hey, no, I told him to do it.’ So that would have been maybe an interesting story that I would not have enjoyed telling if Taker… but he even pulled me aside afterwards, right afterwards and I said, ‘Taker, I swear to God I didn’t mean to do it’ and he goes, ‘You have to understand, we have a lot of injuries right now and now we’re down another guy. You gotta be careful.’ He was not intimidating or belligerent or trying to scare me. He was just trying to tell me sternly, like hey man, you don’t do that and I knew right away, I was unfortunately right about the schematics of the chair shot, that he’s just so — John doesn’t — you might not think he’s that big because there’s a lot of guys that are super big in the company but he’s a big dude. He’s a minimum 6’5, 6’6 and I’m 6’2. So you can imagine how much reach just to get him so I don’t hit him in the face and that’s what ended up happening.
The 50-year-old Richards last wrestled in August of 2021. Over the past several years, he regularly wrestled for the ‘WildKat Pro Wrestling’ promotion based in Georgia.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit the Café De René podcast with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
