Arn honors Ole.
At the age of 81, Alan Rogowski a.k.a. Ole Anderson passed away. One of the names who paid tribute to Ole was his former tag partner and fellow member of the original Four Horsemen, Arn Anderson.
Arn was the focus of a Highspots Sign-it-Live and reflected on history with Ole. He added that Ole will be missed.
Well, real quickly, how this all happened was I was just starting my career. I had been in the business about five, six months. I was working for Bill Watts in an underneath role, just starting out. About five months in, there was a conversation between Bill and Matt Borne. Matt Borne was Ted DiBiase and (Jim) Duggan’s partner. They were The Rat Pack, they were on top. I was on the very, very bottom and Matt had been there for a while. Bill looked at him, he said, ‘Matt, we wanna send you to Atlanta and give you a manager, Paul Ellering. You need a partner’ and just out of the blue, we’re all in one room at television. Junkyard Dog’s lacing his boots, he goes, ‘Hey Bill, Lunde looks just like Ole Anderson. Why don’t you send him with Borne? Make him an Anderson’ and ding! Bill Watts went, ‘That’s a great idea, Dog.’ A week later, we’re at TV again. Bill says, ‘You’re gonna go just like we talked about last week. You wanna go to Atlanta with Borne and Paul Ellering?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ Long story short, we had about a six-month run. Something out of my control happened with Matt and he got fired. So, Ole said, ‘You know, I don’t know what I can do with you. You want me to call someone? Get you booked?’ So, I called Bob Armstrong. He said, ‘Yes, come on down.’ I spent 14 months there, which brings me to my meeting Ric Flair. Spending some time with him when he came through the territory. He booked me for Jim Crockett Promotions and off of that deal, Ole, I guess legitimately was watching on TV and he completely forgot that I had worked for him earlier and by the way, backing up, our first meeting with Ole… because he was the boss at the time of Georgia Championship Wrestling, he looked at me and he went, ‘Jesus Christ, you do look like me.’ I don’t know if that was a compliment or a dig or whatever so that’s how I became an Anderson and he said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna call ya Arn.’ Works for me. That’s how I became Arn Anderson and after the 14 months that I worked for Continental, I went back to Jim Crockett Promotions and that’s when Ole saw me on TV. I’d had 14 extra months of seasoning and he said, ‘You know, I’ll tag with the kid.’ You don’t get a rub like that in this industry very often. To follow Gene and Ole Anderson and be Ole’s partner and on equal terms, I mean I can’t tell ya what that did for me. He mentored me without knowing it because he didn’t take me aside after matches and go, don’t do this, don’t do that. He was a veteran, he had been a boss. He was the booker. Wasn’t gonna go through all that so I just watched what he did, stole what I could, put my little twist on it and once you’re an Anderson, you’re always an Anderson I guess.
I’m a big fan of treating people the way they treat you and I could care less who he’s friends with outside of that dynamic. If you’re good to me, I’ll be good to you, because let’s just face it, you can’t get two people in this business to agree on something at any one time… and he was good to me and he will be missed. He left his legacy.
A graphic to commemorate Ole’s life was shown on WWE Monday Night Raw and TNA iMPACT.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit Highspots Sign-it-Live with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
