During a recent appearance on the “Something To Wrestle With” podcast, WWE Hall of Famer JBL discussed the origin of The Godfather gimmick and the reaction backstage following its debut.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On the origin of The Godfather character and whether Billy Gunn came up with the idea as a parody: “Nope, none of the above. Absolutely none of the above. Now Billy — you know, not taking away from Billy, he may have seen what we did in house shows. I don’t know exactly what the timeline was. No, The Godfather got created on the house shows, 100%. Godfather has told the story million times, so have I. I was there, he was there. We wre the only two that were there.
“So we’re we’re working on the house shows, and for whatever reason we weren’t over. Now I can understand me being over, but he’s with the Nation, and the Nation that kind of fizzled out a little bit. We’re working the popcorn match which, for those that don’t know, is the match after intermission. Uou work a match, and you just try to get out there. You stay in the ring, you do something real fast and do something a lot of action. Try to get fans back in their seats, get them ready for the second part of the show, which is the most important part because you’re leading up to the main event. That’s the popcorn match. Get the folks back from eating their popcorn.”
On the first night of the gimmick: “Me and Godfather are working popcorn match every single night. And it’s not working. So you wanna know exactly how the Godfather is created? I’m-a tell you exactly how the Godfather was created. So we’re sitting there every night, Jack Lanza is the agent. He’s working with us, we are — these matches. That match I had with Vader looks like a sissy match compared to what me and Godfather were doing. We were beating the s**t out of each other. We couldn’t get over. And we’re hitting each other harder and harder and harder. Every night we’re going out there, we’re trying to get the people — no one cares. I mean, we’re going out there working 10 to 12 minutes, and it is a fight. We’re hitting each other with everything we can. It’s snug, it’s stiff, it’s all this stuff. We’re staying in the ring. It was just good stuff, but nobody cared.
“So finally, one day, Charles comes to me, and he goes, ‘Hey man, I got an idea.’ He said, ‘I’m just going to go on the mic and say something.’ And he goes, ‘Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.’ I said, ‘Charles, do whatever you want. Whatever we’re doing is not working.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, it’s not.’ So he tells Lanza. He goes, ‘Jack, can I get on the mic?’ And Jack loved Charles. And he goes, ‘Charles, do whatever you want.’ And he goes, ‘Well, I’m say some stuff about some h*es and stuff.’ He goes, ‘Charles, say whatever you want. Just do something entertaining.’ So he gets out there, he gets on the microphone. I have no idea what he’s going to say, Conrad. None whatsoever. And he goes, ‘Big John. Now you know exactly who I am.’ And I sat there, and I’m shaking my head. I have no idea what he’s saying, where he’s going, nothing. I said, ‘Yeah, I know who you are.’ He goes, ‘Now you know, you know I’m a pimp. And I got backstage, I got the finest h*es you’ve ever seen in Charlotte, North Carolina,’ or wherever the hell we were. He goes, ‘There’s some fine h*es back there.’ And he said, ‘If you will just leave right now and get counted out, let me win this match, you get all those h*es, everyone of them. They’re the finest h*es in the world. They going to treat you like a million dollars. They’re all waiting for you, those fine h*es.’ He said, ‘Just go back there and get them. It’s all you gotta do.’
“So I’m sitting there looking at I’m like, ‘Really, really?’ And so I get out of the ring, and I’m all excited to go back to the ring, and he goes, ‘Man, just like a dumb a*s redneck, he gonna take them h*es over–‘ And when I do, I come back in. Whatever the finish was. I like, duck something, hit him with a clothesline, Or if it was Ho Train or whatever it was. He hit me with something, whatever it was… Anyway, we finish. The place went crazy. I come back in, we did one move.”
On the reaction backstage: “And so we come back. Lanza goes, ‘My God, Charles, that was fantastic.’ He goes, ‘Try it again tomorrow, and try this.’ And so now Jack’s into it, because he had heard what Godfather was going to say. So now we’re doing this loop. We got like eight, 10 shows in a row. Every night, he’s coming out. He goes, ‘Big John, you know who I am. I got the finest h*es you’ve ever seen right here in Columbia, South Carolina. All you gotta do–; And every night we do it, and we get a bigger pop every night, because he was getting better and better and better at it.”
On Vince McMahon’s reaction: “So when he gets to TV, Vince pulls him aside, and he said, ‘Charles, I need to talk to you? I understand this pimp thing has legs.’ And I think it surprised Charles as much as anybody. And he goes, ‘What?’ [Vince says], ‘You need to do this on TV. And then all of a sudden they come up with the name The Godfather. Then they decide to — he goes, ‘What do you need to do this?; And Charles says, ‘Well, I actually need h*es.’ I actually need real h*es that’ll be there. And he goes, we can, ‘We can call it the Ho Train.’ Vince is like, ‘Oh, my God, we call it the h*e train!’”
