Billionaire Mark Cuban had no fear when he stepped in between the ropes and entered a WWE ring in the early 2000s, but he exited with two things: a sore back and more respect for what professional wrestlers do on a weekly basis.
Cuban appeared on “Build or Break” and talked about his pro wrestling moments. He was on the final part of his conversation where he was asked, “build or break.” If he thought something was good, he would say “build,” and “break” if he thought the opposite.
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Host Daniel Lubetzky asked, “build or break,” WWE. It led Cuban to recall the two times the Mavericks minority owner made cameo appearances for the company. He talked about getting an RKO from Randy Orton and being slammed through a table by Sheamus.
“I did it twice. I loved it,” he said. “So they reached out to me in 2003 after I just bought the Mavs. And they said, ‘We have WWE coming to Dallas. And would you like to participate because we’ll get celebrities come in and do cameos?’ I’m like, ‘I’m happy to do it, but I have two rules. One, I get hit and two I get to hit somebody.’ So, I got RKO’d by Randy Orton and so we have to practice it and do this stuff and it was still hard. It still hurt but that was my rule in 2003 when I did it the first time.
“Then, I did it again in 2009 and I did this whole thing, it was WWE Live, and I did this whole thing with John Cena and everything and there’s this guy, a wrestler named Sheamus. And they were like, ‘OK, Sheamus has never hit the canvas. We know your rules. You get to put him down so he hits the canvas, but on the flip side, he’s going to put you through a table.”
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Cuban was cool with going through a table because he knew it would “look cool on video forever.”
“So, it was a real table, a regular table. … And they told me, ‘He’s going to put you right in the center of the table. It’ll just crack in half but keep your head down because if your head is up and you hit, you’ll break your neck.’ I’m like, ‘My head will be down.’ And so, he puts me through and I guess I ate too much that day because he got me a little bit high and we broke the table. I did my whole pretend I’m dead thing and got out of the ring and all that stuff.
“I was sore for two weeks. My back hurt so bad. Those guys deserve so much respect. It may be orchestrated, but it’s still athletic and it’s still painful.”
He hasn’t been on WWE programming in a hot minute, but those moments were highly talked about at the time. It’s rare for a sports team owner to get involved in the ring – you probably would have never seen Jerry Jones or George Steinbrenner take an RKO or be driven through a table the way Cuban did.
Moments like those are what make professional wrestling great.