Here’s a strange fact about at least a portion of the staff here at MTV News: Several of us — hip-hop editor Shaheem Reid, rock editor James Montgomery and myself — are big fans of professional wrestling. We all follow it with differing degrees of intensity and all have different taste when it comes to what we like, but give us a hot promo and a cage match and we’ll probably walk away smiling. So yesterday was a big day in the Newsroom, as there were a pair of wrestling-related interviews going down (which happily coincided with the WWE’s “Raw” show airing live from Madison Square Garden on Monday night).
First, we got a visit from Ted DiBiase, Jr., who sat on the Newsroom couch to talk to Reid about his role in the upcoming film The Marine 2, which will hit DVD and Blu-Ray on December 29. He also talked about the thrill of winning the Tag Team Championship with partner Cody Rhodes, the pressures of being a third-generation performer, how he uses Eminem to get himself worked up during workouts and who among the WWE stars has the best musical taste.
One of those stars he mentioned was Chris Jericho, who happens to front his own metal band called Fozzy and who also called in for an interview yesterday. Jericho has long been one of my favorite performers in all of pro wrestling, so it was a thrill to talk to him about the new Fozzy album Chasing the Grail (which hits stores on January 26, 2010), the response his band gets from metal fans in the U.K., the thrill of meeting some of his idols (including Lemmy, Ronnie James Dio and Ozzy Osbourne) and who among the WWE wrestlers has the worst taste in music (“[ECW Champion] Christian knows the lyrics to Backstreet Boys songs,” he said).
There will be more from both of these guys in the coming weeks, but just know that between Reid, Montgomery and I, we would talk to a wrestler every day if we could — so you can be glad that we aren’t constantly doing coverage of the ongoing feud between Randy Orton and Kofi Kingston.
