Scotty 2 Hotty is remembered as one of the most fun stars of the WWE’s famed attitude era. Scotty and his Too Cool teammates were always ready to hype up a crowd with their dancing and over-the-top antics. Scotty also had a few serious matches during his time in WWE.
Dean Malenko was considered one of the finest technical wrestlers in history during his run with WCW. After Malenko jumped ship to the then WWF, he was quickly lost in the shuffle. One of his most fondly remembered bouts came against Scotty 2 Hotty.
At the Backlash pay-per-view in April of 2000, the two squared off with a chance to show the fans that Scotty was more than just a dancing gimmick. A top-rope DDT to finish the match caused Scotty a scary moment. In a recent interview with Fightful, he said he took some major heat from Linda McMahon about the spot.
“I remember being there. It was in Washington, D.C. and I’m getting together with Dean that day and we didn’t really have a whole lot. We’d wrestled so many times at that point, it felt like we kinda missed the boat on the whole match. We were on Velocity or whatever that Saturday Night Shotgun slot was at that time. Metal or Velocity or Jakked. There’s been so many times it’s been rebranded over the years. We must have wrestled every week. We’d get to TV, we’d be wrestling. So by the time we got to Backlash, it really didn’t even feel special. But like you said, twenty years later, that’s the match that everybody talks about and the finish everybody talks about was that DDT off the top. I dodged a bullet that day, man. I was lucky.
Actually, when I came back through the curtain, Linda McMahon was standing there. She pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ Linda McMahon said that. That was sick. I feel like I dodged a bullet because if you look at that, there’s no way I didn’t break my neck. I did have neck surgery the next year, so that may have played into it.”
Scotty 2 Hotty recently moved on from his backstage role at WWE NXT to attempt a return to in-ring action. The constant paranoia over releases in WWE made him realize it was time to move on. Scotty now hopes to bring back some of the magic that made him love wrestling in the first place.
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