Naturally, a wrestler’s place in the company pecking order, which dictates where they’re slotted on the card for any give show, is a vital factor in their financial stature at any given time. But for those not yet near top billing, those who are the difference between a huge payday and walking away from an event lighter in the pocket than one might have hoped. On “Busted Open Radio,” WWE Hall of Famer Mark Henry and co-host Tommy Dreamer recalled what it was like working on the same cards as a pair of all-time WWE greats during “The Attitude Era.”
Asked by host Dave LaGreca for his take on working with The Rock and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Henry put the pair as equals in that regard. “Being a guy that was on cards with both,” he said, “the money was near the same.” The recollection quickly dovetailed into important lessons that Austin taught Henry, however, with regard to the business side of wrestling. “Steve Austin was the first person to ever come to me and go, ‘So, you know how much the house was today?'” Henry added, noting that at first, he’d have to tell Austin that he did not, in fact, know. “‘Why don’t you know?'” Henry recalled Austin asking. “I was like, ‘S***, I’m gonna get paid regardless. I got a guarantee.’ But he was like, ‘You need to know what the house is and write it down because the effect of you being on a show might [influence] what your next contract looks like.'”
Explaining that if he knew that the last time WWE was in a particular town without him, hypothetically, they drew $226,000, Henry says that Austin told him the next time they were there, he’d show Vince McMahon the difference after the fact. “‘Me, at the top of this card, we drew [$540,000],” Henry recalled Austin saying. “So, the effect of me being on this card, I want to know, so I can go to Vince and definitively say, every show that we do, ‘Hey, we did 200+, we did 300 grand+ on this show. What’s gonna be my cut of that?”
‘Oh, they’re not here.’
Chiming in to note the difference of being on a card with a Rock or an Austin versus otherwise, Dreamer, who was never a main-event player in WWE, made the discrepancy very clear. “Checks-wise, if you were on, and listen, I’m working first, second, third match,” he explained, “and I’d look at my checks and I’d be like, ‘Oh, this is the show that The Rock was on. This is the show that Steve Austin was on’ and then you’d get your same checks in the same venues the next time and be like, ‘Oh, they’re not here,’ and your check is cut in half.”
Making the distinction that things are quite different, in terms of how wrestlers are paid these days (of which, he would have first-hand knowledge, as Head of Talent Relations for TNA), Dreamer noted that it didn’t even really matter where you were on a card with megastars at the top to notice the drastic range of paydays you might take home. “You could get as low as $1,500 for working the second match on the card,” he said, “or like seven or eight thousand for being the first match on the show that [featured] a Rock or Steve Austin as your champion.”
More importantly than the income at the time, according to Henry, was what he was able to take away from someone like Austin, who took the time to pass down the lessons that helped him financially in the long run. “It was hard for me, as a kid,” he said, “getting schooled and not knowing all of these things but Steve was one of those guys that helped teach you. There’s a lot of guys that didn’t give a s*** whether you knew but Steve was not one of those.”
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit “Busted Open Radio” and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
