Kevin Nash Enters the WWE Hall of Fame: He Did It His Way
During the course of his 25-year career, Kevin Nash has wrestled as Oz, Vinnie Vegas and Diesel, appeared on the big screen as Super Shredder (in TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze) and a super stripper named Tarzan (in the surprise hit Magic Mike) and been singled out as both the biggest draw in – and the biggest problem with – professional wrestling. Often at the same time.
Now, you can call him a WWE Hall of Famer. What better way to sum up a quarter century as accomplished as it was controversial?
“I’ve been called just about everything, but this is the first time I’ll be called a Hall of Famer. It’s nice,” Nash laughs. “It’s been a long 25 years, but this business has been great to me. Without wrestling, there’s no way I’d be where I am today. I’d probably own a strip club someplace.”
Nash will be inducted into the Hall on March 28 – the night before WrestleMania – at a ceremony that airs live on the WWE Network at 8 p.m. ET. He’s the final member of a 2015 class that also includes “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Women’s Champion Alundra Blayze, “Living Legend” Larry Zbyszko, Japanese icon Tatsumi Fujinami and celebrity honoree Arnold Schwarzenegger. As you can probably expect, Nash’s enshrinement has already been the subject of much speculation; for starters, no one seems sure what name he’ll use when he enters (“I would prefer to go in as Kevin Nash, you know, the human being,” he says – and a WWE spokesperson later confirmed he would). And then there’s the matter of his career itself.
Unlike most, Nash entered the business late in life, joining WCW after playing basketball at the University of Tennessee and professionally in Europe (he also worked as an MP in Germany and on an assembly line at a Ford plant). During that initial run with Ted Turner’s company, Nash first wrestled as Steel, one half of the monstrous tag team the Master Blasters, and was later saddled with gimmicks like Oz (a gray-haired wizard) and the wise-talking Vinnie Vegas. It was while he was working as the latter that he caught the eye of WWE icon Shawn Michaels, who insisted Vince McMahon bring him to the promotion as an in-ring enforcer. And from that moment on, Nash’s life was never the same.
“Shawn seeing me as Vinnie Vegas on WCW TV, asking Vince to bring me in as a bodyguard, that’s where I learned the business,” Nash says. “Sitting ringside, watching Shawn and Scott Hall work, all of my progression was because of them. The exposure I got because of that changed my career forever, and I’m eternally grateful to Shawn and Scott and Vince McMahon, because WCW couldn’t do anything with me.”
Nash, now wrestling as Diesel, would make the most of his opportunities, winning the Intercontinental and Tag Team titles, then taking the Heavyweight Championship from Bob Backlund in 1994. He’d hold the belt for nearly a year (his reign was the single longest of the 1990s), but his close friendships with Michaels, Hall, Triple H and Sean Waltman bothered some backstage – the group was derisively referred to as “The Kliq” – and when Hall and Nash decided to leave WWE for massive guaranteed contracts with WCW, the group broke decades of wrestling tradition by embracing in the ring, an incident that would come to be known as “The Curtain Call“. It angered wrestling veterans schooled in the code of kayfabe – which held that all events within the ring were real, especially feuds between wrestlers – and earned Nash a reputation as a guy who put himself before the business. Nearly 20 years later, the new Hall of Famer is still dealing with the notoriety.
“When people write articles about why I should or shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame, inevitably they always mention something about all of that,” he says. “To be honest, I think the thing I’m most proud of is that I always viewed this as a business, and without me doing some of those things, this business wouldn’t be as lucrative for some of the guys as it is today.
“But my whole thing is, for someone that didn’t love the business, I sure did come back from a lot of injuries and work through a lot of pain,” he continues. “I never wanted to let a company down because of injuries. We all get injured, but we all continue, and I still do it. I’m still on the road, still at the gym.”