Recently, The Undertaker (real name Mark Callaway) sat down for a series of out-of-character interviews with Fellowship Church Senior Pastor Ed Young. The two men spoke about a variety of topics including the strongest men Taker has ever faced and a great story involving Mark Henry, a stuck WWE bus and a plain, ordinary towel.
“There [have] been a lot [of strong WWE superstars]. Lesnar, Lesnar especially his first time in [WWE] when he was still in his 20s. He was just a freakish athlete. And he still is, but I mean, in his 20s, when he first came up. He was a NCAA national heavyweight champion and he defied what your mind would tell you.” Undertaker added, “Kane, my gosh, Kane is just incredibly strong. Man, there [have] been some cats. Mark Henry, oh my gosh, Mark Henry is at a whole-nother-level… I’ve seen him, now this is a great story, so when we travel overseas, once we get to where we’re going, we travel around on buses. You had good guys on one bus and bad guys on the other. Anyway, we were checking out of a hotel one morning. We had a four-hour drive to the next city, wherever we were going. And in front of the first bus was a car and the driver didn’t have enough room to pull out. And we’re sitting there. No one could find who owns this car. Everybody’s looking at their watch like, ‘oh my gosh.’ Everybody’s worried about, ‘oh, I’ve got to go to the gym,’ ‘I’ve got to eat,’ and all this other [stuff]. Mark gets wind of it and he goes, ‘I’ll handle it.’ Mark gets up, goes off the bus, grabs a towel, goes to the backend of this car, puts the towel under the fenderwell, he reaches under it, he picks it up, and he takes a couple of steps, and he puts it down. He looks at his hands, refixes the towel, puts it under there again, picks it up, walked it a couple more steps until we had enough of an angle for the bus to pull out. I was like, ‘what do you do with that?’ I’ve seen him take… we were in Japan once and I’ve seen him take a nice piece of silver. It was like a spoon you’d stir your coffee with. So it’s a spoon like that [gestures with hand], nice thick silver. And he twisted it like a pretzel. I’ve seen him take frying pans and bend them in half. It’s just a gift that he’d been given that not many people have. And he’s just the nicest guy in the world.”
And while the two Phenoms never met in the ring, The Undertaker and Andre The Giant did share a locker room towards the end of the Giant’s career.
“I never got the chance to wrestle André, but by the time that I got to WWF then, WWE now, by the time I got there, his health was really in decline. He wrestled a few times. And it was funny because André really was old school and André didn’t like big guys either. He loved me, thank goodness. But most big guys, he thought they were arrogant, or bullies, or whatnot. But he had his way with a lot of guys that you go, ‘ooh, that’s a pretty tough guy.’ André set them straight. Anyway, he liked me, and I guess we always think we have one [match] left in us.” Undertaker continued, “I’d come in [to the locker room] and say, ‘hey, boss. How are you doing today?’ ‘Good. One day, kid, me and you. I have an idea.’ ‘Oh really, boss? Tell me about it!’ ‘Oh no.’ And he would never tell me. He’d never tell me. And a good friend of mine to this day, his name is Tim White, and he drove André around. He was one of the referees. And I’d ask Tim all the time, ‘did he ever tell you?’ ‘I’d always ask. He’d never tell me.’ This is how old school André is. He didn’t want anybody to do it because he thought he was going to get to a point where he could get back in the ring and we could do this, have a really big deal. Nobody knows what it was! He ended up passing away and he never let me know. And I wonder to this day because, man, I bet it was good!”
