This edition of “The Weekly Top Ten” is provided by Shawn Michaels, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, and Sean Waltman, who, collectively, are known as The Kliq.
The Kliq held a question and answer session hosted by WrestleCon on Saturday before the NXT show, and the crowd at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando enjoyed a no-holds-barred session, hosted by Maria Menounos, with wrestling’s most notorious clique. Paul “Triple H” Levesque is also a member of the group, but he was not part of the Q&A.
Here are the top-ten moments from “One Night with The Kliq”:
10.) The actual origin of The Kliq was detailed by Scott Hall: “The Kliq was born in Kansas City, and nothing happens in Missouri. It was brutal. There was TV every week, and that’s when I first crossed paths with Shawn Michaels in 1985. Now I’m a big, jacked-up, muscle-head, and I didn’t know anything, but the business was changing. The business was going with guys who looked a certain way, and me and Kevin [Nash] can say amen to that, because that’s how we got paid all the time. Here comes Shawn Michaels, and we were going from Kansas City to Des Moines.
“Shawn had been doing jobs, putting guys over that he’s been doing the match to—he’s reminding them, ‘OK, now hit me with your finish; face the hard camera; look like a big star!’ He was doing that stuff then. When I got in the car with him, he broke it down for me, ‘Hey, you big muscle head, I’ll keep it real simple—you make the other guy look good, then you get a little heat on; then you do the finish the office gives you and then you get back in the car, and let’s go.’ So thank you, Shawn, for 1985 when we first met.”
9.) Michaels then returned home to wrestle in Texas, and he was genuinely surprised to receive a postcard from Kansas City. The postcard, of course, was from Scott Hall: “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and that was the one and only postcard I’ve ever gotten from another professional wrestler in my entire life.”
8.) Michaels also noted that he did not know Kevin Nash, even when he was advocating for Nash to join the WWE, and Hall jumped in at the chance to needle Michaels about the sales pitch that could have been used to help Nash jump from WCW to WWE: “You’re with Shawn,” said Hall. “Come help him with his baggage, and he has a lot of baggage.”
7.) “Nash was the first guy, like a big brother, I could tell anything to,” said Michaels. “We could be real-life with each other, and honestly talk. We all did that with one another [in The Kliq], and we stuck together like glue after that.”
6.) Kevin Nash revealed that The Kliq was his dose of reality in a business that was not always centered around reality: “It’s amazing that, in a world of complete fakeness, four real friendships came together.”
5.) Hall then broke up the party: “Plus, everyone else hated us,” said Hall. “Well, everyone was scared of Kev. Pac [Waltman] was a sweetheart, so everybody liked him. But everybody hated me and Shawn.”
4.) Each member of The Kliq was asked who he keeps in closest touch with now, and Michaels answered first: “It’s a toss-up between Kevin and Hunter,” said Michaels. “We text on a fairly regular basis.”
3.) Kevin Nash shared that he is currently closest with Hall and Waltman: “I feel like I’ve been on the road with Scott and Sean for my entire life. We never took a pause. When we left Shawn and went to Turner, we went back here and to TNA. We’re like the mercenaries.”
2.) Sean Waltman stated that he remains closest with Scott Hall: “It has to be Scott. A lot of that has to do with my career. Everyone else gets a squash match and vignettes when they come in, but I got to beat Scott. Not only that, but he took me under his wing. I love the guy.”
1.) Scott Hall revealed that he is closest out of the group with Nash and Waltman: “For me, it’s Kev and Pac. Kev’s been the big brother that I’ve never had, and Pac is like a little brother to me. Shawn has turned his life around so much that I was almost embarrassed to call him. He is doing so well, and I wasn’t doing that good. But The Kliq was born with Shawn and I.”
Lucha Underground is on its mid-season break for season three, but seasons one and two have been added to Netflix and the current season is also available on iTunes .
**Conrad Thompson picture
Conrad Thompson and Bruce Prichard return to the MLW airwaves this Friday at noon for the “ Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard ” podcast discussing The Undertaker’s run in 1993 and ’94.
“Given everything that happened at WrestleMania, we really wanted to celebrate The Undertaker’s career,” said Thompson. “We want to go back to near the beginning. You have his debut and his first WrestleMania available in his archives, but then Bruce left and wasn’t back until late ’92. We thought, ‘Let’s give everybody two complete years of the life of The Undertaker, and that’s what we are going to do for both 1993 and ‘94.”
Thompson is particularly looking forward to engaging Prichard on the subject of ‘The Underfaker’, who was played by Brian Lee.
“The SummerSlam match was Undertaker vs. Underfaker, and we’ll talk about that and the hilarious bits they did with the cast of the ‘Naked Gun’ films. There will be a lot of fun, old-school, Undertaker stories. We got to see the end this past Sunday, so I think going back to where it began will hit the spot this Friday.”
