Mark Cuban recalls his WWE experience.
The American Businessman most recently appeared on the Build or Break podcast, where among other things, he also talked about his past WWE appearances. He revealed that the officials first reached out to him in 2003 shortly after he had bought Dallas Mavericks.
Cuban agreed to the appearance on condition that he got to hit somebody and got hit himself. The company then booked him into a segment at the 2003 Survivor Series PPV where Mark Cuban threw Eric Bischoff out of the ring and took an RKO from Randy Orton in return:
Oh, I did it twice. I loved it. Yeah. So they reached out to me in 2003 after I just bought the Mavs. And they said, ‘We have WWE coming to Dallas. Would you like to participate because we’ll get celebrities come in and do cameos?’
I’m like, ‘I’m happy to do it, but I have two rules. One, I get hit and two, I get to hit somebody.’ And so I got RKO’d by Randy Orton, and so we had to practice it and do this stuff and it was still hard. It still hurt, but that was my rule in 2003 when I did it the first time.
I Was Sore For Two Weeks: Mark Cuban
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Mark Cuban also detailed the experience of his second WWE encounter during the December 7, 2009 episode of Raw. He moderated a TLC segment between Sheamus and John Cena. The segment saw the 68-year-old standing up to the Celtic Warrior for attacking the Cenation Leader. Cuban shoved Sheamus for his act and in return, got put through a table:
Then I did it again in 2009, and I did this whole thing. It was WWE Live and I did this whole thing with John Cena and everything. And there’s this guy, a wrestler named Sheamus. And they were like, ‘Okay, Sheamus has never hit the canvas. We know your rules. You get to put him down so he hits the canvas, but on the flip side, he’s gonna put you through a table.’
And I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s gonna look cool on video forever.’ And so it was a real table, and they told me, ‘He’s gonna put you right in the center of the table. It’ll just crack in half, but keep your head down because if your head’s up and you hit, you’ll break your neck.’ I’m like, ‘My head will be down.’
And so he puts me through, I guess I ate too much that day because he got me a little bit high and we broke the table. I did my whole pretend I’m dead thing and got out of the ring and all that stuff. I was sore for two weeks. My back hurt sooo bad. Those guys deserve so much respect because it may be orchestrated, but it’s still athletic, and it’s still painful.
Sheamus puts Mark Cuban through a table: Raw, Dec. 7, 2009
