ProWrestling.com’s Doug Enriquez caught up with WWE Hall of Famer Jim Ross this week at the brand new Pro Wrestling Tees store in downtown Chicago! The iconic Monday Night Raw announcer is currently on a promotion tour for his critically acclaimed autobiography Slobberknocker: My Life in Wrestling.
You can check out the full interview above, as well as a few transcriptions from the discussion down below. A special thanks to the staff and owner of Pro Wrestling Tees and their fantastic store, as well as JR’s management team.
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With the lives of professional wrestlers and wrestling personalities seemingly on display every moment of the day, we asked Jim with the publication of his new book if there was anything he wished hadn’t made it into the public eye.
“Nope, not a thing. My life has been pretty much an open book for years and my wife and I decided what to put in the book. Her only request was that whatever I decided to go with that I was going to be totally honest about it. And we accomplished that.”
“You know, I’d like to not have had three bouts of facial paralysis, obviously, but that’s
the hand that was dealt me. There must’ve been a reason for it. I can’t and I WILL NOT ever let the Bell’s Palsy define me. I just think the good lord put us here for whatever reason he wanted and he establishes the journey and I’m not going to question it. I’m going to make the best out of it that I can, and try to live a positive, productive, fun life.”
JR also noted that he’s working on a project with his long-time broadcast colleague and fellow WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler.
“Sometime in 2018” … “I’m probably going to do some ‘Ringside with JR
and the King’ shows. Lawler and I will team up and do some Q&A’s and meet & greets and things on a little tour. That’s not been announced, it’s on the drawing board. So it looks like it might happen.”
“We think it has a good shot of happening. The King and I are willing and happy and excited about the opportunity to work together in an adlib environment. Should be hilarious stuff, informative, and fun. It’s just a matter of getting the tour booked, and all that good stuff. Hopefully it will happen, and it should be fun, without a doubt.”
“I know that if my wife were here, she would be beaming at the success of our story.”
Despite an incredibly challenging journey over the course of the last few years, JR remains almost contagiously optimistic about how he’s handling things, as well as the road ahead.
“You can’t play your game in life if you turn your jersey in, and I haven’t turned my jersey in because I’m not going to quit. I’ll leave you with this: my dad left me with something important. He said that ‘quitting is the easiest thing in the world to get good at’ meaning that if you start quitting on things, it becomes very easy to do it.”
“I had a chance to not finish this book because of my wife getting killed and my writer partner dying all of a sudden. But we did, because I didn’t want to quit. I didn’t want to get halfway in my journey and stop. So I’m very proud of what we finished and what we completed and I’m ecstatic that folks like it so much. I know that if my wife were here, she would be beaming at the success of our story. Because it really was OUR story, not just JR’s story.”
JR also mentioned that the process for recording the audio book (which if fantastic in its own right) was unexpected difficult.
“The audio was very challenging to do, from a talent stand point, because it was like me narrating my own documentary, and I had already lived that. I didn’t realize how challenging it would be to relive, for example, my mother’s death. Where I was, what I was doing, how the information was relayed to me. I relived that whole sequence. And I did that on several topics that were very emotional, and I didn’t really realize it until I got myself in the midst of the reading of the book,” … “I can just say the audio book is very raw, it’s very real.”