Remember when Kevin Nash made a surprise appearance at the end of “SummerSlam” in 2011 to powerbomb CM Punk, leading to an Alberto Del Rio cash-in to win the WWE title?
Only reason I do is, it ruined an OBX vacation.
I was part of the behind-the-scenes team working on an indy pay-per-view, the AWE “Night of the Legends,” which was built around Nash and Ricky Morton in the main event.
Our show was in October. “SummerSlam” was in August.
I was on vacation in the Outer Banks when I got a concerned text from a member of the creative team asking me if I’d seen the “SummerSlam” spot.
I hadn’t, but when I heard that Nash had been involved, it sent us all into panic mode to try to confirm that Nash was still planning to do our show, which he eventually did.
The episode came back to life for me today after reading Nash sharing his memories of the “SummerSlam” angle on his “Kliq This” podcast last week.
Nash said he’d been booked for a one-off – “They asked me to come out, stick him, and be gone,” he said.
He was brought back out the next night to appear on “Raw” so that Punk could confront him.
What Punk had to say that night – that his sister had texted him to say that she had thought Nash was dead – got under Nash’s skin.
“I have no verbiage. I’m told not to say anything,” Nash said. “As soon as he says that, I’m thinking to myself, OK, I cost you the world title, and you come down, and you come through the curtain, and you stand 250 feet away from me? Like, you don’t come down and attack me? You verbally attack me?'”
The big man said his relationship with Paul Levesque, Triple H, who was instrumental in bringing him back for the appearance, was what kept him from going off-script.
“I just thought to myself, after all these years in the business, that’s what you should do, is be completely unprofessional, be a f***ing douchebag, never go in the Hall of Fame because you went into business for yourself. I was like , “F*** it, man, it’s only pro wrestling,’” Nash said.
He would go on after the booked one-off to get more time on WWE programming around our AWE pay-per-view, laying the groundwork for a feud with Triple H that culminated in a forgettable sledgehammer ladder match in December.
In between, he worked our AWE show, which wasn’t set to be a one-off, but became one when the company’s money guy decided to pull the plug.
Based on the reviews the show got, that one was probably a wise move.
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Chris Graham
