On this week’s episode of Neal Pruitt’s Secrets of WCW Nitro, Neal interviewed former WCW cameraman Tim “Snake” Snyder and, true to the show’s name, revealed a story about how Goldberg’s famous entrance really went down:
Tim Snyder: “Halloween Havoc, we were in Las Vegas, and by that time, Goldberg had gotten quite popular. The audience, everyone would yell ‘Goldberg, Goldberg, Goldberg.’ That was to hype everybody up, I guess.”
Neal Pruitt: “Did we sometimes pump that into the crowd, audio-wise? I can’t remember.”
Tim Snyder: “I couldn’t imagine that we wouldn’t have (laughs). I mean, if it works, right? Make it work times two.
“What they did on this particular Pay Per View, if you remember, the arena is a big, round building, basically, and Goldberg’s dressing room was just to the right, it was the very first dressing room to the right of the entrance stage. Instead of having him walk out of his dressing room and walk right down the ramp, what we did is we walked the other way and we walked all the way around the building so that we could have this three and a half minute entrance of everybody chanting ‘Goldberg.’ He had, I want to say, eight police marshalls there to ‘protect him.’
“He was getting with it too, and I was backpedaling as fast as I could. This is where I say, too, if you can appreciate the mechanics of what it takes to do a show, and that walking backwards carrying a seventy-pound camera rig that’s probably worth $200,000, falling is not an option. Lot’s of things and people will be getting hurt. You will not fall. So to back peddle that fast, you really did have to have a lot of people helping to keep that cable out of the way.
“Initially, because I was new to doing this when we first started doing it, I just stood there and when he came crashing out of the door, I went ‘Woah,’ and I started backpedaling and I thought ‘Please, don’t run me over, because I don’t want to shoot you from behind and I don’t want to fall over,’ and all that.
“You get smart after a while and you kind of swerve a little left and right and you can block them. I knew that they wanted to keep a certain tempo or speed, but if I couldn’t do it, I’d go as fast as I could and then just kind of let them know ‘We’re going, don’t pass me.’
“At that particular Pay Per View, Halloween Havoc, when we finally made it all the way around the building and now it is time to go out on the stage, there was a dark tunnel. It wasn’t lit, it was just a walkway, and at that point, I signaled him to go ahead of me and fell in behind Goldberg so that when he came out and all the lights were shining on him, I would be behind him and he would be backlit.
“He looks kind of massive and his silhouette… At that point, I knew he was going to stay because of the pyro gimmick that he had. So I slid around to the right, went around the giant pumpkin, and came back in front of him so that he could walk down and breathe the smoke and all that, then took him to the ring from there. All of that had to be planned before we did it because I had to start at the ring and walk the route that I was going to take, so I went in the way I thought I was going to come back. Had he changed the route for any particular reason, we would’ve been dead in the water, because I was cabled and the cable only went one way.
“Plenty of the guys that you would talk to you would get to be friends with and you were trying to make them look good. I would hold the camera down as low as I could. I’d make Rey Mysterio look like he was seven foot tall, because that’s what you do. You’re there to make these guys look good. “
Rush’s Analysis: It’s a fascinating conversation if you’re into the inner workings of a televised wrestling show, and if you’re unfamiliar with this podcast, that’s it’s very purpose. Neal Pruitt served as producer of Nitro and is most famous to casual fans for being the voice over guy for the NWO. Most weeks, he serves as the subject, discussing his memories of famous events. This week’s show found him wearing the interviewer shoes and it was a great listen.
Current WWE fans may feel this show doesn’t have the sizzle found on a podcast like Bruce Prichard’s, for example, but it certainly has the steak. The episodes are kept reasonably short, averaging approximately 90 minutes and, much like this week, the subjects discussed are often times things you’d never realized you wanted to know about.
To listen to the full episode, check out Neal Pruitt’s Secrets of WCW Nitro.
Please credit PWPodcasts when using any part of this transcription.
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