On the most recent episode of Dinner With The King, Jerry Lawler discussed the time he almost had a match against Elvis Presley:
“One day we were just driving up to Louisville from Nashville, and I was talking about ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a match with Elvis Presley?’ Because Elvis was really in the news then about karate, doing all this karate, and I think this is when his wife, they’d had kind of a falling out and Priscilla was doing some hanky-panky with one of Elvis’s karate teachers. That was what was in the news back then, and I thought, I was telling (Lawler’s manager) Mickey Poole ‘How cool would it be to have a match with Elvis?’ And just out of the clear blue, he says ‘Well, if you want, I’ll have my brother ask him if he’d want to do that.’ And I said “What?’ He says ‘Yeah, my brother is the president of the Elvis International Fan Club and has been for, like, eight years and hangs out at Graceland all the time,’ and I said ‘Aw, Mickey, you’re crazy.’ He says ‘No, really, I’m serious.’
“I thought the guy was just making this up. So then the next day, he says ‘I talked to my brother and he said he’ll talk to Vernon and he’ll run it by Elvis and all this kind of stuff. They thought it was a great idea.’ He said ‘As a matter of fact, I gave him your number and Vernon Presley is going to call you.’ Then I’m thinking ‘Now I know this guy has lost his mind,’ right? Sure enough, the next day, I leave home and go to Evansville, Indiana, and when I get home that night, they say ‘You had a phone call earlier today,’ and I said ‘Who was it?’ They said ‘Well, he said he was Vernon Presley.’ I said ‘You’re kidding.’ That went on two different times, he called and I was on a wrestling trip. Then finally, they gave him the date to specifically call me and, sure enough, he calls up, you know ‘It’s Vernon Presley,’ he said that Mickey’s brother had run the idea by him and Elvis liked it and that’s when he told me ‘When he gets back from the tour, we’ll put the whole thing together.’
“I’ll never forget, one of the last things Vernon said to me was ‘I’ll be honest with you, Jerry. Elvis is not in that great of shape right now, but he’s fixing to start working out and getting ready for this tour and as soon as the tour is over, we’ll do this thing.’ Of course, he never made it to the tour.”
How would it have been booked?
“I’ve thought about that many times, like what would we have done? I can tell you honestly, we would’ve done anything that would have made him happy.”
To listen to the entire episode, check out Dinner With The King.
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