On Stone Cold Steve Austin’s show “Broken Skull Sessions” on the WWE Network, Bully Ray and Steve Austin talked about their careers.
Bully, known as Bubba Ray Dudley in ECW and WWE, talked about his debut with Vince McMahon’s company in 1999, alongside his long-time tag team partner D’Von Dudley.
The Dudley Boyz were first assigned to attack the APA. The Dudleys had recently moved from ECW and their debut with the promotion left a sour taste in their mouth.
“They tell us we’re going to attack the APA with 2x4s,” Bully said. “Now we know what happened to The Public Enemy. Public Enemy and the APA were doing business. Creative wanted the APA to put The Public Enemy through their own tables. Public Enemy and Sabu did tables long before The Dudleys did. We didn’t invent the tables, we brought them to the forefront and made them cool.
“We learned how to make a buck off of them. Public Enemy didn’t want to do business about ten minutes before they go out, if I’ve got the story straight. They said, ‘we’re not gonna go through the table. We’re not gonna do the job.’ Something like that, and Ron [Simmons] and John [“Bradshaw” Layfield] beat the sh*t out of them.
“We knew that we were being fed to Ron and John, so we can be tested. That was it. And you know what, that’s the way it was back in the day. You got tested. You earned your stripes, you paid your dues. Whatever word you want to put on it, that locker room was going to make sure that we were OK, and that we weren’t another team like The Public Enemy who might disrupt things.
“And now they tell us about the 2x4s. I’ve swung just about every weapon there is, but I’d never swung a 2×4. It’s not easy to grip a 2×4, and then you have to try and work the 2×4. I said, ‘D’Von, they’re gonna kill us whether we go light on them or whether we lay our sh*t in. So why don’t we just lay our sh*t in, so at least we can look good on night one, and then we’ll take our ass-kicking, and we’ll just move forward from there.’
“As Bradshaw would always say, I hit him so hard with that first shot, we laid our sh*t in, we hit them as hard as we could. And then the next week on RAW, they’re gonna get it back on us. We’re on that RAW set, live shot.
Bully Ray was shown the video clip by “Stone Cold” Steve Austin of the backstage beat down on RAW, which saw the APA attack The Dudley Boyz with garbage cans and shoot right-hand punches.
“As soon as they yelled cut, me and D’Von got up, shook their hands, hugged them, said thank you, and there were all the boys in the background. And that’s when I realized, you know, what was going on. From that moment on, everything was A-OK.”
