Brodie Lee's WrestleMania Rib & Justin Bieber's Cancelled Match: Ten Things You May Have Missed In Wrestling This Week

9. Tyson Kidd Recalls Debut WWE Match

Tyson Kidd was a guest on the Conversations with The Love podcast this week and discussed the first time he worked a WWE match. 

No, this wasn't when he debuted on ECW in 2009, but rather when he was in his teens in the mid-90s. 

As Tyson tells it, he teamed with Davey Boy Smith against Teddy Hart and family friend Andrew Picarnic, which was done as a tribute to Teddy's younger brother Matthew Annis (who had suddenly fallen ill and sadly passed away) and came about due to them playing around in the ring on the day of July 1996's In Your House: International Incident pay-per-view. 

It's a long story, but there's some good stuff in there. 

Per Kidd: 

"Owen flew us to International Incident. We were in the ring lesson [that] day at that pay-per-view. I remember – I was just telling this story to somebody in locker room – but we’re in the ring wrestling and like Jim Cornette and Vince end up walking down the aisle, obviously talking about the show. The guy who had us in the ring was this guy named Matt Miller. And he’s like, he trying to whisper like ‘guys, get out! Guys, get out! Guys, get out!” But like, we’re kids, and we’re so nervous, man. We’re just like wrestling this match. We couldn’t wrestle on the fly. We’re wrestling this match that we’d like rehearsed.

"Next thing I know, like, oh, Vince is at the ring and we roll out. So I don’t know, like, somehow, then one thing led to another. We hung out with Carl DeMarco that night. And then, next thing you know, he wanted – he was a part of like wanting us to – Carl DeMarco and Davey Boy were big proponents of us doing this match at the Saddledome. And then, it doesn’t feel real, man. Every day right after school we’d go up to Stu’s and we’d like, again, kind of rehearse this match. In our minds, it was WWF, so we had to go all out. So we were we were doing everything possible. At this point we’d already come across Rey Mysterio. We came across Rey Mysterio, Bash at the Beach ’96. Ever since then, like, our style changed a lot. We started getting in trouble a lot more from Stu, so thanks, Rey! But, we thought like – we don’t know, like, wrestling rules at this time. We’re kids, man! I’d just turned 16. Harry had just turned 11. Teddy is 16, and our other friend is, like, 15. And he doesn’t even – our friend's cool, he was a very good athlete, and he just kind of stepped in to help us so we can do a tag match. He didn’t – like wrestling wasn’t really his thing, but he helped us for these couple matches.

"Anyway. Dude, next thing you know, we’re at the Saddledome the morning of, and the ring’s set up and we roll in and we do this match that we’d practiced. It’s probably like 12 minutes long, maybe 15 or something. It’s like wild. I’m doing a dive through the ropes. I’m getting backdropped over the top rope. And, I can almost take, like, a 450-style bump. Like, it was so ridiculous. I think somebody saw us doing that earlier in the day and was like, ‘what are these kids doing?’. And they realize we’re on the show. And then, next thing you know, Jack Lanza is telling us that we only have five minutes, no two guys on the floor at the same time".

Kidd, who now works as a backstage producer, also mentioned that JBL brought it up to him years later and that, during the match, Earl Hebner threatened to ring the bell if they didn't finish the match earlier than they had planned.  

That Hebner, always screwing over the Hart boys...