Former WWE star Steve Blackman addresses Shane McMahon’s stunt from the 2000 SummerSlam PPV
While speaking to Chris Van Vliet, former WWE star Steve Blackman reflected on his match with Shane McMahon from the 2000 SummerSlam PPV that included Shane’s stunt where he fell off the titantron scaffold. Here are the highlights courtesy of ChrisVanVliet.com…
Planning out the match: “I don’t remember much being discussed differently than what we did. Most people don’t realize, it was rare that I’d go out there and talk about the match and stuff in the ring before we go out and do an appearance. I didn’t really walk through much with people. That was a rare one when we went out there to go up to the Titan Tron, we actually climbed up and that’s high. And the worst thing was, there was nothing on the floor from the TitanTron until you’re seven feet, eight feet away. Then there was a mat the size of a bed way out here. And I’m like, he’s going to land on that backwards from up there? What if he falls straight down? This one guy, he’s one of the stunt coordinators, goes, ‘If he just steps back and falls this way, he’ll land out there.’ I’m like, You’re kidding me, right? I said, well that’s insane to me. So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll do it.’ He didn’t drop, but he said, Okay, he’ll do that. And I said, All right.
So we get up there the next day, I hit him with my stick, and he drops. Well, I’m supposed to drop an elbow on him, and I’m like, I have two feet to land there. How am I going to drop an elbow on this guy from 50 or 60 feet, whatever we were, I shimmy down. I might have still been 25 feet up. So I shimmy down halfway and jump from there and landed. But what happened is, overnight, somebody encased the mat with three-quarter-inch plywood around it. So if you have a limb sticking out, it’s just going to snap off. So I had to land right there, drop an elbow on him and try not to completely pancake him. So I landed there, hit him with the elbow and pulled it off. But during the match, our runners would grab props anywhere, and sometimes they were real street signs. I’d be like, Guys, where are you grabbing this stuff? This is a real street sign. Well, don’t ask Steve. So he gets out there, he hit me with a street sign one time. If you watch that match, it felt like it ripped the nose off my face. That metal thing just went peeling right down my face. I thought, Holy hell. Then Test and Albert interfered, you know, we had a good match. You know, everybody was getting beat on in that one.”
On whose idea it was for the Shane fall: “Well, it had to be him. I don’t think it was his dad. It had to be Shane. And never forget we were out there going over it and talking about it. I’m like, I’ll crack him, crack him, crack him. But the worst part was that I was so sweaty from the match for 15 minutes, trying to hold on to those bars. I was just drenched in sweat. I kept worrying about slipping and dropping, so that’s why I stopped where I did, held the bar and then cracked him because I just kept sweating so bad. And we were out there. I’ll never forget, Vince is like, ‘You need to get that stick out of the way. If you crack him and your stick’s here, and he drops, he’s going to [fall differently].’ I said, You know what, you’re right. So it’s good you thought of that. I had to crack him and make sure I got the stick out of the way so he didn’t land on it and flip or something like that. It hits me, because you think of crazy little things like that that you wouldn’t most of the time.”
On Steve Blackman’s elbow drop afterwards: “Well, I mean, he dropped twice the distance. I had a narrow area to land in, and even at that 25 feet I was at, that’s still hard to land right in that spot. But yes, he overshadowed it with the way he dropped. But I thought the match was pretty good. We did a lot, we hit hard in that match. We hit with all the weapons hard in that match and stuff like that, and took hard bumps. So I thought it went well.”