Prior to reinventing himself as the French-Canadian Frankenstein, PCO performed under a number of different names and gimmicks. One of those was Pierre, one-half of the Quebecers, under which he won three WWF Tag Team Championships. Under the same name, PCO was one of the participants in the ill-fated Brawl for All, which was recently the subject of an episode of the critically-acclaimed Dark Side of the Ring series,.
PCO recently joined me discuss his participation in the Brawl for All and the Dark Side of the Ring documentaries.
On the Dark Side of the Ring documentary series:
SL: “The reason I bring those guys up specifically is because synchronicity really seems to be a theme throughout your career, and you have those two guys and then you have the Brawl for All all featured in one year on Dark side of the Ring – but we don’t see any of you! Number one, how have you enjoyed the series if you’ve had a chance to watch it and B) what was your experience like in the Brawl for All since they didn’t ask you!”
PCO: “I think they showed – I watched it. I watched the show and had a lot of guys calling me like Marty Scurll said, ‘oh, you didn’t know I didn’t know that you were part of Brawl for All,’ and Marty texted me on that, and a bunch of other guys and I did a few interviews as well. Yeah, my first fight was against the guy that was supposed to win the whole thing. (It) was against Dr. Death Steve Williams, and Steve Williams, I think he was a little bit worried facing me. Like, he was trying to – he’s very intimidating, he (was) trying to intimidate a lot, he was trying to intimidate a lot of youngsters and young guys. At that time, I was like, probably 29-30 though. Hawk of the Road Warriors came up to me before the fight, and he said ‘Steve’s not gonna hurt you, just like when he hits you, when he tags you, just go down. Just pick up your five grand, man, just don’t give him a fight. He’s gonna, he’s gonna kill you.’ I told Mike, Mike Extreme, I told them I said ‘Hawk, just go back to Steve and just tell them that I’m gonna give him the fight of his life,’ you know, ‘I don’t care about it, like Jesus.’ Basically, I said different words on that but I don’t know if we’re allowed to curse.”
SL: “You’re more than welcome to cuss on here, we got the explicit rating on iTunes for that!”
PCO: “Word-for-word I told him, I said ‘tell Steve to go fuck themselves, go fuck himself with the five g’s and the easy win I’m gonna kick, I’m gonna kick his butt and I’m gonna beat the shit out of him. Just tell him that.”
PCO: “It was short notice, you know. I got worked out so bad on this, you know. Like, I had been sent at one point to Power Pro Wrestling which was like the OVW or the NXT at the time. Kurt Angle, everybody, like – when they didn’t have something for you or if they were-“
SL: “Like, developmental, quote-unquote?
PCO: “Yeah, it was. Yeah. (If they) didn’t have anything on the creative side and they wanted you to work on another character or something, they would send you there, or they would bring guys up, like Kurt Angle got brought up from there. I was there with both guys of Three Minute Warning, Rosey and Jamal, you know, and Fatu was there, that was before he did one of his gimmicks. The kids, the Usos, they used to come. They were 10 years old or 9 years old. They used to come all the time. There was a bunch of guys, the Samoan guys, you know, holding the territory.”
PCO: “So, then I had a break. I was at home and it was during summertime and I got a phone call from Bruce Prichard. He said ‘hey, Carl. Vince (has) got a great idea for you. I was like ‘What? He’s got a great idea for me? What is it?’”
PCO: “I (bit) on it. I’m like ‘yeah, what is it? I’m so excited!’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says. ‘It’s gonna be a tournament and it’s gonna be 16 guys, and it’s gonna be a shoot. You’ve got to fight for real. Five points you know, if you touch with your glove, and five points for a takedown and you get five grand every match, but then the Quarter Final you make 25, semi-final 50, if you won the whole thing, you make 200 Grand 250 grand. And I’m like ‘that’s not a bad idea!”
SL: “If you make it far, it’s not a bad idea!”
PCO: “That’s a hell of a push! I truly believe that maybe if I was lucky enough, I could have, like, a lucky punch or something, because they called me on a two-week or a week-and-a-half (weeks) notice, you know? Oh, really? Short. Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t have – I didn’t have time to train for that.
SL: “Just like for reference, would any of the other guys have known earlier? Like a Doctor Death: did he know months in advance or how was that sort of planned out?”
PCO: “You would have to make some research on it, but the rumours, maybe if I knew that probably other guys know that, or guys like Bruce Prichard or Vince Russo might know that. I think they gave him enough time to train and to get ready for this because they wanted him to win this thing and to go against – that’s what Jim said, I’m not sure if that was the plan for him to go against Steve Austin – but they wanted to build Doctor Death with this, I think, even if it was created on something that Bradshaw was bragging about with Vince Russo and then decided to go with it. I think Williams is really just the guy that they thought would win it by what he had achieved, being a four-time All-American in wrestling and having played for the Oakland Raiders in the NFL a little bit and college football and being a tough guy and having like a reputation of being one of the toughest shooters in the wrestling business.”
SL: “(He) just had the resume.”
PCO: “Yeah, beating up guys. You know, I’d seen him like, bullying new guys, young kids and things like that. And, he was strong. I saw him – like he did like he was doing like, easy – I saw him press Phineas Godwinn probably 300 pounds over his head in a wrestling match. In the gym, he was super strong, too, like behind the neck, easy. 350 pounds easy. He would do like 10 reps of that. So he was a strong guy. Yeah.”
SL: “It wasn’t an undeserved reputation.”
PCO: “Yeah, well, I don’t know if he – you know, probably some guy saw him in the ring giving a lot of beatings to job guys and things like that, or guys that are popping out in the business, or guys with a reputation that (were maybe) trying to go against them or whatever. I don’t know, because I’m not from that, from Steve’s era, really. He’s older than me, and he did a lot of his things for UWF, which I did watch a little bit but no, I wasn’t a part of them. I was a kid still. So, anyway, I took the fight on short notice, and I thought to myself, I said to myself, ‘if I, you know, by any kind of luck in any kind of good vein, I want to win this thing. It’s going to be – I want to force myself into a bush. Well, it didn’t turn out to be like that, but I did fairly good. I didn’t get knocked down. The scariest thing when you do something like that you don’t want to end up on your ass. You don’t want to end up doing the bacon dance, you know?”
SL: “I’ve never heard that before! That’s hilarious.”
PCO: “You want to keep your pride you know, you want to show that you can go to fight and have a good fight.”
SL: “Hundred percent. Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t think anybody got that major push out of the brawl for all nonetheless yourself.”
Please credit Spencer Love/Love Wrestling with any transcriptions used.
