Vader Interview
Posted by David Damage on Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Under: Interviews
Source: WWE.com
Where Are They Now? Vader
By: Ryan Murphy May 25, 2011
It was the second blow that knocked Vader’s eye out. He’s sure about that. He’s watched the tapes back, obsessing over the way his longtime rival Stan Hansen nearly blinded the 450-pound world champion in front of 77,000 fans in the Tokyo Dome.
Both men were known for being aggressive, but they were really laying it in that night. The match had started off ugly when the mighty Texan bashed Vader with a bull rope before the bell even rang. The giant was out for revenge after that and began smashing his opponent with hammer fists in the corner. Desperate for survival, Hansen used an old bar fighting trick and thumbed Vader twice in the right eye.
The first shot stunned him. The second one forced his eyeball right out of the socket.
Had things ended there, the bout still would have earned its own bizarre place amongst wrestling tape traders and YouTube surfers — the infamous eye pop out match. But it didn’t. Dazed and shaken, Vader stumbled backwards, jerked his mask off and somewhat nonchalantly shoved his eyeball back in his head. Then he wrestled for another 10 minutes. (PHOTOS)
“It was just instinct,” Vader told WWE.com during a lengthy conversation about his extraordinary life. “I popped it back in and it swelled up real quick and held it in, but that cost me about 30 percent of my vision, broke all the bones in my orbital, broke every bone in my nose. I had to have reconstructive surgery. That p****d me off. ”
This is the kind of story you want to hear when you talk to Vader, but this story is not that kind of story. Not entirely, anyway. In truth, it’s the story of how a kid named Leon White became the world famous wrestling champion known as Vader and the struggles he went through to become Leon White all over again.
It begins in the 1960s in the notoriously dangerous area of Los Angeles known as South Central. Leon was raised here in a place where, he said, “you either grew up pretty fast or you got consumed.”
His childhood was a rough one. Once, two men broke into the house through a bedroom window while Leon and his sister were home by themselves. White grabbed his sister's hand in a panic and ran to a neighbor’s house where the cops and his parents were called. It was a traumatizing moment, but the kids were given little comfort.
“I remember my dad coming home, getting the shotgun out of the gun rack, loading it and giving it to me,” White said. “He said, ‘If they come back, you know what to do,’ and went back out. I was eight years old.”
Vader was born big.Vader was born big, but his size often put him at a disadvantage. A talented football player, he was too powerful to mess with the children his own age, so he was forced into rough games with older kids.
“It doesn’t sound like much now, but believe me that two and three-year jump at that early age is a big deal,” he said. “I got the hell beat out of me.”
They were brutal years, but they made White tough. By the time he graduated from L.A.’s Bell High School, he was a nationally ranked offensive center and one of the most heavily recruited athletes in the country. A full scholarship brought him to the University of Colorado where he became a two-time All American before being drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1978. The big man played in Super Bowl XIV, but a knee injury brought a premature end to his career after only two seasons. He pursued real estate after that and did well, but the work bored him.
A lifelong athlete, White desired something physical and aggressive, which naturally led him to professional wrestling. Breaking in was easy. American Wrestling Association promoter Verne Gagne took one look at the 6-foot-5, 450-pound wrecking ball and saw a wealth of opportunity.
Trained briefly by Olympic wrestler Brad Rheingans, White was huge and inexperienced, which made him dangerous. That meant only the roughest veterans would get in the ring with him. For six long months in 1985, Leon “Baby Bull” White was thrashed night in and night out by tough guys like his future rival Stan Hansen, the 475-pound Jerry Blackwell and Bruiser Brody who once, according to White, hit him so hard with a steel chair that it left an impression in his back that said “Made in Milwaukee.”
“I don’t know if it was planned to see if I’d quit, but they beat me unmercifully,” he admitted.
It was a bad time for White. Not so much because of the beatings — he could take a beating, he proved that already — but because he wasn’t developing as a talent. He wouldn’t start learning how to be a solid performer until 1987 when he was sent by Gagne to Otto Wanz’s Catch Wrestling Association in Germany.
“That’s where I learned my first wrestling hold,” Vader said. “There were a couple of referees over there that I would pay. They would show up in the ring early and show me how you lock up, how you hit a rope.”
Now going by the name Bull Power, White blossomed as a powerhouse and quickly rose to the top of the CWA, winning the promotion’s championship within months of his debut. The bruiser’s power and agility were beginning to gain attention (“I could bench press 600 pounds and dropkick at the same time,” he said) and New Japan Pro-Wrestling promoter Antonio Inoki was one of the men who took notice.
Leon White in all of his Big Van Vader glory.At the time, the WWE Hall of Famer was developing a character he called Big Van Vader. Inspired by a Japanese comic book villain, Vader would be a complete monster that entered the ring wearing a massive, spiked helmet that spewed smoke. It was a main event spot that Inoki had considered for both Ultimate Warrior and Sid Vicious, but he was impressed by White’s physicality in Germany and made him a large money offer.
Vader debuted with NJPW in the winter of 1987 as a surprise opponent for Inoki and battered the star so badly that riots broke out in the stands. In an instant, he was the most hated villain in Japanese wrestling.
“It just caught fire,” Vader remembered. “We would go to hotels and they would mob me. Every night was sold out for a long, long time.”
Putting a marketable persona on top of Vader’s size and ability turned him into a global sensation at the tail end of the 1980s. He was so dominant that at one time he held major championships in Japan, Germany and Mexico simultaneously. Vader wasn’t just a gorilla in a helmet, though. He could go and his blistering brawls — specifically the aforementioned eyeball incident — garnered him the interest of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling.
“I saw him in some matches versus Stan Hansen in Japan,” former WCW employee and current WWE Hall of Famer Jim Ross told WWE.com. “He was agile and very aggressive, so we brought him in.”
Vader became a major star in WCW, winning their top title three times during his stint with the company. Over the next five years, he cemented his reputation as one of sports-entertainment’s greatest super-heavyweights thanks to physical rivalries with Sting and Ron Simmons. His brutality became legend. One night, he powerbombed Cactus Jack on the concrete floor and knocked him unconscious. A year later, he severed the mad man’s ear during a wild brawl in Germany.
But what made Vader truly amazing — and devastating — was that with all of this size, he could still leap off the top rope. (PHOTOS)
“I’ve always thought that he was as athletic as any big man I ever saw,” J.R. said. “I mean, he weighed four and a quarter and he was doing moonsaults."
Still, despite his success in WCW, Vader remembered this time in his career politely, but not passionately. When answering questions, he chose his words carefully as if there were parts of himself he was either not ready to reveal or unwilling to look back on. He summed up legendary matches as “pretty good” and heated rivals as “good guys.” When Vader attributed the end of his time in WCW to the return of Ric Flair and arrival of Hulk Hogan, he did so briefly before adding, “I have no hard feelings. I wish everybody well.”
It all pointed to a man going through changes and that’s something Vader admitted to openly. As he continued to speak, it became clear what his time in Atlanta now meant to him.
“I was struggling with some bad personal habits,” he confessed. “I drank way too much. I was in a lot of pain with my knees and my back and my shoulders and started taking way too many pain pills.”
Active in athletics since childhood, Vader’s years on the gridiron and in the ring were catching up with him. The knee that he’d injured in college had become problematic, making the act of traveling from show to show a struggle for him.
“People don’t realize how hard it is to travel and sit in the same place for a long period of time when you’re 400 pounds,” Jim Ross said. “Then, address your injuries and rehab and you’re going to the gym and the diet. It’s very, very challenging for someone that big.”
"The Man They Call Vader" during his time in WWE.The Mastodon had his troubles, but he was still a tremendous performer who could throw down with the best of them. He proved this in 1996 when he stomped into WWE and battered legendary Superstars like Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker in pay-per-view main events. Although he never won the WWE Championship, the hard-hitting style he’d cultivated in Japan made him a competitor worth watching.
“He filled a major void for us at that time,” Jim Ross remembered. “He was that big, killer villain and he had some real good outings.”
After two solid years with WWE, Vader opted out of his contract in order to return to the rings of Japan. In his early 40s at the time, he knew that the matches overseas could be brutal, but the tours only lasted for a few weeks. He forced himself through these international trips for years and experienced significant success in the country, but eventually everything caught up with him.
“It got to the point where I physically couldn’t get on a plane and go do it anymore,” Vader said. “It didn’t matter what I took, didn’t matter how much alcohol I drank — I was just physically unable to continue.”
It has been said that an addict must hit rock bottom before they can begin to recover. For Vader, that moment came in 2007 when he returned to his beautiful house in Colorado, which was now empty. His wife had left him.
“That was the low part of my life,” he told WWE.com. “At that point I realized something had to change. Either I had to get busy dying or get busy living.”
This is the part of the story where Vader becomes Leon White again and it isn’t pretty. For the better part of three years, the big man went through hell. After quitting his ill habits cold turkey, he had a double knee replacement, which became infected and forced him into bed for six months. After that, he attempted to take a trip to Japan for an autograph signing and went unconscious on the plane. Vader was in a coma for the next 30 days. When he awoke, he had lost 112 pounds and struggled to walk and talk again, but, for Vader, this was the moment of his rebirth.
“Did I really think that after misbehaving for so many years that I was just going to quit and go through a couple of weeks of misery and be done with it and be healthy and happy?” he said. “For me, that didn’t make sense. If you want to get your life back this is what you have to do.”
If Vader sounded introspective, it’s because he’s told this story before. After returning to Colorado following his coma, White was put in touch with a group called the Wounded Warriors Alliance. Founded by Dave Roever — a veteran who was severely wounded and disfigured in the Vietnam War when a grenade exploded in his hand — the organization provides courses in public speaking, spirituality and physical rehabilitation to soldiers who have been hurt in combat. “The U.S. military sends me these guys with no legs, so I can get them back on their feet,” is how Roever once put it. (PHOTOS)
Although the Alliance was designed for military veterans, the group heard White’s story and recognized him for what he was — a wounded warrior. He was invited to attend a program at their ranch in Pueblo West, Colorado. The experience changed his life.
“These beautiful people allowed me to come into their program and they taught me how to give my testimony — that’s what has value,” White said.
Since completing their course, Leon has become a speaker and a counselor with the faith-based group (White, himself, is a born-again Christian), sharing his story with the young men and women who have survived the horrors of war and are now scarred both physically and mentally.
Leon "Vader" White speaks with the wounded warriors.“These guys may have one arm or one leg, may have been shot in the shoulder or the chest two or three times,” White said. “What I do with these kids is I stand up in front of them and tell them that throughout my career, I’ve had 45 surgeries to date, I’ve had 19 concussions, I’ve had both knees replaced, I’ve actually been in a coma for 33 days in Japan.
“If this old man can do what he did and come out on the other side and actually be here tonight,” he added, “then what can someone do at 23 with their whole life ahead of them?”
In addition to his motivational speeches, the former champion also helps the warriors with physical rehab, training them in the gym with a program that White developed himself. It’s meaningful work that has given Leon purpose again and helped him restore the relationships in his life — specifically the one with his son, Jesse.
“Jesse’s the love of my life without question,” an emotional White said. “I certainly hadn’t given him very much to be proud of for a long time. The person and friend and father that he sees now is substantially different from the person I was at the end of my career.”
A powerhouse like his father, Jesse was a football star at the University of Oklahoma before a hip injury halted what could have been an NFL career. He transitioned to the squared circle after that, competing in Japan for the company his father recently started — Vader Time Promotions. In 2011, he signed a developmental contract with WWE.
“He’s very, very strong,” said die-hard Sooners fan and family friend Jim Ross. “He’s comparable to a John Cena, Ezekiel Jackson level — but he’s not Vader II. He’s 235 with a completely different body type than his father."
On the day of this interview, White was preparing to see his son off as Jesse started the long drive to Tampa, Florida to begin training. The dad couldn’t have been prouder.
Jesse’s got my strength, but he’s as good looking as anyone WWE’s ever had,” White added. “I married well. What can I say?”
He talked at length about his son’s future in the ring, but when asked about his own, White was sheepish. It was clear his passions have changed. Although he admitted to being in better physical shape than he was during his time with WWE, White managed to shift the subject back to his work with the Wounded Warriors Alliance.
“When you reach one of these kids, it’s like the feeling of going into that match with Stan Hansen in front of 77,000 people multiplied by 10,” he said. “For one of those kids to say, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ That’s what it’s all about.”
Where Are They Now? Vader
By: Ryan Murphy May 25, 2011
It was the second blow that knocked Vader’s eye out. He’s sure about that. He’s watched the tapes back, obsessing over the way his longtime rival Stan Hansen nearly blinded the 450-pound world champion in front of 77,000 fans in the Tokyo Dome.
Both men were known for being aggressive, but they were really laying it in that night. The match had started off ugly when the mighty Texan bashed Vader with a bull rope before the bell even rang. The giant was out for revenge after that and began smashing his opponent with hammer fists in the corner. Desperate for survival, Hansen used an old bar fighting trick and thumbed Vader twice in the right eye.
The first shot stunned him. The second one forced his eyeball right out of the socket.
Had things ended there, the bout still would have earned its own bizarre place amongst wrestling tape traders and YouTube surfers — the infamous eye pop out match. But it didn’t. Dazed and shaken, Vader stumbled backwards, jerked his mask off and somewhat nonchalantly shoved his eyeball back in his head. Then he wrestled for another 10 minutes. (PHOTOS)
“It was just instinct,” Vader told WWE.com during a lengthy conversation about his extraordinary life. “I popped it back in and it swelled up real quick and held it in, but that cost me about 30 percent of my vision, broke all the bones in my orbital, broke every bone in my nose. I had to have reconstructive surgery. That p****d me off. ”
This is the kind of story you want to hear when you talk to Vader, but this story is not that kind of story. Not entirely, anyway. In truth, it’s the story of how a kid named Leon White became the world famous wrestling champion known as Vader and the struggles he went through to become Leon White all over again.
It begins in the 1960s in the notoriously dangerous area of Los Angeles known as South Central. Leon was raised here in a place where, he said, “you either grew up pretty fast or you got consumed.”
His childhood was a rough one. Once, two men broke into the house through a bedroom window while Leon and his sister were home by themselves. White grabbed his sister's hand in a panic and ran to a neighbor’s house where the cops and his parents were called. It was a traumatizing moment, but the kids were given little comfort.
“I remember my dad coming home, getting the shotgun out of the gun rack, loading it and giving it to me,” White said. “He said, ‘If they come back, you know what to do,’ and went back out. I was eight years old.”
Vader was born big.Vader was born big, but his size often put him at a disadvantage. A talented football player, he was too powerful to mess with the children his own age, so he was forced into rough games with older kids.
“It doesn’t sound like much now, but believe me that two and three-year jump at that early age is a big deal,” he said. “I got the hell beat out of me.”
They were brutal years, but they made White tough. By the time he graduated from L.A.’s Bell High School, he was a nationally ranked offensive center and one of the most heavily recruited athletes in the country. A full scholarship brought him to the University of Colorado where he became a two-time All American before being drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1978. The big man played in Super Bowl XIV, but a knee injury brought a premature end to his career after only two seasons. He pursued real estate after that and did well, but the work bored him.
A lifelong athlete, White desired something physical and aggressive, which naturally led him to professional wrestling. Breaking in was easy. American Wrestling Association promoter Verne Gagne took one look at the 6-foot-5, 450-pound wrecking ball and saw a wealth of opportunity.
Trained briefly by Olympic wrestler Brad Rheingans, White was huge and inexperienced, which made him dangerous. That meant only the roughest veterans would get in the ring with him. For six long months in 1985, Leon “Baby Bull” White was thrashed night in and night out by tough guys like his future rival Stan Hansen, the 475-pound Jerry Blackwell and Bruiser Brody who once, according to White, hit him so hard with a steel chair that it left an impression in his back that said “Made in Milwaukee.”
“I don’t know if it was planned to see if I’d quit, but they beat me unmercifully,” he admitted.
It was a bad time for White. Not so much because of the beatings — he could take a beating, he proved that already — but because he wasn’t developing as a talent. He wouldn’t start learning how to be a solid performer until 1987 when he was sent by Gagne to Otto Wanz’s Catch Wrestling Association in Germany.
“That’s where I learned my first wrestling hold,” Vader said. “There were a couple of referees over there that I would pay. They would show up in the ring early and show me how you lock up, how you hit a rope.”
Now going by the name Bull Power, White blossomed as a powerhouse and quickly rose to the top of the CWA, winning the promotion’s championship within months of his debut. The bruiser’s power and agility were beginning to gain attention (“I could bench press 600 pounds and dropkick at the same time,” he said) and New Japan Pro-Wrestling promoter Antonio Inoki was one of the men who took notice.
Leon White in all of his Big Van Vader glory.At the time, the WWE Hall of Famer was developing a character he called Big Van Vader. Inspired by a Japanese comic book villain, Vader would be a complete monster that entered the ring wearing a massive, spiked helmet that spewed smoke. It was a main event spot that Inoki had considered for both Ultimate Warrior and Sid Vicious, but he was impressed by White’s physicality in Germany and made him a large money offer.
Vader debuted with NJPW in the winter of 1987 as a surprise opponent for Inoki and battered the star so badly that riots broke out in the stands. In an instant, he was the most hated villain in Japanese wrestling.
“It just caught fire,” Vader remembered. “We would go to hotels and they would mob me. Every night was sold out for a long, long time.”
Putting a marketable persona on top of Vader’s size and ability turned him into a global sensation at the tail end of the 1980s. He was so dominant that at one time he held major championships in Japan, Germany and Mexico simultaneously. Vader wasn’t just a gorilla in a helmet, though. He could go and his blistering brawls — specifically the aforementioned eyeball incident — garnered him the interest of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling.
“I saw him in some matches versus Stan Hansen in Japan,” former WCW employee and current WWE Hall of Famer Jim Ross told WWE.com. “He was agile and very aggressive, so we brought him in.”
Vader became a major star in WCW, winning their top title three times during his stint with the company. Over the next five years, he cemented his reputation as one of sports-entertainment’s greatest super-heavyweights thanks to physical rivalries with Sting and Ron Simmons. His brutality became legend. One night, he powerbombed Cactus Jack on the concrete floor and knocked him unconscious. A year later, he severed the mad man’s ear during a wild brawl in Germany.
But what made Vader truly amazing — and devastating — was that with all of this size, he could still leap off the top rope. (PHOTOS)
“I’ve always thought that he was as athletic as any big man I ever saw,” J.R. said. “I mean, he weighed four and a quarter and he was doing moonsaults."
Still, despite his success in WCW, Vader remembered this time in his career politely, but not passionately. When answering questions, he chose his words carefully as if there were parts of himself he was either not ready to reveal or unwilling to look back on. He summed up legendary matches as “pretty good” and heated rivals as “good guys.” When Vader attributed the end of his time in WCW to the return of Ric Flair and arrival of Hulk Hogan, he did so briefly before adding, “I have no hard feelings. I wish everybody well.”
It all pointed to a man going through changes and that’s something Vader admitted to openly. As he continued to speak, it became clear what his time in Atlanta now meant to him.
“I was struggling with some bad personal habits,” he confessed. “I drank way too much. I was in a lot of pain with my knees and my back and my shoulders and started taking way too many pain pills.”
Active in athletics since childhood, Vader’s years on the gridiron and in the ring were catching up with him. The knee that he’d injured in college had become problematic, making the act of traveling from show to show a struggle for him.
“People don’t realize how hard it is to travel and sit in the same place for a long period of time when you’re 400 pounds,” Jim Ross said. “Then, address your injuries and rehab and you’re going to the gym and the diet. It’s very, very challenging for someone that big.”
"The Man They Call Vader" during his time in WWE.The Mastodon had his troubles, but he was still a tremendous performer who could throw down with the best of them. He proved this in 1996 when he stomped into WWE and battered legendary Superstars like Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker in pay-per-view main events. Although he never won the WWE Championship, the hard-hitting style he’d cultivated in Japan made him a competitor worth watching.
“He filled a major void for us at that time,” Jim Ross remembered. “He was that big, killer villain and he had some real good outings.”
After two solid years with WWE, Vader opted out of his contract in order to return to the rings of Japan. In his early 40s at the time, he knew that the matches overseas could be brutal, but the tours only lasted for a few weeks. He forced himself through these international trips for years and experienced significant success in the country, but eventually everything caught up with him.
“It got to the point where I physically couldn’t get on a plane and go do it anymore,” Vader said. “It didn’t matter what I took, didn’t matter how much alcohol I drank — I was just physically unable to continue.”
It has been said that an addict must hit rock bottom before they can begin to recover. For Vader, that moment came in 2007 when he returned to his beautiful house in Colorado, which was now empty. His wife had left him.
“That was the low part of my life,” he told WWE.com. “At that point I realized something had to change. Either I had to get busy dying or get busy living.”
This is the part of the story where Vader becomes Leon White again and it isn’t pretty. For the better part of three years, the big man went through hell. After quitting his ill habits cold turkey, he had a double knee replacement, which became infected and forced him into bed for six months. After that, he attempted to take a trip to Japan for an autograph signing and went unconscious on the plane. Vader was in a coma for the next 30 days. When he awoke, he had lost 112 pounds and struggled to walk and talk again, but, for Vader, this was the moment of his rebirth.
“Did I really think that after misbehaving for so many years that I was just going to quit and go through a couple of weeks of misery and be done with it and be healthy and happy?” he said. “For me, that didn’t make sense. If you want to get your life back this is what you have to do.”
If Vader sounded introspective, it’s because he’s told this story before. After returning to Colorado following his coma, White was put in touch with a group called the Wounded Warriors Alliance. Founded by Dave Roever — a veteran who was severely wounded and disfigured in the Vietnam War when a grenade exploded in his hand — the organization provides courses in public speaking, spirituality and physical rehabilitation to soldiers who have been hurt in combat. “The U.S. military sends me these guys with no legs, so I can get them back on their feet,” is how Roever once put it. (PHOTOS)
Although the Alliance was designed for military veterans, the group heard White’s story and recognized him for what he was — a wounded warrior. He was invited to attend a program at their ranch in Pueblo West, Colorado. The experience changed his life.
“These beautiful people allowed me to come into their program and they taught me how to give my testimony — that’s what has value,” White said.
Since completing their course, Leon has become a speaker and a counselor with the faith-based group (White, himself, is a born-again Christian), sharing his story with the young men and women who have survived the horrors of war and are now scarred both physically and mentally.
Leon "Vader" White speaks with the wounded warriors.“These guys may have one arm or one leg, may have been shot in the shoulder or the chest two or three times,” White said. “What I do with these kids is I stand up in front of them and tell them that throughout my career, I’ve had 45 surgeries to date, I’ve had 19 concussions, I’ve had both knees replaced, I’ve actually been in a coma for 33 days in Japan.
“If this old man can do what he did and come out on the other side and actually be here tonight,” he added, “then what can someone do at 23 with their whole life ahead of them?”
In addition to his motivational speeches, the former champion also helps the warriors with physical rehab, training them in the gym with a program that White developed himself. It’s meaningful work that has given Leon purpose again and helped him restore the relationships in his life — specifically the one with his son, Jesse.
“Jesse’s the love of my life without question,” an emotional White said. “I certainly hadn’t given him very much to be proud of for a long time. The person and friend and father that he sees now is substantially different from the person I was at the end of my career.”
A powerhouse like his father, Jesse was a football star at the University of Oklahoma before a hip injury halted what could have been an NFL career. He transitioned to the squared circle after that, competing in Japan for the company his father recently started — Vader Time Promotions. In 2011, he signed a developmental contract with WWE.
“He’s very, very strong,” said die-hard Sooners fan and family friend Jim Ross. “He’s comparable to a John Cena, Ezekiel Jackson level — but he’s not Vader II. He’s 235 with a completely different body type than his father."
On the day of this interview, White was preparing to see his son off as Jesse started the long drive to Tampa, Florida to begin training. The dad couldn’t have been prouder.
Jesse’s got my strength, but he’s as good looking as anyone WWE’s ever had,” White added. “I married well. What can I say?”
He talked at length about his son’s future in the ring, but when asked about his own, White was sheepish. It was clear his passions have changed. Although he admitted to being in better physical shape than he was during his time with WWE, White managed to shift the subject back to his work with the Wounded Warriors Alliance.
“When you reach one of these kids, it’s like the feeling of going into that match with Stan Hansen in front of 77,000 people multiplied by 10,” he said. “For one of those kids to say, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ That’s what it’s all about.”
In : Interviews