Paul Lazenby on Pancrase, Stunt Work and Doubling Steve Austin

Fred: What’s up, everybody? This is Fred Richani of TheSportsCourier.com and YouTube.com/TheSportsCourier. Welcome to our live broadcast. We’ve got a very special man on the other end. He’s an actor, a stuntman, a fighter, a pro wrestler, a journalist and a commentator. I’ve probably forgotten a couple of job titles already, but he’s one badass dude: Paul “The Mauler” Lazenby. You’re one of the hardest-working men in show business. What came first for you: wrestling, MMA, acting or stunt work?

Paul Lazenby: What actually got all this started was powerlifting. I was just out of the army, 19 or 20 years old, and I came across a multiple-time Canadian masters powerlifting champion. I had seen powerlifting on TV and loved the look of the sport, and he was the right guy to talk to. He took me under his wing, showed me the ropes, and I got into strongman and powerlifting. Then, out of a lifelong love of pro wrestling, I saw an ad in the back of Pro Wrestling Illustrated one day for the Hart Brothers Pro Wrestling Camp and thought, “I’ve got to do that.” That’s where the whole ball got rolling.

Fred: So you started wrestling after powerlifting?

Paul Lazenby: Yeah. I had no money, and a couple of really good friends lent me the cash to move 2,000 miles from Kitchener, Ontario, all the way out to Calgary. This is going way back, like 1991. Lucky for me, just finishing up their rookie year and teaching that course at the Hart Brothers Camp were Lance Storm and Chris Jericho. Even though they were rookies, they were miles ahead of where a lot of other guys were. Lance is an instinctively good teacher. I can only imagine the quality of training his current students are getting, because I got a great education from him way back then.

Fred: Wrestling is a tougher business than some people give it credit for, between being on the road and taking all those bumps. So what made you wake up one day and say, “In addition to all that, I want to get punched in the face”?

Paul Lazenby: That was totally by accident. I didn’t want to be a fighter. I had two goals when I got into pro wrestling. One was to make it to the WWF or WCW level, or one of the bigger promotions in Japan. The other was to wrestle in Japan, even if it was for a small group. I wanted to see Japan. Buddies of mine like Dr. Luther, who’s a hardcore icon, were wrestling in big stadiums for FMW at the time, and Storm and Jericho were going over there.

That came up in 1996, when I was wrestling for Insane Championship Wrestling down in Detroit. I saw an older lady who looked familiar, and then I realized I’d seen her on a UFC videotape. It was Phyllis Lee, a very well-known wrestling and fighting agent. I went over and introduced myself, and she said, “Well, I’m not booking wrestlers, but I’m booking real fighters. Have you heard of Pancrase?” I was one of maybe a hundred guys in Canada who knew what Pancrase was. It was the No. 1 MMA group in the world, but it didn’t have a lot of visibility in North America, and I knew all the names and faces because I’d been watching bootlegs.

So I jokingly filled out an application and filled it with lies, because I had no combat sports training at all. I’d never even been on the high school wrestling team. I sent it away with a chuckle, thinking they’d never taken a Canadian and I wasn’t going to be the first. A month later I got a phone call: “Pack your bags, you’re going to Tokyo.” I wanted to go to Japan so bad that I was willing to take an ass-whooping to do it.

Fred: And you took a few. You went 1-6 in MMA, but I believe you won your final fight. What made you keep coming back?

Paul Lazenby: I had too many mental hurdles. I lost my first fight, but in a fashion where they said, “Look, we’ve got to try to develop this dude.” My next fight was three weeks later against Masakatsu Funaki, the world champion. I’m the only Canadian ever to fight him. They brought me over and let me live and train in their dojo. If it weren’t for my own mental hang-ups, where I couldn’t get past the fact that these guys were gods to me, I would have won a couple of fights over there. I was jumping in at the world level with no experience and not the right mental makeup. So I lost four fights in Japan, went down to Texas and lost two more. After that I moved to Vancouver and started kickboxing. I put together an unbeaten run and won three Canadian title fights. Then I returned to MMA for my very final fight and won that one, too.

Fred: With Pancrase, especially back then, did you ever get the sense the fix was in on a few fights, particularly any you were involved in?

Paul Lazenby: I was never asked to work a fight. The funny thing is, I didn’t even know 100 percent it was a shoot until I was getting into the ring. I had heard the rumors. They did consider themselves a pro wrestling organization. They just thought, “We’re pro wrestlers who don’t do works.” They even used a three-rope, sprung pro wrestling ring. The whole time I’m there, I’m waiting for somebody to come up in the week before the fight and give me the finish. I was even walking to the ring thinking, “Did somebody forget to give me the finish?” I didn’t want to be shooting if the other guy thought it was a work. Then I got into the ring and looked down, and that canvas looked like Jackson Pollock had gone nuts all over it. I realized, “OK, this is going to be a real fight.”

There’s one fight in particular I was kind of suspicious of, and it’s been talked about that there was the occasional work in Pancrase. But for the most part it was a shoot organization. Most of the fights people would consider works were actually fights where guys like Funaki and Suzuki were so far ahead of their competition that they would tailor the fight.

Fred: Like a squash match, essentially.

Paul Lazenby: Yeah, it’d be a squash. They’d lead the guy along and give him a couple of little hope spots. He’d think he was shooting the whole fight, and they would just control him and put him away when they felt like it.

Fred: Around that time, the WWF was doing Brawl for All, Eric Bischoff was claiming some of his guys were tougher than UFC fighters, and ECW boasted some of the toughest guys in the world. Were you surprised you didn’t end up in one of the big three? You had a great look, a great athletic background, and you were an actual shooter.

Paul Lazenby: The problem was I was never very good as a pro wrestler. I didn’t get a proper understanding of the business until I left it. It’s funny. About a year and a half ago I was working with Adam Copeland, Edge, on a TV show called “Sanctuary,” and I actually apologized to him, because we wrestled each other almost every night on one of those Northern Manitoba death tours. I’d been in the business longer, so I was calling the match, and I had no idea what I was doing.

Having said that, when I was in Insane Championship Wrestling, I had a gimmick called Death Wolf that got over huge right from the get-go. It was over in Winnipeg, too. If I had managed to connect with Paul Heyman around that time, I think I would have had a chance to get into ECW. That gimmick would have been a great fit, and Heyman is such a genius at accentuating the strengths and hiding the weaknesses of his performers. Maybe that would have translated into a job with WCW or WWE, like it did for a lot of other guys. But that’s a lot of what-ifs. Veering off into MMA in Japan took those possibilities away, and I have no regrets about that.

Fred: Your IMDb page is about 500 pages long. How did you get into acting and stunt work?

Paul Lazenby: I lost so many fights that I could see my MMA career wasn’t going anywhere, and there was nothing going on for me in Ontario. My buddy Dr. Luther was living in Vancouver, and he’d been bugging me: “Dude, move in with me. We’ve got regular wrestling here.” I thought, “OK, I’m 31 years old. If I’m going to make this work, it’s going to have to be soon.” So I moved to Vancouver as kind of a last-ditch effort and briefly set up a wrestling school.

Doing promo for the school, I ended up working out at the same gym as James Bamford, a very established stunt performer and stunt coordinator. We call him Bam Bam. He had just taken over a kids show about Mexican pro wrestler superheroes, and Bam Bam hates pro wrestling. Despises it. So he was asking around the gym if anybody knew a pro wrestler he could use as a consultant, and somebody aimed him at me. He ended up moving on to a show called “Freedom” instead, but he took me with him. I started out on the wire team. When performers are harnessed to wires and hoisted up in the air, I was one of the guys doing the pulling. That was my first job in the business.

Fred: We talked off the air. Being a stuntman isn’t as glamorous as it seems, right?

Paul Lazenby: On my very first day as a stuntman, the first take of my career, the first time the cameras were ever rolling on me, I got the entire side of my face crushed. My orbital bone was smashed, and I have permanent vision damage. That was my welcome to the business. I joined the stunt business the way a lot of guys join the Crips: I got jumped in. If you’re not willing to take that and come back for more, you’ve got no business being a stunt performer.

Fred: Contrary to popular belief, you’re not the brother or love child of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, but you two are linked. You’re his stunt double. How did you get involved with Steve?

Paul Lazenby: Steve came up to British Columbia to do a movie called “Damage.” They already had a stunt double for him who’s a better stuntman than I ever was, and from the neck up he was a good double, but from the neck down, physically, a bit different. I was working on that show as one of Steve’s opponents in a bare-knuckle fight scene. In fact, he broke my nose. He put it all the way over under my left eye by accident. I don’t blame Steve.

Fred: I think I heard about that.

Paul Lazenby: Yeah, it actually made TMZ. Those guys are diligent. Within 18 hours they were emailing me asking for photographs. But a lot of people were looking at me and seeing how my physique, the way I moved and the shape of my skull matched up with Steve, and I still had hair back then. Shortly after that, he came back to make a movie called “The Stranger,” and a buddy of mine who was coordinating it said, “Come on in, we want to look at you for this.” As soon as I shaved my head, it was such a match. So many people have said it since: “You guys even move the same.” It’s good for directors, too, because unlike a lot of doubles, they can shoot me in profile and from angles you normally can’t shoot a double from, and it still looks like Steve.

Fred: He’s one of the greatest of all time and one of the biggest draws in pro wrestling history. Were you in awe at first, given that it’s Stone Cold Steve Austin, the face of WWE during its biggest money-making era?

Paul Lazenby: By the time I met Steve, I’d been in the business long enough to realize actors are just people. I was Vin Diesel’s pro wrestling consultant on “The Chronicles of Riddick,” and he’s an awesome dude, but you stop getting starstruck after a while. Having said that, it was kind of surreal. I remember being a bicycle security guard making $6.75 an hour when I first moved here and riding my bike past a big poster of Stone Cold Steve Austin, because Raw was coming to town. He’s the biggest moneymaker in the history of this business, so meeting a guy who has ascended to greater heights than anybody in the business I was chasing for over a decade was a take-a-step-back-and-appreciate-it moment. We’ve made seven movies together now, and he’s become a friend. Sometimes I forget how famous he is, because to me he’s just Steve.

Fred: One guy you worked with recently, a current WWE Superstar who’s moving into acting, is The Miz, in “The Marine 3.” What was it like working with Mike Mizanin?

Paul Lazenby: He was a really nice guy. He main-evented WrestleMania, so you could see a guy like that being a bit cocky. I don’t think anybody’s gimmick is the same as real life, but sometimes there’s some overlap, and I was prepared for a little ego and attitude. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I think he was happy to be sitting in one place for a while, because wrestlers have such a frenetic lifestyle. He got to stay in the same place for a month and shoot this movie, and he was nice to everybody. Same as Steve. When the No. 1 on the call sheet is a guy like that, it puts everybody in a good mood. They set the tone for the whole production.

Fred: Mizanin does seem like a really nice guy, but to put it nicely, he’s not the best babyface. I feel like he’s miscast as this new Ric Flair, and since he main-evented WrestleMania with all that momentum, it’s been kind of downhill character-wise. What does WWE need to do to get him taken seriously again?

Paul Lazenby: What they need to do with a lot of people, and that’s stop micromanaging the wrestlers. I desperately miss the days when you let a guy fall into his own gimmick. The reason Death Wolf was over is because I invented it. I developed it, and I decided what that character was going to do and say. WWE wrestlers don’t have that option anymore. Everything’s scripted for them. Instead of the promoter looking at which way the wind’s blowing with a character, it seems the creative team just decides one day, “OK, now it’s time to turn this guy.”

I found Mizanin most effective as the bratty, borderline cowardly, snotty little pain in the ass you want to punch in the face. Even though he’s not a small guy, he’s got the vibe of the jerk in high school who instigated fights between other people and hid behind the big bully. Even when he was main-eventing WrestleMania, they were trying to play him off as a tough guy who could go blow-for-blow with John Cena. And as a babyface, when you send Ric Flair in there with him and say, “You’re going to look at him like you look at me, and I’m going to give him my finishing hold,” that’s hanging an albatross around the guy’s neck. You can’t force that kind of thing. Wind the guy up and let him run, and I think he’d do a great job. It’s like, “We are the company, you are the fans, and you will think what we want you to think.” You can influence the fans and guide them, but you can’t force them.

Fred: You’ve done MMA, you cover it extensively, and you’ve been a commentator. There are a lot more similarities between pro wrestling and MMA than people like to think. How alike are they?

Paul Lazenby: They’re almost identical. There’s the obvious difference, where MMA is a shoot and pro wrestling is a work. Anybody who’s heard me say this before, prepare to roll your eyes: Mixed martial arts is the new pro wrestling. You trace them both back, and they come out of exactly the same place. That’s where a lot of promoters fall flat. They try to promote it like boxing or kickboxing. Promote it like pro wrestling. I love these hyper-purist journalists who think they know what’s best for the sport and get angry because a guy leapfrogs into title contention. Heaven forbid Dana White should make the fights people want to pay to see.

Chael Sonnen rocketed up the rankings on the basis of his mouth, and let’s be honest, Chael is Jon Fitch with a mouth. He’s a very smart guy. He saw the writing on the wall and tailored his persona to the business. If that’s going to sell tickets and be healthiest for the company, why would you not make that fight? Either the people hate this guy and want to see him get his ass kicked, or they love him and want to pay to see him fight. That’s how you make fights. That’s why people shouldn’t have been hating on Kimbo for being in main events right out of the gate, or on Chael or Brock Lesnar. Anybody who does that is betraying a serious lack of knowledge about the business of MMA, regardless of how long they’ve been part of it or covering it.

Fred: Injuries have plagued MMA. We haven’t seen it as much this year, thank God, but 2012 was insane. Why do you think there have been so many? Is it as simple as overtraining?

Paul Lazenby: It’s definitely training problems. This is still a very young sport in its current incarnation, barely two decades old, and people are still learning what works and what doesn’t. When I lived at the Pancrase dojo for six weeks, I came home thinking, “How do these guys train like this all year round?” Most of them were wrecked by their early 30s, because they were so injured from training too hard and too much. Dana brought up a good point. Now we’ve got super camps with multiple world champions or elite-level guys in the same camp, and they were raised on stories of places like Chute Boxe, where guys knock each other out in training every day. You’ve got hyper-aggressive, hyper-competitive young guys beating the hell out of each other, and they’re the best fighters in the world, so they’re going to take each other out. I think events like UFC 149 made them realize, “We have to dial this back.” If you have your best fights in the dojo, you’re not going to make money having them in the cage.

Fred: Can you apply that to pro wrestling? You’ve got to make your name on the independent level to get to TNA, WWE or Japan, but sometimes I see guys going ridiculously hard and taking unnecessary risks in front of 500 people. You could even argue guys in New Japan are taking way too many shots to the head. Do guys need to take it easy to some extent?

Paul Lazenby: Yes, and it’s funny you brought up New Japan, because somewhere around the ’90s, New Japan started getting a lot of injuries from the high-flying nature of what they were doing, and they dialed their style back to a more mat-oriented style with occasional high spots. According to Dave Meltzer, who’s usually accurate about statistics, their gates went down for a while and then went back up as the audience got re-educated.

The problem right now is the standard has shifted toward getting your stuff in. “I’ve got to make this Cirque du Soleil. I’ve got to have 97 high spots.” You’ve got the curtain-jerker going 15 minutes with guys coming off the top rope, so there’s nothing to follow it with for the rest of the show. The ebb and flow of an entire card has been lost. Telling a story within the context of a match has been lost. It’s all about two guys trying to out-spectacular each other, regardless of whether it makes any sense to take that risk. And it’s costing guys. Look at Nigel McGuinness. He was taking people’s heads off with that lariat. It looked great, but God knows how many concussions it caused unnecessarily, because this business is supposed to be a work. That torn bicep was the beginning of the end of his chances at the top level. I’m not second-guessing Nigel. He’s a better worker than I ever was. But those are choices a guy makes when he’s young without realizing they’re going to cost him down the line.

Fred: Absolutely. God bless Misawa, look what happened to him in the ring. And I’m paraphrasing, but I think when Kobashi was 30 or 31, he had the knees of an 80-year-old.

Paul Lazenby: Insane. Look at his match with Samoa Joe. I sat down and watched that match with Steve Austin, and he’s very good at deconstructing a match. He wasn’t knocking it by any stretch. As a technician, he just saw certain things. But overall, those guys told a spectacular story, at a time when Kobashi could barely walk. Look at Minoru Suzuki. I watched him fight Tanahashi, and I think Suzuki took one real bump in the whole match, but I was riveted, because he was telling the story of his character and the conflict without destroying his body. In the words of Jerry Lynn, when you start your career, you’ve got a jar full of marbles, and every time you take a big bump, you take a marble out. When you get older, those marbles run out. The way you make them last is by learning psychology, learning how to tell a story, taking fewer bumps and making them mean something.

Fred: One guy you mentioned who’s a good friend of yours and a phenomenal trainer is Lance Storm. He’s already had a ton of prospects get signed to developmental deals.

Paul Lazenby: It’s not an accident, either. I consider Lance’s school the best wrestling school in the world, with no disrespect to any others. There are schools helmed by legends, but by virtue of Father Time having his way with them, they can’t get in the ring and show you stuff anymore. Lance is still young enough, and he’s taken care of himself, so he’s in the ring with the students every day. He’s one of the smartest minds in the business, one of the most athletically gifted guys ever to come into it and one of the most underrated guys ever. Anybody considering getting into the pro wrestling business needs to go train with Lance Storm. That will present your best possible opportunity to make it to the next level.

Fred: Completely agree. Folks, check out StormWrestling.com. Let’s get to some viewer questions. Who was somebody you looked up to before getting into wrestling, somebody who drew you in?

Paul Lazenby: One guy who really stood out was Gene LeBell. He was my hero from when I was a little kid, because aside from strength sports, everything I’ve done, whether it’s being a stuntman and an actor, a pro wrestler or a fighter, Gene LeBell is a legend in all of those things. When I was a real little kid, Tony Atlas and Rocky Johnson were my favorite tag team. I freaking loved those guys. And the Road Warriors, especially Animal, because I was coming out of powerlifting, and I loved that power wrestling style and that kind of physique. It looked like the physique of a guy you didn’t want to fight. In 2003, the first year I was really successful in the film industry, I had a few dollars in my pocket, and I made a dedicated trip to L.A. just so I could meet Judo Gene. That’s how highly I regard that guy.

Fred: You don’t get to do stunt work and acting and have the opportunities you have without a lot of hard work in addition to talent. What advice would you give people who want to succeed in entertainment, whether as a journalist, an actor or whatever?

Paul Lazenby: You have to decide how much you want it and what you’re willing to sacrifice. If you already have other obligations, you have to deal with them first. I’m not saying a guy with a wife and a kid depending on him should neglect them and chase his goal. You don’t have that luxury anymore, but if you want it bad enough, you can still make it work while taking care of your family. I slept on couches a lot until I was 30. When I was fighting in Japan, I was living in a buddy’s auto shop. I depended very heavily on the generosity of friends, because I was willing to live in poverty to chase my dream with no guarantee I was ever going to get there. Even after I moved to Vancouver, I was a 31-year-old guy with holes in his shoes, riding the bus and sharing a one-bedroom apartment with three or four other guys.

You can’t settle. I used to look around at my friends who had money, cars and nice places to live while I was living in the auto shop, but they worked in a factory. I did that when I needed a few bucks in my pocket, but to me those were always temporary jobs, stopgaps until I could get back on the road toward my goal. If you really want something, decide you want it, formulate a strategy to get it, follow through and don’t be swayed off course.

Fred: Excellent advice, definitely speaking from experience. Any upcoming projects you’re working on?

Paul Lazenby: I just finished a little bit of voice work for Disney. I don’t think I can say much more than that. I love the jobs I’ve got, but the one thing I’ve given up to have them is job security, so I never know what’s coming down the road. I believe Steve Austin has a couple of movies he’s going to be co-producing and starring in this summer, and I’m hoping to be a part of that. I’m confident I should be appearing in something soon. If you’re an “Arrow” fan, you saw me get shot just last week.

Fred: Awesome. Paul, thanks so much, man. You’ve been very candid. Best of luck in everything you’re doing.

Paul Lazenby: Thanks very much, man. I appreciate it. Invite me back anytime. I had a good time.