Brian James relives the days of the Voodoo Kin Mafia and talks about his real-life animosity toward Shawn Michaels and Triple H during a turbulent time of his life.
The New Age Outlaws are one of the most successful tag teams of WWE’s Attitude Era and they were a part of a larger D-Generation X stable during the height of WWE's popularity in the late-1990s.
Eventually, both Road Dogg and Billy Gunn ended up in TNA Wrestling during the mid-2000s and following a brief period of time where they were James Gang, they wound up renaming themselves to the Voodoo Kin Mafia, specifically said they could have the same initials as Vincent Kennedy McMahon.
Speaking on the latest episode of the Oh... You Didn't Know podcast, Road Dogg explains how he chose that name by having one of his children look up words that started with the letter V on the internet.
“It was always going to be V.K.M,” he began. “Me and one of my children — I sat in my recliner and one of my children sat on the computer and I said, ‘Look up all the words that start with V.’ Then I thought like, ‘Voodoo is cool.’ Then I thought, ‘Well Voodoo Kin is like — if he's gonna be Kip James, like, we're not really ‘kin’ so it's like Kabuki kin. Okay, good. Voodoo Kin, okay.’ Then, the ‘mafia’ just seemed to fit. So we came up with Voodoo Kin Mafia, I came up with that, and Russo liked it.
“Of course, down the road, we got Roxxi Laveaux that played off of the Madame Laveau in New Orleans and all that,” he continued. “So, yeah, it was all over the place and because I really didn't know what we were doing, you know, from a character standpoint, it wasn't, it wasn't something that we could take and evolve. It was either gonna end drastically or nothing…. We tried to get their attention, and we tried hard.”
A large part of that storyline was trying to antagonize, the recently reunited on WWE television, Shawn Michaels and Triple H. Road Dogg, who has since made peace with both men and worked with them for many years in NXT, is very candid about a lot of that animosity being a byproduct of his drug addiction.
“I want to be very clear,” said Road Dogg. “It pissed off a couple of guys that were in active addiction. It was a couple of guys whose egos got out of control. We thought we were bigger than the business. We thought, ‘How dare they fire us?’ Look, once you come out of that fog that is drug addiction, and you kind of clear your mind and start thinking about your part in all this. Like, what did I do? I did it all. They didn't do anything. I did it all and believe the same way. So we've grown up, you know what I mean? We realize at the time, that those feelings were real. I would have fought either one of them if they'd showed up somewhere… I would have fought them at the time. Like now. I think about that and go like ‘Man, what a piece of crap I am.’”
Ultimately, once all the fences were mended, the full D-Generation X stable, including Chyna, was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2019.
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