In honor of the untimely end of Talking Smack, which may or may not have had the plug pulled on it by Vince McMahon himself, we bring you The Miz telling the story of the greatest promo in the history of the show.
It's up there at the top of the page, in case you don't remember it all that well. It's still amazing.
It happened on August 23rd of last year, but it almost didn't happen at all. The Miz was upset about the Intercontinental Title holder being left off of SmackDown that night, and he wanted to let the world know about it. He didn't know what was going to happen exactly, and in the middle of talking he was sure that he was going to get punched in the nose, but he knew he had to say something. The rest, as they say, is history.
Speaking on The Hard Hidz podcast last weekend before the news of Talking Smack's cancellation, The Miz told the story:
"I was pissed. I was angry. And the main reason I was angry, was that day, I get to the building and I'm Intercontinental Champion. As Intercontinental Champion, I was doing nothing.
I was like, 'I have this title, it's the title I remember as a kid thinking, 'God, I love this title.' I always wanted to be that guy. Everybody always says, 'I'm going to make this title relevant again,' 'I'm going to make it prestigious,' and everybody's always chomping their gums doing that and it always seems like whoever was Intercontinental Champion would be losing every single match until the Intercontinental Championship match and win. I didn't want to be that Superstar. I didn't want to be that guy.
So I get to the building and they tell me, 'Yeah, you're not needed today on the show.'
I'm like, 'Excuse me? I'm the Intercontinental Champion.'
'Sorry, yeah, we're debuting the new Tag Team titles and we're debuting the new Women's title, so we kind of don't have enough room for the Intercontinental title.'
And I went, 'Huh. You're telling me the rich history of this title, all the Superstars that held this title before me are just irrelevant because we have two new titles you need to put in there?'
And so, I go, 'Put me on Talking Smack tonight.'
And they go, 'Why?'
I go, 'Everything I'm going to unleash it on Daniel. He's the General Manager. He's the person to get things done, right? Well, he's going to need to get things done.'"
"We went in there and I had no idea he was going to walk away. I was actually planning on him hitting me, like, 'When is he going to hit me? When is he going to hit me?' And I knew I couldn't hit him back. But I was just so angry and it got the attention it needed and I succeeded at doing what I wanted to do, which was making the title mean something."
In a bittersweet touch of irony, The Miz told the podcast hosts how much he enjoyed being on Talking Smack.
"It's great, right? Yeah, I love it. I love Talking Smack. I though they do an incredible job with it and they allow the Superstars to really shine, Superstars you don't really get to see."
This is an echo of the Tweet he sent out after news broke that the show was being taken off the weekly schedule.
RIP Talking Smack. You were too beautiful for this world.
You can listen to the entire interview with The Miz at this link.
