The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase talked about the passing of his former colleague Virgil on the latest episode of his Everybody’s Got A Pod podcast.
Dedicating some time to discuss Mike Jones, the man behind the Virgil gimmick, DiBiase recounted how he met him in a WWE office when they were going to start the whole Million Dollar Man gimmick.
“Mike had this tremendous body and kept himself in shape and eventually that was his role,” DiBiase said. “He was the bodyguard. I would run my mouth and if somebody wanted to say something, I would back up and say, ‘Virgil, take over'”
DiBiase went to explain how they split on WWE TV and ended up having a match where Virgil eventually won the title.
“Mike was a great guy, a nice guy. To keep your body in that kind of shape takes a lot of discipline and he was very good at that. He was much better at doing that than I obviously was in terms of keeping his body in great shape,” DiBiase continued. “I just wish that he had more wrestling savvy. I don’t know how to put it any other way because if he could have really wrestled, we could have had a good run, but basically it was on and it was over pretty quick.”
DiBiase said that after it was over, they remained friends and as time went by, he used to see him at comic cons and always invited him to sit beside him if he was there, but after he heard Virgil talking bad about him with fans, he stopped doing that.
“The reason that I stopped doing it was things that Virgil had said to some fans that just wasn’t right. I’m looking back at it from where I am now. He never would say that to me, but he didn’t want anyone to know that he was struggling,” DiBiase said.
After he found out later through his caretaker, DiBiase said that it was mind-boggling to him that Virgil was living in those conditions and it’s really just a sad story.