Jack Swagger and his fake on-screen father, Bunkhouse Buck. (WWE)
Bunkhouse Buck recalls the time he was asked to play Jack Swagger Sr on WWE SmackDown and take a tombstone and chokeslam from Kane
Jack Swagger was remembered for a lot of things during his time at WWE– his WWE heavyweight championship reign and his ‘We, The People’ phrase.
But there was another rare and memorable incident where WWE got in someone else to play as the fake father of a superstar.
The promotion got in James ‘Jimmy’ Golden, who made his name in the 70s and 80s and wrestled as ‘Bunkhouse Buck’ at WCW in the 1990s, to play as Jack Swagger’s dad.
And Buck himself recalled that situation when he was on Hannibal TV earlier this week. He revealed it was because of his connections with former WWE wrestler, Michael Hayes.
“Michael Hayes. I knew Michael Hayes when he first got in the business. Michael Hayes and Terry Gordy. I saw Michael, he was already up in WWE. He was a booker/road agent up there. I saw him at the Gulf Coast wrestling reunion 6 months before that deal…. [and I said] I want to do the deal with Swagger.”
During those two episodes that he featured on, one in July 2010 and one in September later that year, he was first hit with a tombstone piledriver by Kane, and then attacked by MCP- both when his ‘son’ abandoned him in the ring.
“He put my name in the hat for taking the tombstone from Kane. Some lady called me up- secretory from WWE and she asked me that ‘your name is brought up for the tombstone’. So I ended up walking down to the ring with Jack Swagger as his dad, where we told a big fat lie about how we were fishing and stuff when he was somewhere. So I ended up taking the chokeslam. My boy ran out on me, he left me!”
Swagger spent a lot of years in WWE and after a small tussle with WWE over the legalities of his contract, was released in March 2017.
He then tried his luck with Lucha Underground, Major League Wrestling, and various other Independent circuits before finally signing with AEW. He even took a shot at MMA, fighting 4 times in Bellator in the heavyweight division where he garnered a record of 3-0-1.
He then signed with Tony Khan’s promotion in late 2019 where he currently fights under the name ‘Jake Hager”.
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