Long before Glenn Jacobs was Kane, he was evil dentist Isaac Yankem DDS.
The evil dentist was the start of his WWE career, and if you think it’s ridiculous, so does Jacobs. Jacobs was a guest on Taking You To School, a podcast from Tom Prichard and the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling, where he had a chance to talk about it candidly. The WWE Legend revealed that he hated the gimmick from the get go and it really affected his attitude in the WWE at the time. Eventually, it took The Undertaker pulling him aside to help him improve his attitude and get him on track.
“I’ll never forget, I went into J.J. Dillon’s office. Vince came in and we were talking and he pulled out the Isaac Yankem thing for me. I was literally deflated but not trying to show how deflated I was. I was trying to figure out how I was going to make this thing work and realizing I didn’t like it from the beginning and I wasn’t going to be able to make it work. It probably isn’t good when you make that decision when it is presented to you. A lot of the failure of that character is really due to me and the fact that I just couldn’t get into it. Nevertheless, as things progressed, and I did not have the best of attitudes at times, I remember one day Mark Calloway, The Undertaker, took me aside and was telling me that I better basically get myself in gear because if I didn’t, I wasn’t going to have a job there very long. He said he liked me and Vince liked me and all that stuff, but I had to prove that I belong. That’s when I decided really, that yea, I didn’t necessarily have what I wanted, but if I kept moping around, I was never going to get what I wanted. So, I had to do the best with what I had and that’s what I tried to do. Even though initially it was not my dream character by any stretch of the imagination, it allowed me to get my foot into the door and give myself another chance.”
While Jacobs still had to endure a stint as the Fake Diesel, eventually he found his footing and became The Big Red Machine and had the best run of his WWE career. Who knows, though? Maybe had he been enthusiastic about the gimmick, we would be talking about how Jacobs had a World Title run as Yankem.
h/t to Wrestling News for the quote
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