Matt Cardona Details The Origins Of ‘The Big O’ And How New Kids On The Block Brought Them Together
IF YOU CANT HANDLE THE HEAT, THEN GET THE HELL OUTTA HIS O-ZONE!!
On this week’s episode of MC! True Long Island Story, Matt Cardona and Mark Sterling looked back on introducing “The Big O” to the original Z!TLIS YouTube series. As Cardona explained it, Big O and Iced Z first bonded over NKOTB, and they hit it off from there.
“He’s somebody who went to my gym, Gold’s Gym, Fillmore. He was that loud, annoying obnoxius guy, throwing around the weights, talking so loud, slamming the weights, so effing annoying, right? And I will never forget the day I was doing standing calf raises and I don’t know if I had headphones in or what,” Cardona said, “but he put his headphones in my ear. So I don’t know if he took mine out and put his in or what, but it was New Kids on The Block, I think ‘Summertime.’ And I knew right away, ‘Oh, this guy’s great.’ Like as obnoxious as he is, I loved it. And then we started hanging out for real.”
“I think once the headphones went in the ear, that was the icebreaker,” Cardona explained. “He was not a wrestler then. Like I said, I knew I needed other characters and I knew this guy’s perfect.”
“Now, did I think he was going to be my bodyguard in WWE? Like, I would have loved for that eventually, but listen,” Cardona explained, “I didn’t have this master plan that he was gonna get signed or anything like that, right? I just knew he was a great addition to the show and a great element, a great character and he was. I gave him the jist of what I wanted. The Big O thing was him, I just needed to take what he was already doing, like ‘why was he doing this,’ and apply it to wrestling. So I gave him a little jist like, ‘Hey, you’re going to be my bodyguard, my muscle. Here ya go,’ And he always was like—besides being late all the time—he was always like prepared for it and always knocked it out of the park.”
Cardona said The Big O nailed what he was looking for, adding that he looked like the guys the ‘Woo Woo Woo’ gimmick was based on. “These loud, obnoxious, ‘sunglasses inside’ Long Island douchebags,” Cardona described them as. “So to bring one with me as a heater, as muscle it just kind of all made sense.”
Cardona said he hasn’t seen Big O in a while, but he did try getting him on the show for this episode. Sterling said that he had his own Big O story and teased airing a related video once they got him on the show, followed by Cardona’s story about the last time they actually saw each other.
“If anyone knows where the Nautical Mile is in Freeport, New York, I was crossing the street, this is like, it’s out of a movie,” Cardona explained, “he was driving by in a convertible, honked the horn and just gave me the finger, and I haven’t seen him since! It was like five years ago.”
If you use any part of this transcript, credit @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone and link back