By James Caldwell, PWTorch.com assistant editor

"Cowboy" Bill Watts will be making his first trip to WrestleMania when he's inducted into the Hall of Fame this year. Watts says he's looking forward to the event to re-connect with the business after he poured most of his life into his work.

"This will be the first Wrestlemania I have been to, so I will be there as a spectator, but I will also have a very special position to watch it, feel it, and see it," Watts told Slam Wrestling in an interview. "It reconnects you for a moment to a business that you put a lot of your life in."

One of the reasons why Watts has not been to WrestleMania is because of the rivalry between Watts and Vince McMahon. Watts was running the Mid-South territory 25 years ago when McMahon took the WWE product national with the first WrestleMania.

He says he doesn't believe in McMahon's philosophy on presenting wrestling, but he respects him for having a vision and long-term plan.

"Vince has a different philosophy than I have and Vince's is the controlling one because he educated the public and that is all they really know, except for the aficionados of the sport who've got old tapes," Watts said. "He is a genius, a workaholic, and he has a long-range vision."

Watts will be inducted into the Hall by Smackdown announcer Jim Ross, who got his start in the wrestling business working for Watts.

"I had the choice of who would do the induction speech," Watts said. "Jim would be the only one that I could put there because of all of the things he and I went through together."

Watts will be joined by the Von Erich family in the 2009 Hall of Fame class. Watts says the tragic deaths of each Von Erich son except for Kevin shows how damaging the drug culture in pro wrestling became.

"That family is one of the all-time great tragedies in our business. It showed things were coming into our culture that was so deceptive in the substance abuse area," Watts said. "They were wonderful kids -- David and Kerry and Mike. I didn't know Chris well. Fritz von Erich and their mother Doris was a phenomenal lady. We have lost so many great ones to this subtle deadly thing called substance abuse."

Link: Bill Watts interview on Slam Wrestling.

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