I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a wrestling fan say they don’t have enough time to watch ‘Raw.’ Maybe it’s less about not having the time to watch a three-hour show, but it’s more about the time and the patience. You can usually sum up your three-hour ‘Monday Night Raw’ in a five-minute conversation.
Acting is something I always wanted to try after wrestling, and I felt like this was a perfect fit.
Nothing is more theater-based than wrestling. It’s Greek-tragedy-level theater.
It’s interesting: I never got stressed before wrestling matches. I always felt completely confident that I had done everything I could do, all my mental preparations when I sat down and envisioned the match, so I never felt stressed.
There’s no drama like wrestling.
I like a women who’s got some balls, some strength. As long as I can beat her at arm wrestling, that’s fine.
The wrestling world is unique. There are things that happened, and there are things that didn’t happen, but in wrestling, you just say they all happened. Some of it’s fun to let stay out there – it adds to the mystique and wrestling lore.
Because of my wrestling background, nothing a director can throw at me on a set can faze me.
Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.
The key to WWE’s success and longevity is that they are, as modern and as relevant as the company may be in modern social media and platforms and contemporary distribution, the company is still built around old-school promotion. Who are these two fighters? Why are they wrestling? And why should I pay to see it?
There is nothing I love more than pro wrestling, so getting to do that all over the globe with some of the best out there is my personal heaven.
I like wrestling 30 minutes a night.
A lot of people, especially performers in wrestling, feel that winning the title is the only statistic that matters, but it’s always about the journey. If you don’t have the people behind you, believing in you, and the start of a new chapter after winning the title, then you don’t have anything.
If the fans have an opinion, the wrestling universe has to listen.
College, for me, was more about wrestling than actually going to classes.
When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the regional scene. I read ‘Pro Wrestling Illustrated,’ and I watched Portland Wrestling and everything I could.
There is an art to wrestling, and there is a need to do it right. Cody Rhodes exemplifies all the right things.
The WWE also embraced more of a reality-based approach to wrestling a year or two after I established it. I knew, deep down inside, were it came from. The WWE did it better than I did, and they’re still here, and I’m not, but nonetheless – I knew where it came from.
I am a huge wrestling fan. I would say The Rock is my favorite person to watch for obvious reasons.
Wrestling is a team sport, and an individual sport all rolled into one.
There’s no casual wrestling fan anymore.
I would say wrestling gives you confidence. It gives you strength. It helps you learn discipline, and to know that you have to love the process and respect the process, and if you just keep going, you can accomplish anything.
I am into professional wrestling. Only Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling can qualify in Olympics. I chose professional wrestling for fame and limelight and good money.
Due to the injuries that I will have for the rest of my life, it is physically impossible for me to consider any career in wrestling.
When I was in England, I did a lot of wrestling and moves. Over here, they were like, ‘You don’t need to do that much. Save your body. Become an entertainer rather than a wrestler.’ And I wasn’t used to wrestling on TV and in front of huge crowds, so it was a big adjustment.
To know you’re truly alive in wrestling, you have to constantly challenge yourself. You constantly have to do things that you’re unsure you can do.
I have always loved wrestling and grew up watching it – my earliest memories include watching Hulk Hogan.
I’m in professional wrestling, which is what I do for a living. I coordinate stunts. I memorize them.
Wrestling in Japan, obviously, the fans are a little bit different – very quiet, very respectful in New Japan – but here in the WWE, these fans are going nuts.
To portray something that you’re really not, it’s like a little escape, and I love to act and to be dramatic. I feel like the wrestling ring in WWE is the perfect platform to do that. It’s totally acceptable.
In ‘The Third Hotel,’ my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She’s trying to make sense of her husband’s death, how someone’s life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.
I was six years old watching wrestling on TV. I was eight years old watching Ultimate Warrior run to the ring at WrestleMania. I was eighteen years old starting out on a journey in the U.K. wanting to be a professional wrestler.
Vince Russo knows about as much about wrestling as Eric Bischoff does.
Preparation is a mentality… With wrestling being my background, I’ve always learned to overwork, overwork. Work, work, work, work. It’s not always the talented that wins, but it’s the one who puts in the most preparation and thought into things.
I’m pretty interested in documentary film, and I’d watch almost anything. At some point, I stumbled upon ‘shoot interviews’ and found out that wrestlers were now talking openly about things that were going on in wrestling that we as viewers were not privy to. This fascinated me.
In the wrestling world, we say the Judo guys are just the leftover wrestlers that couldn’t make the wrestling team.
Most people don’t know that wrestling came out of the circus.
I played all sports when I was young. I was into wrestling, basketball, baseball, football, and I ran track. But wrestling was my main sport because there was no criterion height-wise.
In Mexico, wrestling is part of the cultural fabric. The guys wear masks and they are real-life superheroes.
Wrestling is a lot like any other workplace. You don’t really talk religion or politics. But we are all independent contractors, so we pay our taxes quarterly. And we talk about taxes.
That’s what I love about my faith and Christianity. It’s the polar opposite of darn near everything I experienced in the wrestling business. I still love the business, and I’m thankful for everything that it’s provided, but the idea that it deals in the truth is the furthest thing from reality.
I started wrestling when I was 15 years old, and back when I was world champion, I was wrestling 7 nights a week.
I think I had a really hard-working and authentic wrestling style, so people liked the way I was – that I was a ‘no-quit’ kind of wrestler – and I was very realistic and credible in my style.
If you’ve never stepped in a wrestling ring, and you’re with me, we can still have an excellent wrestling match, because that’s how good I believe I am.
It’s not for everybody, and some of the toughest people I’ve ever met in my lifetime, I met in the wrestling ring.
I’ve been wrestling for many years; I’ve accomplished a lot – but I take pride in being genuine, honest, and down-to-earth. Those are the qualities I really respect about myself, so I’m really pleased when I see that the energy that I want to exude is well received.
I’m good friends with The Rock, and I talk to him all the time. And he says that, even though his movie career has taken off, he misses the instant gratification of wrestling, and the live crowds, and I could see being that way myself.
There’s a misconception about wrestling, that it’s really fake, but it’s real, and you can really get hurt, even though a lot of it is performative.
What I loved about wrestling was just being foolish, so I studied clown. I studied clown. I studied the art of clown. I actually did my thesis on clown.
I could have been Mr. America if I wanted to be, but I chose wrestling. I could have played pro-football, but I chose wrestling.
Wrestling and kickboxing, like martial arts, combine a handful of skills. They’re really an art form.
My favorite part of working with ‘Lucha Underground’ is learning more Lucha, combining that with my WWE psychology, and taking wrestling to a place we’ve never seen before in the evolution of wrestling.
The fans are the ones that really tell the tale, and I think they speak very loudly about where I stand in pro wrestling. I don’t think that there are too many people who would tell you that I don’t deserve to be there.
I think President Obama is not progressive. And I know a lot of people hate to hear that; it breaks their heart. But that’s the reality. It’s not in his nature. His nature is pro-establishment. If he had a wrestling nickname, it would be The Establishment.
I got a bad conduct discharge, was at home for a few months in late ’99, and basically said, ‘Dad, I want to give wrestling a shot. I sure as hell don’t wanna go to college, and the Marine Corps wasn’t for me. And I need to make some money, so let’s see if I can do it.’
When I was a kid, I wrestled my high school amateur wrestling in junior year.
Wrestling and boxing is like Ping-Pong and rugby. There’s no connection.
I’m not, like, an English speaker, so I have confidence in my wrestling skills, also, like, body language, hand gestures, facial expressions. I put all of my emotion in my wrestling.
