I love tag team wrestling.
People look at me, and they have a certain perception, and they slap a label on me. The guy you saw in a wrestling ring is not who I am.
I know AEW will be welcomed by wrestling fans here in the U.S. and throughout the world who are ready for something new and authentic. AEW will work hard to deliver on that promise.
My goal in wrestling was always to take people on a journey to get a reaction and make people feel like they had seen something special. Thankfully, I get reminded of that every day.
I’ve always had an aptitude for wrestling. I can’t explain it – it’s like a gift. To this day, I don’t always know how or why I do certain things.
There are a lot of projects I want to do with producing and acting outside of wrestling.
One element of wrestling that I know what I grew up with we put a lot of emphasis towards was the takedown. But, you could win an Olympic championship and never score a takedown, and I don’t know if MMA fans are even aware of that.
Wrestling will be around forever. It’s been around thousands of years. It’s going to be around till the end of time.
I always felt like the wrestling business was better off with two viable mainstream promotions.
We’re changing the way people are going to look at wrestling, women’s wrestling, forever. Forever. And we’re at the start of it? That’s unbelievable. That’s unbelievable! Unbelievable.
I would definitely say the WWE superstars are underrated athletically. In fact, that’s one of the things that always attracted me to wrestling.
Wrestling encompasses hard work, dedication, sacrifice, and determination – there’s just nothing like it in any sport.
I’m very happy with my wrestling.
Sami Zayn and I have had a long history. Same goes for Adrian Neville. I might not get the chance to work with them now, but Seth Rollins, Cesaro and Daniel Bryan, all those guys, we all spent a lot of time together wrestling all over the place.
I’m having a really hard time with this retirement thing and not having wrestling.
My strength is my wrestling, but I don’t focus on it as much. I try to focus on a lot of different things like knees, elbows, submissions, and submission defense – just a lot of different things.
I think voters want somebody who understands their problems. You’re right that they don’t expect the president to fix everything. When he’s wrestling with Congress and Wall Street and the rest of the world, they hope he’ll be looking at things from their vantage point.
I would say Chael Sonnen would be a natural for professional wrestling.
I just had the absolute best luck in the world in terms of meeting The Young Bucks, and they might look like wild little rock stars who are irresponsible, but they are business geniuses. They set up the deal with Hot Topic, and they’re going to be the first 7-figure downside characters that New Japan Pro Wrestling has.
I started wrestling professionally, I did my first television match at 16, but I was wrestling at country fairs and national armories when I was 14.
There’s no question, I guarantee you, that you will see more NFL players getting into wrestling. They have the personality for it.
I had three intentions when I became a wrestler. One was to keep my integrity. Two was to give pro wrestling a more respectable image. And three was to be a role model to Jewish kids, who may not have thought they could do what I do.
Back in the day, when I was getting into the business, you could watch Pro Wrestling Noah. You could watch Ring Of Honor Wrestling, and a lot of people would say, ‘the best wrestling in the world is actually at Ring Of Honor.’
People don’t understand that, when I was at WCW, if I wasn’t wrestling that night, I was down at the Power Plant teaching. I was teaching people how to do stuff, but every time you teach someone, you learn more. The more you learn, the more you teach. The more you teach, the better you get.
I come from the sport of wrestling, where there’s nothing but respect on the mat.
I always said when I was younger that I want to wrestle until I’m 40 or even in the 50s as long as I can still keep doing the same style of wrestling that I do.
When I started wrestling, I hounded my dad to teach me. Eventually, he gave in, but he was careful to instill in me a respect for other wrestlers. He wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to hurt anyone.
Kurt Angle was amazing. He was the person who got me into pro wrestling. He found me when I was at the Olympic training center just wrestling, amateur wrestling.
I’m just glad when I was fighting for us to wrestle I would always have people tell me, ‘Gail, women’s wrestling is for the bathroom breaks, you know they really don’t want to see it.’ I would get discouraged a little bit but I was very adamant, so I’m glad that we girls proved them wrong.
My father-in-law and I always had great interest in Indian sport. At the Athens Olympics, watching the wrestling event, we started discussing the state of Indian sport – inadequate representation, lack of satisfactory results etc. We thought we should do something about it.
I have the best entrance in all of professional wrestling for crying out loud.
I used to be weak – as did all British fighters – with wrestling, because we don’t have high school wrestling or college wrestling here.
I had one of the best matches of my career with Matt Cross, and I’d never met him before, until that day. Wrestling will always be in my heart.
Football has an off-season. Basketball has an off-season. TV has an off-season. Everything has an off-season except wrestling.
I just love sneakers. When I first started wrestling, I was wrestling in boots, and I felt like I was trying too hard to play a wrestler. I just wanted to be myself. So when I started wearing sneakers, I felt so much better.
I have learned so much personally from wrestling, and it has really bled into my daily life.
Wrestling has always been a dominating force in UFC.
In many ways professional wrestling is a dance.
Making the City Of Joy gave me the best political education of my life. It became a wrestling match between an Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist, and a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day.
The best ones – Hulk Hogan believes in Hulkamania. It’s not a thing he’s selling here. It’s real. He knows it’s real because he goes to the Mall Of America and everybody goes insane, right? Wrestling is real. Those characters are real.
One day, when I’m unable to physically perform, would I want to pursue more of an acting career? Eh, maybe. But I think my home is with the WWE, being on the road and wrestling in front of a live audience.
I was 15 years old when I started wrestling full time, and I know what I had to go through to get here.
Judging from what looks like the popularity of this classic wrestling show is that the people like what they have grown to know and love here in Memphis.
Wrestling is the first reality show. With a reality show, you never what is real and what is not.
I’ve been involved in professional wrestling since 2000 when I started training and there hasn’t been one day that I haven’t put everything into it.
Sitting on the sidelines is so painful because it’s very difficult for me to watch wrestling and not be a participant in the ring, since that’s just where I belong.
Once you catch that fever of wrestling, you really can’t get it out.
Cornish wrestling was very different from that in Devon – it was less brutal, as no kicking was allowed.
The reality is that a lot of these bad things that happen in the wrestling business, 90 percent are because of certain people’s egos. There’s no question about that.
I quit wrestling in 2006 because I just got lost. My mom didn’t want me wrestling. I was wondering if I was going to make it in wrestling; I got injured in a match. I was 19. I was away from home, living in Florida, and I just got lost. I couldn’t face it, so I stepped away.
We take pride in making our Knockouts Division about wrestling, not about looking pretty.
One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.
My initial goal was not really cater to the hardcore wrestling fans or the smarter wrestling fans. It was to cater to casual wrestling fans.
‘Lucha Underground’ is the evolution of wrestling. It’s high-style, high-flying, fast-paced hybrid style wrestling, and we’re actually paying homage to lucha libre for the first time.
You go from Olympic wrestling into pro wrestling, and it’s a very difficult transition, but if you make it, you can earn a great living while at the same time giving amateur wrestling a lot of exposure by being on TV every week. Fans know where you came from.
I was always a wrestling fan, and being an Arab kid who grew up in Canada, there was no representation for people like me.
I’d been told countless times, even before I got into pro wrestling, that I would never amount to anything and that I’d never achieve this dream.
Wrestling has to be more aggressive. It has to be bigger; it has to translate to the back of a football stadium. With acting, when that camera is up close, they can see your nose hairs twitch, and you have to pull back everything for it not to look clownish. There is that different mindset.
I think if I’d never had found pro wrestling, I’d be a blue collar guy, working a 9-to-5 job.
