It’s damn exciting that without the biggest wrestling company in the world, I’m able to build a brand and be successful. It’s hard to stay on top of it. I had to hire a staff. It sounds so silly. I had to hire a kid to do social media work for me. It’s really cool.
I think TNA has been an excellent locker room. They have a good mentality, they have a good work ethic, and they try really hard. They’re obviously really passionate about wrestling, and there’s a huge amount of talent.
In high school, during lunchtime I would go in the room where the wrestling mats were and try different flips and different moves. Like windmills. I just started mixing martial arts with jazz and contemporary stuff and it would get mashed together and became my style.
I’ve done bingo halls and tents in front of 10 people with a cow mooing in the background. Doing that and then going to WrestleMania and the Superdome and wrestling in front of 80,000 people is night and day.
If you watch wrestling, you now know the hip-hop culture is being represented with wrestling. For the longest time, the cultures have almost been parallel.
Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.
Wrestling ultimately comes down to what happens when the bell rings, and it comes down to athleticism, storytelling, and characters – and what we’re doing in ‘Lucha Underground’ is the highest-quality wrestling out there.
I got to have about 15 minutes with Michelle Obama, and that was a big deal because you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m part of living history.’ You know? I definitely think she could take me in an arm wrestling match.
‘Lucha Underground’ really is the first episodic professional wrestling show. There are storylines in every promotion, but the way ‘Lucha Underground’ is crafted really is more of a TV show than your traditional wrestling show.
I was a big fan of amateur wrestling, and I loved it and dedicated my whole life to it for 20-something years, and it’s not really a glory-getting sport.
I couldn’t really get a grasp on wrestling at a young age. I knew it was what my parents did, and they fought people. It scared the crap out of me, so I thought, ‘No, I can’t do that. I’ll get beaten up!’
And you know what – and I don’t mean this in tongue in cheek way – but it’s like deja vu. When I walked in to WCW they were producing wrestling on a little teeny sound stage at Disney, okay? I’m walking into TNA and they’re producing wrestling in a little teeny sound stage at Universal.
There is no age limit to wrestling.
I don’t like to have gimmicks. I don’t like to have gadgets and stuff. I just like to go out there and entertain the fans by wrestling.
There is no dearth of talent in India, and it is going to be the force to reckon with in world wrestling in future.
I first started pro wrestling right after I got out of college at the University of Michigan, so I was in that frame of mind where I wanted to wrestle with my brother.
I was a big wrestling fan growing up. That was my thing. I had the action figures and the magazines and everything like that.
When I’m in bed with a woman, my favorite move is a wrestling hold called the lip lock.
It’s like fiction – the fact that somebody’s telling you a story about people who didn’t exist doesn’t make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing – but it’s happening in real space.
The wrestling is real, all the injuries are real, so much so that in no other sports, whether soccer or cricket or hockey, players get so many injuries as in WWE.
I watched professional wrestling at a very early age.
Triple H is a former bodybuilder. He’s all about bodies. He thought that Hulk Hogan was the greatest wrestler in the world. They think Ultimate Warrior was the greatest wrestler in the world because that’s what they’re attracted to, but he’s not really a wrestling fan like I grew up. I was a wrestling fan.
In the ’90s, there was a big wrestling boom in Switzerland with Hulk Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior, and all those guys. It was on television in Switzerland on a German TV station for a year or so. That’s when I saw wrestling for the first time. I was in the fifth or sixth grade and was a fan of it right away.
I know a lot of guys say that when they are younger – ‘I’m gonna get it, get my money, and get out’ – and then end up wrestling until they’re 50. But that could end up being me, too. I can tell you I want to get out early and end up eating my own words. All of a sudden, I’m 50, and I’m still walking out there.
It was by accident I got into wrestling. Somebody didn’t show up, and I just filled in.
I love to give the fans what they want. They’re what I miss most when I’m not wrestling. That time in the ring is like being in heaven for me.
I’ll do anything. That has proven problematic – you may remember my broken leg in a dirt bike accident – but that is also the ingredient that has allowed me to elevate myself in pro wrestling.
I had wrestling in my blood.
I had wanted to be a novelist for so long, but I didn’t have a story. That story came from the death of my father, and wrestling with how to help my mother. Writing it allowed me to work through my fears, frustrations and desires. I wanted control over the situation. And I wasn’t sure I would have any in real life.
You just remember back when you were watching as a kid and going, ‘Man, Sting’s so cool,’ and now I’m wrestling the guy. It’s breathtaking.
I do not like – in the middle of a wrestling arena where they’re serving alcohol and there are screaming fans including children in the front row – I don’t feel like that is the proper place to be exposed.
There’s probably as many rules of thumb to wrestling as anything in the world, and then there’s just as many exceptions to every one of those rules because somebody doesn’t fit that thumb.
Who would have ever thought that, within a couple months of getting into the WWE, that I’d be wrestling in the main event for the world championship? Then, nine months after getting here, actually being the world champion.
Wrestling has a funny way of regenerating itself, and I’m sure, in the past, a lot of people have asked questions about ‘Who’s going to replace Sami Zayn in the locker room?’ or ‘Who’s going to replace Kevin Owens in the locker room?’ People always step in.
To me, wrestling is just as cool as it ever was.
Any time someone stops me in the street and asks me for an autograph, pro wrestling gave me that.
ESPN has this problem with sports, it’s impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.
As they say, anything can happen in the World Wrestling Federation.
I always said when I was wrestling that you have tunnel vision because it’s all consuming. It’s hard to focus on anything else other than what you’re doing. When I stepped away from that, I wanted to have my hand in a lot of different pots.
This isn’t a competitive sport. Wrestling is not the NFL or the NHL. It’s not really sports. It’s entertainment. And in order to be entertaining, you have to create emotion. And you can’t create emotion by simply having a wrestling match.
Everyone out here in Los Angeles is trying to do whatever to break into films. It is a tough industry to get into, kind of like pro wrestling in a lot of respects when you think about it.
Olympic wrestling is like using an old Nokia phone; it’s fairly basic.
A double leg in MMA is completely different than what you would do in wrestling because the posture’s different. You’re standing upright as opposed to bent over; you’re slipping a punch as a opposed to grabbing a guy’s elbow and doing a traditional elbow pull or slide-by in wrestling.
I owe a lot to sports. My athletic ability made the transition from modeling to wrestling very easy.
I wasn’t aware of Green Arrow as a kid. My thing growing up was wrestling.
Pro wrestling has always been ingrained into American culture. It was one of the first things that was ever on television, so everybody watched it. Countless people tell me, ‘I got into wrestling because my grandfather watched it.’ It was always there.
A lot of people say, ‘What set the Attitude Era up?’ or, ‘What started the Attitude Era?’ To me – and I was allegedly the leader of it – sports entertainment, pro wrestling, whatever you want to call it has always had an attitude. So, why that particular generation got labeled, I don’t know.
The Hart Family is as good of a family as there ever was on the face of the earth, and they’ve got a lot of kids that were involved in the wrestling part of it.
You can have a wrestling idea, but you need to have these momentum-shifting moves. We had the Hulkamania movement, then it shifted to the beer-drinking, Stone Cold era, we reinvented the business with growing the black beard and becoming the bad guy, what’s that next level.
When I was in high school, I started getting into Japanese wrestling. For me to watch those matches, I had to order VHS tapes through catalogues, and these tapes were, like, $20 each.
I really didn’t know If I wanted to pursue the Olympics for wrestling. I didn’t know what to do with my life. So, I prayed about it. My manager called me a few weeks later and asked if I wanted to fight. I agreed to give it a shot, and I went out and got knocked out.
