All those guys wanna be us. All the fighters wanna be in professional wrestling; I don’t care what they say.
While wrestling in college as a junior, it came to a point where wrestling just wasn’t enough for me anymore. I love wrestling, but I felt like I was missing something, and so the striking part about MMA, the boxing and kickboxing, was what got me really interested in MMA.
Out of wrestling came a lot of opportunities.
Wrestling is a universal language. The moves, the facial expressions, most people understand.
I do find myself drawn more to pieces that I feel are wrestling with the way that we’re living now, what we’re all going through.
Think about it – pro wrestling as an Olympic sport would be pretty cool. Look at figure skating or gymnastics – what is it? It’s a choreographed performance that is judged.
I think it’s hard to differentiate between your wrestling character and your real character – you kind of end up being both. I’ve always been my wrestling character in and out of the ring and in and out of the dressing room, and I was always really respected in the dressing room by the other wrestlers.
My exit strategy from pro wrestling wasn’t carved in stone. I retired because of a few neck issues, some neurological issues.
I trained at All Pro Wrestling in the U.S. Later, I signed up with the New Japan Pro Wrestling. Then WWE noticed me.
Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me. Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.
My wife asks me daily to leave wrestling, but I will not leave my favourite sport. I will train others.
Every night you go out there, you get hurt. It’s really the easiest way to say it. People can describe wrestling however they want to, but your body is flesh and bone, and it’s not meant to be slammed on wood and steel.
Early, when I first started wrestling, I wanted to be a combination of Sting and the Ultimate Warrior: The Ultimate Warrior’s craziness and weird personality and Sting’s coolness and the way he carried himself to the ring. But then later on, when it came to physicality and athleticism, Shawn Michaels topped the cake.
I’ve been pushing and training for Lucha Underground and AAA, as well as parkour and stunt training for my movie, and I’ve blended those styles together for my wrestling.
There are some times I’m really busy and other times I’m not, but I prefer to be really busy because I generally don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not wrestling or on the road.
Professional wrestling, the WWE, and being in the Hall of Fame represent such a large part of Hulk’s life, as does his connection to the audience.
If you go to an ATM for a hundred dollars and it keeps spitting twenties, when would you walk away? When it wasn’t spitting twenties no more. As long as you can take the money out, you’d stay there. That’s what the wrestling business is like.
Wrestling was very good to me.
In 1985, if you were a wrestling fan, you were into Hogan; that’s just the way it was.
Going through secondary school in Ireland, everyone’s like, ‘What are you gonna do when you finish school? Go to college? Study business? Study electronics?’ I was like, ‘Well I kinda love wrestling, so I don’t see why I should want to study anything else except wrestling.’ For me, it was a no brainer.
Wrestling is a small, intimate sport.
The NXT women are changing the way women’s wrestling is viewed. It’s an inspiration to be able to watch.
From wrestling to my hip-hop thing, I’ve just been able to do so much and meet so many crazy characters.
To me, the best part of coming up in that, kind of the last era before it went that way with the FCWs or NXTs, kind of the farm system, is that, you know, wrestling Jimmy Valiant in front of 10 people in Cleveland. We didn’t touch. I think we did two things, but we were out there for 20 minutes.
I have no problem with Brock Lesnar being a part-timer, because he’s earned that spot. He’s a multiple time champion in WWE, a former UFC Champion, NCAA amateur wrestling champion, so his accolades speak for themselves.
Wrestling really is kind of the highest form of theater.
I know if you get mad, and in a world with all the competitors I’ve been around in my life, either from fighting or wrestling or other sports, you have to learn to breathe.
I think most people, most rational people, most people that I would feel comfortable sitting in a room with, understand that wrestling is scripted entertainment. But they don’t want you to remind them of that.
Sitting front row with my little brother, my older brother, and my dad’s wife at the time – seeing 80,000 people at the Citrus Bowl emotionally pouring their hearts out watching my dad retire – I didn’t even grasp what he meant to the industry. I didn’t even fully grasp it until I started wrestling myself.
I’m not interested in being famous. I’m interested in doing my job and doing it well, and that’s wrestling, and that’s what I love.
There’s probably a hundred more submission holds in the WWE because of me training to bring in those submissions so people could look at them a legitimize them for pro wrestling. You look at it before I was there and after I was there: it’s different matches.
I think having the King of the Ring on television can only help with the importance of matches and help wrestling.
Even if people that I was in love with – even if Bobby Fulton inherited a billion dollars and opened All Elite Wrestling, I was never going to be the manager of The Revival on a weekly television basis ever because that would require me being on the road on a weekly basis.
I’m wrestling almost every single day of the week. I’m fighting for so much more. I’m trying to capture a life here, a future. I’m trying to put my kid in college. There are so many things I’m doing. I’m representing the biggest wrestling family on earth.
I never trained in pro wrestling with The Sheik, but I did amateur wrestling with pro wrestlers in my dad’s basement.
I’m from a wrestling family, a wrestling dynasty. And as biased as that may be, I firmly believe I am from the greatest wrestling family of all time.
Amateur wrestling, you can go by instinct. Pro wrestling, you have to memorize, and you have to go by what moves you said you were going to do. Sometimes you have to feel the crowd and do the moves at the right time and know the timing and tell a good story.
When I was four or five, I had an older brother who got paralyzed from the neck down in junior high school. Some kid did a wrestling fall on him and hit his spine. We had to take care of him. I went from being the baby to not really being the baby anymore.
Bret and I were friends, but we were young, and we made bad decisions. We couldn’t see outside the wrestling business. It was the end-all, be-all. You were in that box constantly, so that’s all you thought about. It affects your decision-making.
When I started wrestling, I never wanted to go to WWE. It was the Japanese life for me.
No one iced their body in professional wrestling before me. I did it because I was 35, 36, 37. I was already what would have been considered an old timer.
Wrestling is like improv. You have to feel and sense what the other person is going to do next and respond faster than they do.
I certainly would have regretted not getting into wrestling. It’s been very lucrative for me and I’ve been fortunate to get into it and make money and not do anything stupid where I invested in something that collapsed.
Dos Anjos, his wrestling and grappling is supposed to be good, but I feel my Jiu Jitsu, wrestling and striking is way better. I’m better than him all across the board.
I found out in pro wrestling that it works better if you just try and be yourself versus working on something you’re not, so I’m me, and maybe it’s magnified a bit, but it’s easier just being me.
I’ve been watching wrestling since I was three years old.
In wrestling, there is no retreat. No way to slow things down. In wrestling, you advance and advance, and being tired is just a lie to make the other guy think he can relax. It’s so hard – harder than anything I’ve ever done.
I was a referee in TCW in Carrollton, Georgia, doing Turnbuckle Championship Wrestling, and it was 1,000 degrees in there, and it was completely sold out every Friday that we ran it. That was my dad’s independent promotion.
When I was Cedrick Von Haussen, the champion of Liechtenstein, I was only 18 years old. I was super, duper young. I started traveling around for wrestling when I was 16, so I had only been wrestling a few years at that point.
I’m not Ken Shamrock the MMA World Champion No Holds Barred fighter. I’m Ken Shamrock, The World’s Most Dangerous Man. Professional wrestling and MMA champion.
In my mind, I do have a lot higher wrestling than Woodley. We’ve wrestled before, and it wasn’t competitive, and that’s honest.
My two main trainers were John Dahmer and DJ Hyde. DJ Hyde mainly taught me how to be tough: I mean, the beatings that he used to give the students as far as wrestling initiations go were as tough as they come, and I’m thankful for it.
Anytime you do anything with Ric Flair, it’s kind of a strange and different atmosphere until you know that’s what he’s going to do, and it couldn’t be any better. Besides myself, he was probably the next in line as it pertains to credibility in the wrestling world.
