Top 75 Jake Hager Quotes

I believe competition makes everyone better.

Any time you can get Glenn Beck crying it’s a good thing.

When you get to go out and perform on a great pro wrestling show, it’s awesome. It’s hard not to enjoy it.

I grew up with two cousins from North Dakota who were junior national champions. They’re a lot older than me and I looked up to them as my older brothers.

Let’s come together, let the people stop fighting each other, but let them fight in the octagon.

I relate everything to amateur wrestling, including the way I watch basketball and the way I watch football. My brain thinks as an amateur wrestler. That’s who I am.

When I was leaving college, getting ready to graduate with a degree in finance, I had job interviews for months and months – and nothing really was moving like a real opportunity. Meanwhile, a lot of my wrestling teammates at Oklahoma had started getting into MMA training.

Your natural instinct when people are throwing punches at you is to back up. That just makes it more dangerous for you. You’ll get hurt that way. You’ve got to teach yourself to go forward, move your feet and move your head. I’m not going to lie, that was tough for me to learn.

I like to think of pro wrestling as an art, so we’re artists.

When I look in the mirror, I’m a husband and a father first.

Pro wrestling fans love surprises, so let’s surprise them, and not just give them the old stuff.

I am Jack Swagger. My background, it’s there for the world to see, and you look at MMA today, you look at boxing today, you look at professional kickboxing today, you need that entertainment value. You want people to relate to you as a character, as a personality. Honestly, that’s what they’re going to remember.

Big risk means big reward. I want that.

I’m lanky and goofy.

I’m making MMA great again for pro wrestlers.

I want people to say that Jack Swagger/Jake Hager is a world champion in MMA and in pro wrestling.

If people want to compare me to Brock Lesnar – there’s worse people to compare me to.

People want to see fighters who can put on a little show and then back it up. Hopefully I can do both of those things.

From the beginning, make no mistakes, I’m a prizefighter and doing this for the money. Money first. And then championships.

If I can make someone tap out with my ankle lock it would be Sasha Banks.

Going through life is always scary doing something new, at the same time it is very exciting.

Whether you speak English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, everybody can speak wrestling and it’s really cool to go to different cultures and societies and see how the littlest things we do as performers influence the biggest things.

Cesaro should be world champ. I’m not afraid to say it, Cesaro is my favorite wrestler.

To be able to change from being essentially a bad guy into a really hot babyface overnight is very hard to do.

All Elite Wrestling completely changes the entire landscape of pro wrestling.

I want to grow my brand and help wrestling continue to grow, too.

Zeb Colter is unbelievable, he is priceless.

I’ve been wrestling since I was 4 years old, so I have over 30 years in some form of wrestling, non-stop in my life. For me, it’s who I am.

Coming to WWE, where they treat the talent a certain way, I really gravitated toward Bellator because you saw the trend in fighters wanting to go over there because they were getting better deals and getting more freedom with it.

AEW loves what I’m doing with Bellator and Bellator loves what I’m doing with AEW.

Toward the end of my career with WWE, I found myself in a comfort zone. Looking back at it now with a little more perspective, it was killing me.

I’ve been a competitor all my life.

For me, the wins and losses in pro wrestling never mattered. The thing that matters is the time on television to tell that story. If you have a two-segment match on television, whether you win or lose, both people’s brands win with a great match.

I think ‘We the People’ is an example of why pro wrestling is so cool because it was a storyline that started out very political and very controversial and very nasty. It really evolved into a movement of the people, not just American people, but people everywhere.

I have a lot of experience with the lights on bright – a lot of people watching and performing on live television.

In addition to being gifted athletically and being the strongest guy in the room, Cesaro is very smart upstairs. He can go in the back and wrestle a match out in his head, then he’ll add his Cesaro-isms in the ring to really make the match special. He knows exactly where to put things and make a match explosive.

I think Bellator is the place for me to hone my craft and they have a great selection of heavyweights here. They put on a great card every time so it’s really exciting to be a part of that.

Really, my family is my strength and I realize that and I am leaning on it.

I love being a dad.

I was never the best athlete, but I knew how to be coached and I knew how to work hard at it.

Once you’re an amateur wrestler, you’re always an amateur wrestler.

All I want to do is go out there and win. That’s all that is important to me.

I feel like being a professional wrestling has definitely made me a better MMA fighter.

As far as the work in the ring, it’s so much technique and spacing and timing, and that’s what amateur wrestling is, too. So I felt like I learned very fast and a lot of things came naturally for me.

Anyone that holds a championship you are on a list of a very few people that have had that special honor, and it is really incredible to say that no matter what you say about my wrestling career I was a World Heavyweight Champion and you can’t take that away from me.

If you speak pro wrestling or MMA, you almost speak any language.

Your character has to be an extension of yourself, and you got to be comfortable in it. Otherwise, people are going to see right through it. They’re going to see that you’re acting or that you’re playing wrestling.

The nerves with WWE performance is more the live television angles because we have time limits and have storylines we want to get through in that time. You’re going to forget a lot about the spots.

I’ve heard that I’m a wrestler and not a real fighter, but I have nothing to prove to anybody.

If I just keep my head down and I keep working hard, that’s just what I do.

I love being a family man.

In this world, I feel like we all need to be nicer to each other.

In my first fight, I acknowledged it. I’m a professional wrestler, this is who I am, who you know me as. But guess what, I’ve also been wrestling since I was 5 years old – real wrestling – amateur wrestling, Olympic wrestling.

I would say to the critics that they don’t have a black belt in time management like I do.

I need to wrestle, I need to compete.

When I was competing at Oklahoma in college, I remember always getting a lot of anxiety before wrestling matches. Almost to the point where, ‘Oh my gosh, man, this is a lot.’

My junior and senior year in college is when I first realized what MMA is and really started liking it. I went the other route – I went into the entertainment field and started wrestling professionally, and I did that for about 11 years.

Pro wrestling is all about staying fresh.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in professional wrestling was use the exposure from cable’s number one rated television show to transition and move on to what you want to go into next.

As a fighter, I’m not one of those people that wants to prove I can go out and throw strikes.

Jumping into something new is always challenging with the schedule and the routine and when you can train, and fit that into your life that you already have right now.

I grew up in one of the most prolific high-school-wrestling programs in the country, and MMA fighters are more successful when they have that amateur-wrestling background.

Growing up in Perry, Oklahoma, there’s not a lot going on, so we would go wrestle anywhere and anyplace we could. It really is who I am.

I think it’s surprising for a lot of people to see Jack Swagger crossover to MMA because they know Jack Swagger more than they know Jake Hager.

I was young; I signed with the WWE when I was 24. I was up on the main roster when I was 26 and 10 years later that is a lot of learning and a lot of growth.

Kofi Kingston has always been one of my favorite opponents to wrestle. He and I started back in McDonough, Georgia in 2006 in developmental at Deep South together. So, our careers have come along at the same time. He’s incredible.

I really like Bellator and them as a company and how they are run. It’s a popular place for fighters to go to.

A lot of people want me to say negative things about WWE, but I’m very grateful for my career there.

Wrestling for wrestling fans is an honor.

People think I look like a P.E. teacher or the principal.

I’m a conservative. I voted for Donald Trump and back in 2016 everybody was talking about, ‘Oh my God, here’s another TV character trying to run for the presidency.’ They didn’t really take him seriously.

MMA is very difficult; you can’t just be good at wrestling. You need striking, kickboxing, jiu-jitsu and countless other things.