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Scott Garland (@thescottgarland) is a professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE as Scotty 2 Hotty and now works as a backstage producer coach in AEW. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Orlando, FL to discuss The Attitude Era, how he was paired with Brian Christopher, Rikishi joining Too Cool, how The Worm became his finisher, the iconic Royal Rumble dance spot, still wrestling now and teaming with his son Keegan, wanting to live to be 100 years old, and more!
You’re still wrestling!
“I love it. Yeah, it’s crazy. I tell this story a lot. I remember being in Europe somewhere on a tour bus. The WWE tours. You go from town to town on a tour bus, and it’s like 3 o’clock in the morning. I’m standing at the front of the bus with Tim White, and I remember telling him then. I was probably in my mid-20s. I remember saying I’m going to be done doing this when I’m 30. Now I just turned 53. I started when I was 15, I love it. It’s never been about the money for me. It’s just doing something I’m passionate about and doing something that I love, and I get to do it, and I feel like I can still go, and I do it at a respectable level. I always said when I have to start wearing a shirt to the ring and not taking it off, that’s when I’m going to. and I don’t even know if that’s true anymore because I love it so much. But yeah, it’s awesome.”
What is it that you love about it so much?
“I think it’s just everything. It’s the performing. It’s the travel. I know a lot of guys who do this, they hate the travel. I love the travel. Now working with AEW as a coach, it’s like there’s times where we’ll have a Wednesday show and then a Saturday show. Say it’s on the West Coast, I’ll just stay out there in between and I’ll go to Yosemite or I’ll go to someplace cool in Arizona or just try to go places I’ve never been and do things I’ve never done. My kids are older now; they’re both adults, 21 and 25. My daughter’s almost 25, so I don’t feel that guilt of missing the soccer game or missing a theater performance of the kids. We have some people who fly in the day of the show and who fly back out on a red-eye because they have babies at home, and I understand it. But I have that luxury. My wife travels a lot, so sometimes there’s an empty house at home, so I’ll just stay out on the road. But I love it. I love it all, man. I feel like it’s what I was meant to do. I struggle with what am I going to do next? Because my goal is to live to 100 years old.”
It’s so cool seeing your son Keegan in the ring. Was this all something he always wanted to do?
“No, not really. I mean, of course, he grew up around it. He was born in ’04, so I was still with WWE at the time. He grew up around WWE the first few years of his life, and then I went out on the independents for nine or 10 years, and then back to WWE as coach now with AEW. But so he’s been a part of it, and he’s grown up, and he never really had interest in doing it, and I never wanted to pressure him to do it. I’m not one of those guys [where I think] ‘I don’t want my kids doing it.’ It’s been so good to me. I’ve done so many cool things because of wrestling. I want my kids to be happy. I’ve never been, ‘Oh, they gotta go for a job with money. They gotta concentrate on money.’ Of course, you want to be financially secure, but I want them to be happy with whatever they do in life. I wanted him to ask me about doing it. One day we were in the gym, and he started talking about it on a treadmill. I remember it was the first time he said it. Then Ace Steel ended up opening up his school, the foundation in Orlando. I worked with Ace at that Performance Center when I was there as a coach, and I knew what a good coach he was. I didn’t want to train him myself. I wanted him to go through it from the ground up and do the training. I never did that. I was a backyard wrestler basically before there was a word for backyard wrestling. I was self-taught in my mom’s garage. We had literally 18 mattresses in this garage, [actually] 20 because we had a mattress in each corner, and then we had three-by-three rows of three by 2 high, with a sheet of plywood in between to stabilize a little bit. And my buddies and I kind of self-taught ourselves.”
What was your wrestling name back then?
“My very first name for the first show I did was “The Gigolo” Jeff Taylor, which is weird now because, dude, I was 16 and I was the gigolo. I don’t even think I really knew what a gigolo was at the time.”
You get to do a double worm with your son Keegan. It’s so fun because he’s jumping one way, you’re jumping the other.
“Yeah, it’s fun. He’s been doing the worm since he was a baby. Literally, I have a video of him. He could barely walk, and he couldn’t really do it. I was on an independent show somewhere, and I brought him in the ring, and he just kind of inches across the ring. Every time he was there, of course, he would want to get in the ring and do it after my match. So I have quite a few videos of him growing up doing the worm. So to be able to do it in a real match together, it’s fun, it’s really fun. I think even if you’re a wrestling fan, or not even a wrestling fan, even if you’re just at a show, and you don’t know who I am, and you don’t know my history, but you see a father and son in there performing together and doing something like the worm together. It’s such a feel-good moment.”
How did you even learn you could do the worm?
“I started doing it, and I think it was fourth grade. It was when breakdancing was popular, and all those breakdancing movies, and everybody was trying to breakdance at the time. So we would bring the cardboard out on the playground, and we would do the backspin and try to do the windmill and the head spin, and the worm was part of it, and the moonwalk, and so it’s so crazy, like stuff I learned in fourth grade, I would implement into my act all these years later, and be what I’m remembered for.”
How did the worm find its place in wrestling for you?
“So I started doing it. I remember when Brian Christopher and I were together, just as Too Much. Just on the house shows, I would just drop down on our entrance when I got in the ring, and I would do it, just kind of messing around to make the other guys laugh in the match. But I was getting a reaction from it. I was like, there’s something to this. Then once we started the Too Cool thing, it felt like it fit the character. So I just started. I would hit the ropes, I would drop down, and I would worm across. I remember dropping elbows and headbutts and leg drops, and I knew I had something just from the buzz of the audience. Then one night on Raw, Jerry Lawler, as I’m hopping from one side to the other, Jerry Lawler says ‘W O R M.’ I heard the playback the next day, and I asked him, ‘Would you please keep doing that? I think if we can condition the audience to do that, they’ll do it.’ Sure enough, a month later, they’re doing it.”
How did you and Brian Christopher get paired together in the first place?
“So we were just thrown together. I signed in February of ’97, and I’d been there a whole year, and then right before WrestleMania of ’98 in Boston, I was sitting home. So being a being a guy who grew up in Maine, being a northeastern guy, to have WrestleMania in Boston and be on the show. So I’m sitting home, and I think it was Wednesday before WrestleMania. I had been home for weeks or months, and they hadn’t done anything with me up to this point, so I’m ready to get released at any point. I get a call from Russo, and he said, ‘We need you in Boston on Friday to do this. They’re going to do this outdoor show,’ which ended up being the DX workout with Tyson. I wrestled Taka Michinoko on the show, we wrestled each other, and then they do the tag team battle royal, which I think was the first match on WrestleMania 14, and they just threw Brian and me in that match together, for no rhyme or reason. He was a heel, I was a babyface up to that point. We had wrestled each other a bunch of times, and all of a sudden we just thrown into this match as a tag team. It made no sense whatsoever.”
How long were you too much before you became Too Cool?
“I think it was about a year, about a year. I remember being in Nassau Coliseum, and Vince Russo came up to us, and he said, ‘Hey, we want to change your character up. We want you guys to kind of do what the Hardy Boys did, where they went from tights to street clothes, and we want you to dress like the kids are dressing in the malls.’ That was the only direction we got. So we were in next week. We’re in Springfield, Massachusetts. Brian and I go out. We walk outside the arena. We find these shops, and they’re hip-hop shops. Okay we can’t really wear tight jeans but they have these baggy jeans. We could wear those in the ring because you get knee pads and knee braces and all that good stuff underneath them, and still be able to wrestle in them. So that was what we ended up doing.”
When you think of the Attitude Era, you’re one of the tag teams that immediately pops into your mind. Too Cool. How long was Too Cool together?
“So it was May of ’99. We did a backstage thing for Sunday Night Heat that was going to air the following Sunday. So we filmed this on Tuesday, saying, ‘Too much is no more. We’re now Too Cool.’ The next day, we’re in Portland, Maine, of all places, on a house show, wrestling D’Lo Brown and Mark Henry. Brian tears his ACL. Oh man, we were just starting this new character, we just filmed that thing last night that’s supposed to air this Sunday, and then I thought, sure enough, they’re not going to air it, or there’s no point airing it. Brian’s going to be out for at least six months. They aired it, still played. So now we’re Too Cool. The whole Too Cool thing is Vince Russo’s idea. While Brian’s out with the ACL injury, Russo goes to WCW. So I’m sitting home. I see Russo shows up on WCW. Oh no, the guy who pitched the idea to us is gone, but they bring us back in, I think it was October of 99. We show up on Raw as Too Cool. Either we jumped Edge and Christian or the Hardys. I don’t remember, but whatever team it wasn’t did a run-in, and the Hollys came in to set up for Survivor Series 99, where it was Too Cool, the Hollys against Edge Christian and the Hardys, and so that was October, and then Rikishi was put with us in December, and then here’s the crazy thing. So Rikishi Too Cool didn’t start till December, that iconic moment in the Royal Rumble where the three of us danced together was four weeks later.”
So if that was October 99, yeah, how long was your run with Too Cool?
“I think it was whenever Brian got released. So we were together all of 2000; I think it was 2001 that he got released.”
So Too Cool existed for a little over a year.
“Rikishi Too Cool wasn’t even a year because Rikishi was put with us in December of 99. December of 2000, he had turned on us and was wrestling Austin at the pay-per-view in December.”
How do you feel being a nostalgia act?
“Dude, I embrace it. I’m a total nostalgia act, and I embrace it. When I came back to the independents this time, I wasn’t sure how to present myself. Do I go back to the classic look? Do I try to portray as I would look all these years later. I didn’t know what people would want. I would do photo ops on the shows with these grown men, and I could feel them shaking, or you get a couple guys who almost start to cry. Yeah, this is crazy, man. Nostalgia is unbelievable. So I’ve learned to embrace it. I embrace it, and it’s cool because Too Cool Rikishi was 2000, so I’m getting guys that were 15 years old in 2000.”
So why was Rikishi added to the group?
“I don’t know. I remember Michael Hayes coming up to us, because the last thing he had done on WWE television was the Sultan, and then he had been sent down to Memphis and he was wrestling there, and I think he was kind of doing the Rikishi gimmick a little bit there. I might be wrong, but I know they said he was going to come out and save us. And he’s got this thong on, and I’m like, this doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t fit what Brian and I have been doing. I go, I don’t see this working. But that first night, man, it’s one of those things you can’t even describe it, or feel like you can come up with and go. I know this is going to work. We did the dance, I always say it was magic.”
You had a magical moment at the Royal Rumble of 2000, where it’s Rikishi, it’s Brian Christopher in the ring, and then your music hits. So you got all three members of Too Cool, and then the music hits, and it’s just what a great moment.
“Again, that was a defining moment, and what made our career.”
The crowd knew exactly what was going to happen.
“Yeah, it was the right timing. I think if it was probably two weeks earlier, it wouldn’t have got that reaction. But we just had those four or five weeks, whatever it was, to condition the audience to what was coming, and they knew when it was only the three of us, they knew what was coming. It was New York City, where either they love you or they hate you. I’ve been on both sides of that, where I was the new guy, and I’m the white meat babyface trying to get over in New York when I first started, and going out there, and they boo you out of the building as a babyface to the other side where they love you. If you can get New York to love you, you can get anybody to love you.”
It’s a fun moment because you guys are dancing. The crowd’s so into it, you almost forget that the Royal Rumble’s happening at that moment.
“Yeah, it was such a good Rumble. The whole Rumble itself was just so awesome. But yeah, every year the Rumble comes around, people start posting that clip of the dance, and it blows up. I’m so lucky to have that. I have a couple defining moments. I had some really good Royal Rumble moments that, again, I didn’t realize until later. Then had the moment with Taker, where he gets eliminated by Maven, and then here I come, and then just one shot from him. I always had this like kind of regret that I never had a chance to wrestle him, but then I go, I had two really cool Royal Rumble moments with him.”
What do you think your career looks like without Too Cool?
“Oh man, I don’t know what my career looks like if I didn’t have that moment in Boston with Vince McMahon, where I pitched the Too Hot thing. Talk about timing is everything, right? If I didn’t have that moment where I cross paths with him and was able to pitch that to him, I don’t think I would have ever gone to his office. I wouldn’t have had the guts to go in and pitch it to him. So it just happened that I had that moment with him. I talk about that a lot where it’s like timing is everything. And we cross paths right there. If I didn’t have that moment, too much would have never been, and then Too Cool would have never been.”
You and Grandmaster Sexay had such great chemistry together, but from what I understand, you weren’t that close behind the scenes. We really,
“We really weren’t. Thankfully, towards the end of his life, we got closer, and literally one of the last texts he sent me was a picture of his son who was wrestling in school, like amateur-style wrestling at the time. So we had gotten to that point where we shared information about our kids because for a long time there were times we wouldn’t even barely talk before we went to the ring, but as soon as we went through that curtain, again it was magic.”
Was there animosity?
“We just had different lifestyles. I think everybody knows, it’s not a secret Brian went down a bad road and fell into the drugs and the alcohol, going out and the clubs and that was never my [lifestyle]. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. I was never a club guy. I feel like Brian, sadly, as it is to say, I feel like Brian liked Grandmaster Sexy better than he liked Brian Lawler. There’s people who fall into that. I see that, and that’s what I always try to tell people: don’t ever believe that you’re that character. It’s okay to embrace it. People are going to treat you better. They’re going to give you free meals when you go into restaurants, and they’re going to treat you better, which is cool. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s not real. Some people just get so caught up into it. It’s sad, and I think I was always able to separate the two. I always love Scotty 2 Hotty, but I’m Scott Garland, and I always try to remember that.”
How was your relationship with Rikishi?
“Great, always good. Yeah, always good.”
You’ve met some big names over the years:
“Funny Adam Sandler story. So we’re in Buffalo, New York, back then we would do pretty much the same shows for maybe a month. So Brian and I were on first every night, and then Billy Gunn was wrestling Eddie Guerrero like third match every night, and I’d heard they’ve been killing it. Of course, Billy and Eddie, the two of them together are going to kill it. So I want to see this match. So Brian and I finish. Go back, towel off. I find this area in the arena where it’s dark, but I can go out in the arena and stand in the shadows and watch the match in the arena. So I’m watching it, and I see this guy come out of the audience and comes over to me, and he goes, ‘Ah, good stuff you did out there. You’re really funny.’ I was like, oh, thanks. I’m trying to watch the match, but I think it’s a fan who snuck back. So, I don’t want more people to start coming and cause a scene, so I can’t watch the match. So, I wasn’t rude, but I was like, thanks, and then continue to watch the match, and then the guy who’s the promoter, he comes out. He walks out there, and he comes back with somebody, and he’s like, ‘Scott, this is Adam Sandler.’ I was like, Adam Sandler just told me I was funny, and I blew him off. Maybe if I was nicer to him, I’d be in his movies [laughs].”
There’s so many second-generation wrestlers now. A lot of third-generation wrestlers now too. Your son Keegan, a second-generation wrestler. What’s the advice that you give to people whose parents have been there and now they’re trying to do it, but they’re also trying to do their own thing?
“I think he’s got to do his own thing. As you mentioned, he’s doing the worm. When we’re together, I think it works. I think he’s got to be careful of trying to recreate what I did. He’s using his real name. He’s used Keegan Garland, and my advice always, and not only to him or not even just second-generation wrestlers, outwork everybody else. Outwork everybody else. Don’t worry about what everybody else is doing. Just worry about outworking. That’s how I am, and I’ll tell it when I do a seminar before a show, I’ll say I’m going to outwork every one of you guys tonight, and I challenge you to outwork me. I don’t mean outbump you or do more moves. Outwork me, work that audience. So as long as you do that, you’ll stand out. There’s another thing I would tell second-generation people, AJ’s son, all the stuff that he’s had to go through recently. Don’t listen to the noise. Don’t listen to the noise. There’s always been such all this nepo stuff.”
Do you know how much longer you want to wrestle for?
“I told you I’m going to live to 100, but just as long as I can present in a professional manner, and look the part and feel the part, I will continue.”
What about a match in AEW?
“So I’ve done a couple of dark matches. I’m not against wrestling; I just want it to be the right thing. I’m very, I don’t know if protective’s the right word, but I feel like what I’ve done up to this point. I don’t want to sound like I think I’m this top guy or this mega star, but I feel like what I do have, what I’ve created in the time that I’ve been doing it, is something special. I don’t want to water that down. I want it to mean something. I almost feel like I’d be best used in a nostalgia role, but in a not used all the time [role]. A mystery opponent, or in the gauntlet battle royal, or just one-offs here and there. I think that’s where I would best be suited. The talent at AEW is so good, and their style is so insane and awesome. I don’t know how I would fit in.”
What is Scotty 2 Hotty grateful for?
“My wife, my kids, and to still be able to do it at this level.”
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