David Heath (@gangreldavidheath) is a professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE as Gangrel. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Nashville, TN to discuss being a trainer at Rusev’s KECH Pro Wrestling Academy, still wrestling today and how much longer he wants to keep going for, why he hasn’t worn a white shirt in over 20 years, why the Attitude Era was so incredible, the rumor about why he was fired from WWE, not being a part of WrestleMania 39, his AEW appearance, spiking CVV with an Impaler DDT, and more!

So we’re at KECH Wrestling Academy in Nashville. This is Rusev’s school, but you’re like the main trainer here?

“I talk to him sometimes; he’ll tell you we’re partners. I’m not so sure what we are, but he’s definitely the guy to put all the money into it. He’s definitely the founder of it, but he said he wouldn’t start it unless I came in and ran it with him or would be the head trainer. So, here I am trying to make all that happen. It’s doing good. We’ve been open a month, he’s on tour. He’s been on tour in Europe, I think that’s towards wrapping up. It’s been a pretty long WWE European trip. He should be back here at the beginning of July, he plans on doing a lot of time in and out, so we plan on rotating in and out. So if I’m here two weeks, I’ll be here, and then when he rotates in, he’ll be here for two weeks that I’m not here, so it’s scheduled down through the summer to be two and two with each other. He’s still in LA, he’s still happily married, and his wife’s out there doing a lot of stuff, different content things, acting, stuff like that.” 

The most important thing about a wrestling school is learning from somebody who’s been there. So, between you and Rusev, you’ve got a guy who’s been everywhere in you, and you’ve got a guy who’s still there in Rusev, that’s the best way to do it. 

“He comes in and I go, ‘You could teach them just as much as I could teach.’ He goes, ‘No, I need you here.’ I go, ‘No, you could teach them, you’re in the current product. You know what they want, you’re living it, you’re in it 24/7 you’re all in, you know what they’re looking for.’ But what I give them is the foundation. I’m a foundation and a footwork guy, so I’m a slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I’ll spend hours and hours on right foot drops and feeds and footwork and stuff like that. I know that a few of my students have had tryouts, and they’ll go, ‘Who trained you?’ They’ll go Gangrel. They’ll go, ‘Oh, I figured, because we could tell by the footwork.’ So I’m not boasting, but I’m just saying, I’m a foundation and a footwork guy. All the extra stuff, all the flips and the flops, and any attitude, that’s gonna come, that’s who they are, it’s gonna be an extension to who they are, and they’re gonna find that. But I’m there to instill a foundation, so when they come in here, and I’ll say, give me six extra months. I don’t believe in the three-month program, you’re out, or eight weeks, or twelve weeks. I’m the same way as I talk about slow is smooth, smooth as fast. I want you to be slow in the beginning, give you a foundation, and then I believe the back side. So I tell them, if you give me six extra months, I’ll save you six years of time. So they get their footwork right in the beginning, just a slow, slow build, get that foundation in, and then when they get past the ropes and stuff, when they get to that stuff like that, it’s gonna just fall into place, because the footwork’s there.”

You’re 57 years old, and you’re still doing this like you are on the indie grind every single weekend. Do you still love it?

“Absolutely, 100%. I don’t know about the traveling as much, but I still love wrestling, so I tell people it’s a lot like a musician. You’ll hear them say, ‘I get paid to travel, not play music.’ I get paid to travel, not wrestle. I would wrestle for free anyway. I love wrestling. When they asked you, what’s your fee, I go, what are we talking about? I look at it, and my fee is addressed to where that travel is. I’ve wrestled in every state, been to a lot of countries and stuff like that, so I know exactly what’s involved in that travel, and that the travel is what adjusts my fee. It’s not necessarily the wrestling part of it. I still love wrestling; it’s the travel of it.”

Are you at the point now when you’re taking bookings and you’re like, I only want to take a certain amount of bumps, or you want to just go out there and have a great match?

“No, no, no. The hardest part about wrestling is getting your boots on. Once the boots are on, I’m fine. I can rewind this back. I do take only certain bumps now, I’ve eliminated certain top rope things that are just not necessary for a 57-year-old man with a new knee and a new hip and stuff like that. I don’t want to push the envelope too much. Once I get in my gear and I’m rolling, I want to go. You’re either all in or you’re all out, 24/7. Can’t stop, won’t stop, fanging and banging. The hardest part about it’s getting dressed. Once you’re dressed, you traveled, you went through that, you got there, then just getting dressed. You’re like, ah, then the boots are on, then it’s all gold. Then after that, you know it’s all good.”

Does your rate change based on what you’re wearing to the ring? Are you always going to wear a white shirt? You’re always going to split blood.

“I haven’t worn a white shirt in 20 years.” 

You haven’t worn the pirate shirt?

“I love Seinfeld, but I don’t want to be a pirate. No, I haven’t worn a puffy shirt. If somebody wants a puffy shirt, if they request it, I say, ‘Sure, you buy it. Make sure you get one. I’ll sign it and leave it with you, but I won’t go hunt them down.’ They don’t make them the same. They’re cheesier, and to custom make them cost way more than what you could buy, it gets out of control. So if they want it, I’m not against wearing it, but it’s just working, you just go through them, you get one show out of them, they’re either torn or that you can’t get the stains out, not the blood stains, the blood comes out, but I spray the blood every night. I still get out my wallet for the blood. You got to have the blood and the Impaler DDT.”

There’s something about the way that you spray. You must project it out 10 feet, it’s a strong spray. 

“I think I just had a natural spray. I don’t know, I have no idea. I just did it, and it was the same the whole time.” 

Was there ever a point in WWE where they said, ‘Oh, we already got a guy that’s spraying something, Triple H, you can’t be spraying a liquid.’ 

“I think I was spraying before he was.”

But then it became such a huge part of his entrance.

“Wow, maybe that’s why I’m not there then [laughs].”

But that was never a conversation?

“No, no, never a conversation.”

The last time I was in a wrestling ring with you, I made a mistake. This is all on me. I’ve said it 1,000 times before.

“You say it 1,000 times, but I have everybody coming to me. ‘Oh, you tried to kill Chris Van Vliet!'”

I know how to take the move. I jumped up a little too much, I got a little too excited, and I spiked myself on the top of my head. It’s had nothing to do with you. You are a consummate professional. You are the very best.

“I thought you died!”

I think about that moment more than I’d like to admit.

“I imagine your whole life flashed before your eyes in front of you, but what little life you had at that point. You were still young.” 

You’ve been in the business for 40 years. What’s the biggest difference between wrestling now versus in the 80s when you started out?

“Meaningful moves make memories, memories make money. So, there’s no meaningful moves anymore. I believe that, and I live by that: meaningful moves make memories, memories make money. They’re doing wrestling, they’re just coming out and doing a lot of wrestling moves, high flying, a lot of cool stuff, but they’re not working into those moves now. Giving me a story, and why you’re building up to why this move is so deadly and so important, because everybody’s kicking out of everybody’s finishes now. You wouldn’t have got that 40 years ago, or 20 years ago, or maybe even 15 years ago, the finishes were a lot more protected. Even the Attitude Era, it was the wild west, and they were gunslingers, and they kicked out on everything, but it’s still kind of protected finishes and stuff like that. So, I just think it’s more acrobatic, smaller guys, I have nothing against that, because now I’m a big guy. I was never a big guy when I started. In 1987 they told me you’ll be lucky to be a junior heavyweight at that. Because everybody was like 305, six foot seven. Here I’m coming in at 230, thinking I’m gonna make a difference at six two. But now I feel like a giant, but I feel like with wrestling, everything cycles too, so I feel like they’re cycling around to bigger guys and some body stuff in healthy ways. I think it’s this crazy world of peptides. I mean, look at Billy Gunn.”

Do you want to wrestle into your 60s?

“I didn’t say I want to wrestle in my 60s, I want to look like Billy Gunn in my 60s [laughs]. I don’t know when I want to wrestle to. It’s a toss-up. I tell everybody, Turkey’s a big thing now with the hair, so it’s a toss-up. Before I thought my body would give out on me, but the body seems to keep motoring, and I keep getting healthier, and I think that has a lot to do with my wife and a happy marriage, and a better lifestyle. But I can’t stop the hair from coming out. When you get these high definition lights, when you’re sweating and they shine down on you, they are unforgiving, and I’m very vain.” 

Are you going to go until the wheels fall off?

“Probably. I didn’t think I would.”

How’d you get the name Gangrel?

“That was a dicey one, there. So it was 87 or 88, I started at WWE, doing jobs. I worked Big Boss Man. So I’ve always been around WWE since I was a kid, doing enhancement matches, and then I had a tryout in 91 as the Vampire King, because I came from Puerto Rico, and they just laughed at it. But then Jerry Lawler came up to me, and he goes, ‘I think that’s cool. Do you want to come work in Memphis?’ Then I went down and started working in Memphis with Lawler. So did the whole Memphis loop, and when they were still a territory at the end, so that came around. So was always doing the vampire thing, but I was always pushing it to them, ‘You guys don’t get it? You could be a vampire and get your butt kicked every day of the week. As long as you’re cool doing it, people are still gonna like you.’ They’re like, ‘No, we don’t get it.’ I was constantly sending them stuff, material on culture and stuff, RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons, but with the vampires called Masquerade. So I’d send them stuff like that, and then eventually they were like, ok. I was on an All Japan tour, they hired me, I lost all this weight, I was like 228, and they signed me. They said they had some stuff for me, and when I signed, they told me I was gonna sit home for a year. But then it was Vince Russo, I guess he called me up on a Friday and said, hey, can you still do the vampire thing. Of course, but I had permanent fangs, I got rid of the fangs. I had a skullet, I’m glad I got rid of that, because I looked a lot like Brian Knobbs. So I got rid of that, I grew my hair in, but I didn’t tell him I didn’t have [fangs]. I don’t know if he realized that they weren’t permanent or whatever. So he called me up on a Friday, and then he goes the flight is for Saturday. So this is Friday evening at five. So I run out to Hot Topic. So I go in Hot Topic, and I’m like they want some kind of shirt. So that’s where the white puffy shirt came from, the suede pants and all that. I got little gimmick fangs out of Hot Topic, they sold fangs right at the counter back then. So because I didn’t have fangs anymore, I said I’m just going to make these work, figure it out, fake it till you make it, figure it out. So then I come out, and I go, what do I gotta do for boots? You know what’s next to Hot Topic? Journeys. So I roll into Journeys. There’s a pair of new rocks. I go these are cool, these boots and all that. Then I go to a Renaissance fair. So I found the shin guards to put over the boots and stuff like that, so I come up with all that, but while this was all going on, this is a Friday night, right? So they filmed on a Sunday, was a Sunday Night Heat, I think they actually filmed it on Sunday, and find out that well, they had to come up with a name, and I gave them all this material and research, but I heard Vince McMahon say I like the name Gangrel.”

What was your name to that point?

“Vampire Warrior. He goes, I like the name Gangrel. Well, this was a weekend. Nobody ran it through legal. Nobody ran the name through legal. So that Sunday Night Heat, Monday came, they had a lawsuit for like $5 million. So I don’t know if you noticed that in all the WWE magazines it would say Masquerade White Wolf by White Wolf Gangrel, and they had to do that for five years, and so I feel like when that deal ran up, so did mine. I feel like I had a black mark on my name from that Gangrel name, so they had to pay for that certain amount. They never contested it in court or anything, because I guess they realized, yeah, we screwed up. I heard they let that whole legal department go that was involved in that, they all got heat, but I don’t know the real story. You could hear the whispers, but I feel like I got a lot of heat from it, but I weathered it out, and it came and gone, so then eventually, when that all ran out, they let me go. Nobody paid attention to the name Gangrel, so then just kept watching it, watching it, and then, and then I had a lawyer. I just filed on the trademark, nobody fought it. So I ended up with the Gangrel name since 2018 I’ve had it that long now.” 

When Edge had his Brood entrance at WrestleMania 39 the match against Finn Balor, there were so many rumors that you might be there. Not only were you not there, he didn’t even use the Brood entrance theme, like it was so interesting that they used another song.

“I’m not sure, but I think maybe it might have been Hunter. Some people said Vince, but I think it might have been Hunter. Somebody kiboshed it. So when that didn’t go down, he left the next year to AEW. Then he wanted to make sure that he’s a guy that wants to have his way. Don’t tell him no on something, he’s gonna figure it out. So in AEW, he had me come back and come up to the ring and stuff like that.” 

Were you close to being part of WrestleMania 39?

“In Edge’s mind? Yes. He was trying hard, but in their minds, no, I don’t think so.”

Edge told me that he was told that fans wouldn’t remember you. It’s like, come on, that’s ridiculous.

“That’s what they said, that’s what he said. But I think it was a little bit more to it. I don’t know what it is, but I think it was a little bit more. It’s weird too, because I was just speaking of the name, you know, the nostalgia deals they have. So I went through that. I’m not going to mention the person the officer’s going through, but it was all lined up. It was right down to the final things, and then, when the last version should be signed, they come through. It came to me and said, ‘Do you have a letter from White Wolf saying that you can use the name, that they relinquish the name to you?’ I go, you have lawyers after lawyers, they clearly could see that I have the trademark registered and all that stuff. ‘You don’t have a letter?’ I go, no, and then I never heard back from them again. So it’s something weird, it’s a little bit more to it. Maybe if you could figure it out in your investigative journals, you could tell me, but at this point I’ve motored on and done my own thing for so long. It would be great to go back in some kind of form or fashion and do something, of course, that would be awesome. I’m sure the money’s great, and it gives you longevity to be on that powerful TV, but at the same time I’ve been busier than I’ve ever been busy. I wrestled more than I wrestled. Then with the two schools, and then committing to a lot to this school here too, more so out of the two. I’m here trying to get this going. It’s been insane.” 

There’s a rumor you got fired from WWE because you didn’t tuck your shirt in.

“Never tucked my shirt.” 

Would you like to clear this up?

“I don’t know if that was the rumor. I think the rumor was they said Vince saw my stomach and said, ‘Ah, he’s got to go.’ I think that was the rumor. No, I don’t know. They hired me back, I got burnt. I sat home all that time, and then they let me go. Then they hired me back, told me I was going to be on the Syfy Channel. They said, ‘You’re going to be a big star on ECW. You’re going to come in, you’re going to have a group, Kevin Thorn, Shelly Martinez.’ I said, great. I went home, never heard from them. I was signed back, never heard from him, never did an appearance on TV or anything. So, there’s no shirts, or there’s no nothing. Then I see Kevin Thorn comes on, and then Shelley comes on with him, and I got let go. Then I get a call from Johnny Ace, going, ‘It never really took off, it didn’t work out.’ I said save it, I’m gonna go back to England next week. So it was nothing. They brought me back for SyFy, I never did any TVs, I never did anything.”

WrestleMania 15: You’re part of this moment where Undertaker hangs Big Boss Man. You’re the one who’s actually giving Undertaker the noose. What do you remember about the setup of this?

“What I remember is we weren’t on schedule for anything in WrestleMania, and then we all get like a memo saying you have a rehearsal. We’re like, rehearsal for what? So we show up, they go, ‘Oh, you’re gonna come out of the ceiling.’ We’re like, “What? We’re looking at each other like, “Who’s coming out of the ceiling? ‘No, you three are gonna come out of the ceiling and come down on top of the cage.’ So, we rehearsed it one time there, and I know none of us were happy about it. We’re all freaking out. So it was terrifying. We did a rehearsal, everything went fine, and we got back up. Then came WrestleMania. Again, it’s not like the entrances. You do a dry rehearsal, it’s one thing, but then there’s live crowd, and in the moment, so we all go off and we go down. I almost missed the cage, like one foot’s over here, but I get back on it. That was scary. Then we go over, and then we’re on that, and all I’m thinking is, don’t fall through the cage, because you think about Mankind. The cage is kind of rigged too, for you to be able to rip it open. So we’re up there, we got the noose, we’re ripping it, please don’t fall through this cage, because I don’t like heights at all. So we get that, we go back up, and then the circuit breakers blew. So we’re all stuck, that’s why you got a picture of Edge hanging right there in his coat. He was hanging the lowest. I was between the sound board and the lighting, and Christian, I think, was just where his hands were on the beam to get back on top. It legit went out. We were stuck, and it felt like forever, but it was probably only a couple minutes, you know. I kept thinking they’re going to come on this sound board and just blow my eardrums out, because I was in between the lighting board and the speakers, and Edge was down low, and he was getting all the pictures, because he was stuck in his coat. That’s why you see that a lot. Yeah, there was just one rehearsal, and then we did it, and there’s a bit of a heavy thing, you know, hanging is a bit strong, I suppose. You don’t really see them, I don’t think they push that much anymore, and stuff like that. I think if you go look for it, it’s hard to find that, because it was so graphic and kind of strong.” 

What is Gangrel grateful for?

“The fans, social media, and being able to give back.”

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Ethan Page (@official_ego) is a professional wrestler and a member of the WWE Raw roster. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in London, England to discuss being a tag team champion with Cody Rhodes in Alpha-1 Wrestling, MJF hitting on his sister, winning the North American Championship in NXT, getting a custom Canadian Title and hating the Lance Storm comparisons, why his pairing with Chelsea Green worked so well, his NXT segment with The Rock, why he hated his old theme song that fans loved, and more!

What an incredible full-circle moment, where you went back to the promotion that you started, Alpha One Wrestling, with the WWE NXT North American Championship

“Yeah, custom, which I’m sure we can get into that. But to one, be given permission while working for WWE to go to my hometown, that’s the company that gave me all the opportunities, because I had to give them to myself. Nobody was like, ‘Oh, here you go, Ethan Page, here’s this on a silver platter for you.’ There’s nothing. So to go back and give back to the fans that supported me, my family that was like selling tickets at the door for me, and like dealing with all that, and concessions, and merchandise, and it was just, you’re right, a full circle is the perfect way to describe it. I’ll remember that for the rest of my life as one of my career highlights, in front of 350 people.”

Did you ask for permission? Was it presented to you? 

“100%. So, when we changed the championship to the Canadian design, I really, really, really wanted to go as hard in the paint I’m the greatest North American as I could, and we had no shows coming up in Canada. I think TNA actually had some shows coming up in Canada within the window, because I had pitched. I was like, I’ll go to TNA to defend the championship in Canada on shows. I’ll do it on an indie, because my original pitch was to wrestle in Alpha-1, obviously, so that I could get a championship defense in Mexico, Canada, and the US to be the greatest North American. So the idea started there, and then from that, just through conversation, they’re like, ‘Wait, what? You have an indie company?’ I’m like, ‘I might have like something to do with it. But the first question out of Shawn’s mouth was, ‘What do you draw?’ I’m like, oh, okay, perfect! So I was like, okay, I’m not in trouble. What can we kind of get away with here? He was like, look, you could definitely go cut a promo, make an appearance, and the trade-off too. I was like, I have the local news, I can chat with the local news to one, obviously promote my appearance the next day. Shout out CHCH, so we end up doing that, but I’m promoting Netflix because we’re all across Canada at the time with NXT. So they get something good out of it, I get something good out of it, something great, actually. So it was a dream come true.”

You were tag team champions in Alpha One with Cody Rhodes.

“Yeah, who’s the booker there?”

So how’d you book it that you guys would be tag team champions?

“He did. What do you mean? Yeah, could you imagine suggesting that to a guy, by the way, our relationship started off very interesting, because we both worked in Evolve, we had to fight each other, it was a whole thing. Then my promotion in Canada seemed to be one of the stops that he wanted to make, and regularly, and my building only holds a certain amount of people. So if you’re good at math, you can figure out very quick that we probably can’t afford Cody Rhodes, but he made sure that we could afford Cody Rhodes, which the company will be indebted to him forever, because until now that was the hottest time the company has ever had, and the exposure that he gave us was like astronomical, and just for me as a performer in itself, he did a lot, but he always made sure that we could afford him. But the biggest issue that I have with Cody was the European standoff with his merch money, because it was always like, okay, if you’re going to do this and you’re going to be a good brother and you’re going to come out here, take all this cash from this meet and greet. It was just me and him, there’s wrestlers that had to witness this weird standoff where we’re fighting with each other about who’s gonna take the money. He fought to not take a cent. I don’t know what your deal is, what the purpose was, or why you felt that I have to now owe you some form of debt, but don’t come to claim it, okay? Because even back then I tried to turn this down, and now we are where we are, and I don’t want you to come around. What are we almost 10 years now? 10 years later to collect a debt I know I don’t owe.”

There’s a story of MJF meeting Cody Rhodes for the first time, and it happened at your promotion, Alpha-1. Apparently this all started because MJF was allegedly hitting on your sister. What’s your version of the story?

“So, my version, first of all, that is a true story. From my perspective, that is a true story. He [Cody] did come to me and tell me that MJF was talking about my sister, and my family is very touchy thing for me. It’s my hard, fast rule is you could do whatever you want, say whatever you want, get away with whatever you want, don’t mention my family, don’t talk about my family, don’t mess with my family. So all of a sudden, at the time, MJF is like the young wrestler, up-and-coming wrestler, like he literally just met Cody that day. So this is kind of like the start of him getting going, so I hear this guy’s talking about my sister. I confronted him, and we were friends at the time, and I just couldn’t believe it, and he was very defensive, which I understand why he would be, and yeah, he did. He confronted Cody about it.”

How did you pitch the idea of the Canadian version of the North American title? 

“Had nothing to do with me. It was presented to me. A fantastic idea, and there was a legitimate reveal to me before the event. I remember we were in Houston, Texas, because I remember it as a top five career day for me, it was like an eight-minute get to stand in the middle of the ring with a microphone; the flags are in there, the podium, I get to reveal the belt, it was awesome. It was a perfect town for it too, just what a dream scenario that was. But before the show I knew that they were customizing this belt because they had told me. But I had not seen anything, so I actually got like a whoa! Just personally, just for me. So I got to actually see it. I’m like, this is insane. After the experience, it really kicked in. Wait a second, I have a custom championship in the WWE, specifically for me. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to get that belt again. It’s literally hanging in my house. Don’t take it, WWE, please! I have no clue how it got there. I left it after I lost the championship. I left it at the Performance Center, but somehow it’s hanging up in my house.”

Did you have any conversation with Lance Storm after your belt came out?

“I did not.” 

Because there were a lot of comparisons

“Which offends me!”

How does that offend you?

“He got stickers! I got a legitimate custom championship in the WWE. That guy slapped on magnets. Brother put some stickers on some championships. I made the WWE bend the knee. That’s a lot different.” 

How many titles did he have?

“I don’t know. I stopped counting. Well, first of all, I only need one championship that I would hold for a record amount of time, and a record amount of title defenses, more than anyone that’s ever held the championship. So, yes, he might have held many championships, but still have guys like Ultimo Dragon. That guy sucks too. This to me, look, you can have as many props as you’d like to boost your ego. It’s great. One championship is enough for me, and it’s what you make the championship. And I’ll say, while I was North American Champion, it was the most prestigious championship in all of WWE.” 

It’s been really fun watching you at these meet and greets. Which one’s been your favorite experience?

“Honestly, so I’ve been dying to get the footage of this, but at the last WrestleMania in Vegas, they had this cool experience where they trap you in this room, and they make you look like you’re standing in a glass box on the floor of WWE World. It’s this huge glowing case, and it looks like a video screen, so everyone assumes that what’s airing is pre-recorded, but while they’re just walking around, you’re interacting with people. So some guy’s walking by, and I go, ‘Hey, you in the Stone Cold T-shirt, I can smell your breath from back here.’ He’s like wait, what? And he turns around, all of a sudden, now he’s having a conversation with Ethan Page on this giant billboard. I thought that was such an incredible experience for fans, but also me. I just did mic work for 60 minutes at one point, just nonstop, just back and forth, and creating a crowd, and then I see some guy standing off to the side, so I’ll pull him in, and someone wants to now cut a promo, so they’re grabbing the microphone and just going back and forth, and it was one of the most fun experiences I have ever, ever, ever had, and with fans. The best part about it all, nobody had to touch me, nobody had to be near me. I didn’t have to smell you. It was fantastic. Didn’t catch anything. I didn’t get sick. I would have stayed there all day. They had to kick me out.”

Were you always this comfortable in the mic? Were you the kid in high school that loved doing presentations? 

“Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, I anything to get in front of an audience, and then once I realized wrestling was the thing that I enjoyed doing in front of people. Me and my backyard wrestling buddies for the talent show at our school put on like a triple threat hardcore match on a mattress on the high school stage.”

What’s your go-to cheat meal?

“I don’t know, it changes all the time, because I’ll have like some kind of crazy craving for one specific thing, and then I’ll have to wait whatever time to get there, but my real go-to, I have a crazy match coming up, or whatever. The first thing I’ll be begging my wife to make these chocolate chip cookies that she makes, and they are incredible.”

You had a segment with The Rock in NXT. Was there a chat before or after that segment with him?

“Honestly, both. That whole experience was fantastic. I would say the best part was getting to be able to tell him, ‘Hey, when I started all this, the number one goal was seeing what I created on screen with what I admired.’ He was the absolute pinnacle of what I admire from professional wrestling. So he’s, to me, the best. So to get to see what I cultivated in wrestling on screen with my number one wrestler. I mean, there’s nothing else that I need to do, unless he wants to have a match with me.”

Are you calling him out?

“Sure, why not? I’ll get you some clicks. Come on Rock, put your little underwear on. Let’s do it. Everybody wants to see your hamstrings. Anyways, that was an unreal experience. So I got to tell him that it was very, very good experience. I’m very happy that I could actually share that with him, and just be like, hey, I’m very proud of this. I wanted to say thanks, it was very great. But there was an interaction we had when we were going through everything and the situation is very interesting. So I ended up putting my hand up like I was in school because they were debating on like how to handle something, so I was like, ‘May I make a suggestion?’ They’re like yeah sure go ahead. So I say what I say, and they go, ‘Yep, that’s good. We’ll just do that.’ So after the interview, Rock’s like, ‘Hey, don’t ever second-guess yourself ever again. If you think it and if you feel it, say it. Worst is we say no.’ I was like, oh, okay. So I’ve definitely taken that with me going forward through the rest of my career in WWE, and it’s definitely helped me.”

You’ve had some brutal moments in NXT. You took out Je’Von Evans’ teeth with a chair. Talk me through that.

“Hey, sometimes you just got to do what you’re told. I will say this: that whole experience gave me something that I desperately needed in NXT, which was like a very hard edge, and it gave the character something that it desperately needed for the next, I guess, whatever time that I had in NXT, and that whole moment it was pivotal for Ethan Page.” 

The chair has become your weapon, because you used it with Ricky Saints, that was bad.

“Yeah, so it could have been worse. He almost lost his eye. So he ends up injuring his trachea the way the chair fell. Give him a twisted grin, and I’m trying to pull his throat down in between the legs of the chair, so as I’m yanking him down, if you see the footage and you watch the leg closest to the camera, it literally grazes his cheek, and you see his cheek after there’s a mark, it’s purple, maybe like an inch to a half an inch, he would have lost his eye. I don’t know why I’m smiling, but yeah, also that night I became North American Champion, and Mattel enjoyed that so much that they commemorated the moment by giving myself and Ricky Saints a two-pack with the North American Championship from that match available now. Go grab it!”

I loved your facial expressions when you get trapped into this box with Oba Femi.

“My favorite of that is the swimming, trying to get out of the box. But ironically, one of the most painful moments of my wrestling career happened when he pulled me back into the box. If you go watch it back, my head is genuinely bouncing like a basketball off of the walls, but then at the end he ends up palming my face into the glass before the door buzzes to open. I just remember my head hitting it like, oh my god, this guy is a maniac! So yeah, Oba Femi, great guy.”

Did you ever think it would come to a point in your career where you didn’t think WWE was ever going to happen?

“Oh yeah, dude, I have this clip, and I’ve texted to a couple people, because I’ve filmed everything in my life, pretty much, especially when I started. When I was with Evolve, my wife convinced me to get a GoPro and start vlogging, but I had no clue what I was doing, so I just have random footage from back in Evolve, then all through TNA, all through Japan, England, all through AEW. I like pretty much filmed as much of it as I could for YouTube, and there was the time I was leaving TNA, and I decided not to stay. In that window, I had gotten an email while in Nashville, recording the show for Impact, and the email was from WWE, telling me that they’re never going to hire me. So I had my camera, and I’m vlogging. I read the email, and I’m like, oh man, what am I going to do? I just told Impact that I’m not staying. AEW was a possible option, but nothing was concrete. Then I get this email being like, ‘Yeah, we’re not hiring you, just stop.’ Pretty much this is the end of the road, it’s not gonna happen, just let it go. So I filmed myself right after reading the email, and then had a conversation with myself documenting it, pretty much being like, ‘You gonna be okay with this, or are you gonna like shove it up their ass?'”

How are you and Chelsea Green able to make such magic together?

“You know, you could ask me that about pretty much anyone I’ve ever worked with. I don’t think there’s a wrestler alive that I haven’t been able to make magic with. But I will say Chelsea has the exact same intangible quality, so when you put us together, it’s like truly magical, and probably one of the most fun times I’ve had in my career. As far as like laughing at work, yes.”

It looked like you guys were just going for it all this.

“Oh, yes, of course. I mean, I’m always going for it, but with her it was like, I don’t know, you ever get with one of the friends that’s like a good influence, but also a bad influence? That was us for each other.”

Take me through the day when you get the call that you’re going to go up to the main roster.

“Honestly, I wish I could. I was in Vegas for WrestleMania weekend, and I had a bunch of appearances, and there was, I guess, half-ass rumors, you might have something there, might be something, but nothing was concrete. I had Shawn Michaels’ panel for his documentary, check it out on Peacock, so they had me out there for that. So that was, I think, on Saturday in the morning, and I still didn’t know what was happening. My hotel ended Saturday night, so my flight was that day. So I finished the interview, and after that they were like, ‘Hey, you’re staying, something’s going on Monday.’ But still nothing. I had no clue, and I had already been to SmackDown before and done backstages at Raw, so for me I was like, oh, okay, they just have me doing something or sitting in the crowd and waving or whatever. So they said something was gonna happen, I said, oh crap. So I called my family and just by luck, my mom was on vacation in Florida at their spot, and I was like, do you mind driving down two hours to my place to watch the kids, so I can fly my wife? I think I’m doing something on Monday Night Raw, and she’s like, yeah, sure. So, last minute, get my wife a flight, fly her to Vegas, and then we end up going out for some crazy dinner, and as soon as I got back from eating 10,000 calories, they were like oh yeah you have a match tomorrow. But I literally found out either like the morning of or like very late the night before.”

People are very upset that you changed your entrance theme.

“Good! screw them. It sucked. Everyone just wants to take everything and make it their own. Guys, this is professional wrestling. This is not some sing-song happy time. The way wrestling is now, music starts and everyone thinks that they have the right to play along, like it’s for them or something. But every wrestler has some catchy tune, everyone sings, so I come out and everyone was going ‘Ego!’ right away, and then they turned it into ‘asshole’, which you’re killing my entrance, especially on CW Network, where NXT is airing the whole time, where people are supposed to be talking about me, the commentators, legendary Booker T. Nobody’s hearing what he’s saying, because the crowd is doing what they want. They are literally cutting the audio. I have full entrances where you can’t hear anything.”

What is Ethan Page grateful for?

“People’s generosity, my family, and my youth.”

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Finn Bálor (@finnbalor) is a professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE and NJPW. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in London to discuss his journey from Ireland to WWE, if he thought about leaving New Japan earlier than he did, winning the Universal Championship and vacating the title the next day, how he stays in great shape, getting his head split open at WrestleMania 39, his last-minute match with AJ Styles, missing out a match with Bray Wyatt, wrestling CM Punk in Ireland, and more!

Have you worked a “real job”?

“Yeah, I started my first job when I was 16; I worked at a cleaning contracting company. So my uncle worked at the maintenance department, so he got me a job in there, where all the floor buffers that were broken, they get broken a lot, because people buff over the cable, and they cut the cable. So I would have to replace the cables and troubleshoot all the electrics in it, and of course I electrocuted myself, which in Europe is like 220-volt, that hurt! From there I got a job at Tesco, which is a supermarket like Walmart or something. Then I worked in the family business, which is the railway in Ireland. So my family work on the railway. So, I sold train tickets and did the announcements for the trains. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next train to Belfast is at 11 o’clock on platform two. Please board in 10 minutes.’”

Was it also free train tickets to go wherever you needed to go?

“Yeah, and actually you could take free train tickets all around Europe. Then there was also a certain amount of passes that you could take the ferry, which is from Ireland to England, so I could travel from Ireland to England, then take the train, and then go to training pretty much for free. So that’s how I was able to kind of fund my training.”

I put up a photo saying you haven’t aged. You had a one-word caption on that photo: consistency. You talked about it’s eating right, and it’s putting in the work and all of those different things. What does a day of eating look like for you?

“So there’s this huge belief that I’m a no-carbs guy, and I was for a long time, from like 2010 when I met one of my good friends, John Anderson, who I wrestled with in New Japan. He said, ‘Brother, you got to go on no carbs if you want to take it to the next level.’ So I went on no carbs from like 2010 till about 2022, pretty much keto. So I was doing that for a long time, and then myself and Chad Gable are best buddies, and I think we were in the run-up to Mania or something; everyone’s doing this Mania prep every year, and I just would always do everything the same all the time. ‘I don’t get ready, I stay ready.’ That’s the quote. He said, dude, just add in some carbs, maybe a carb drink in your workout, so that was the beginning of me reintroducing carbs. So probably for the last two years I’m pretty much on a regular diet, I would say. So breakfast will be like three full eggs, half an avocado, either some Greek yogurt and berries or some cottage cheese. Hopefully two hours later I’ll work out. Pre-workout will be like beetroot juice or pomegranate juice with some honey. I’ll work out. After the workout, I’ll have a shake and a banana. Then within an hour I’ll have like either a piece of chicken and rice or a piece of fish and rice, and then that will repeat again about two and a half hours later. Then before bed I’ll have some Greek yogurt again with berries, and that’ll be it.”

How do you feel like being married has changed you?

“It’s certainly made me more calm, more relaxed, and more fulfilled, and more happy.”

There’s something about doing all of this in life with somebody by your side

“We travel so much, and then going home to your person is so beautiful. And a lot of times when I’d be on the road, sometimes we’d be on the road two, three weeks at a time. I’d be going home, and you don’t really feel home, because it’s just a couch and a TV. But when I go home and she’s there, it just resets me completely. So, anytime, even if I get an opportunity to go home for like 22 hours. I’d fly back from Europe just to see her and fly back just to reset.”

How do you feel like your approach to wrestling has changed, or your mindset about wrestling has changed in your 20s, your 30s, and now your 40s?

“The 20s was you’re scratching and clawing, and you’re chasing, and you’re like, oh my god, but you don’t really feel like you belong, and you feel like everyone’s like, ‘What’s this little kid doing here?’ In the 30s, it was like this is going to end soon. I’m going to burn the back axle out of this, similar to what JD was saying when he was on here, it’s like I’m going to go out there and I’m going to give it everything every single night. I don’t care about what happens tomorrow. Now in my 40s, I feel like I’m a little bit more economical with my movements and my moves, and I feel like I’ve been very lucky to have learned from some incredible people who taught me some skills, not necessarily physical skills, like our techniques, but a mindset that can prolong my career. I always tell a story about when I went to the Performance Center. I started with NXT I think I was 34, which was quite late to start. WWE had came knocking a couple times, and I’d always kind of kicked it back, because I was very happy in New Japan, wanted to do my whole career there, and I was trying to negotiate a 10-year contract, and there was an issue. This was when I was 34; I was trying to negotiate a 10-year contract to stay there for the rest of my life. Then there was an issue, because New Japan was owned by another company, and that contract only lasted for four years, so they could only give me a four-year contract. I’d been there like eight years, and I’d seen how when guys got to like their mid to late 30s, they kind of phased them out. I thought, well, this will get me to my mid to late 30s, and I’ll be phased out, and I want to wrestle longer than that. I’m 34 and this is 12 years ago in WWE, where the roster was a lot younger, they were signing much younger guys, and I thought, oh, this could be my last opportunity, so that’s kind of the mindset I had. I was talking with my dad about the decision: should I roll the dice in WWE, or should I stay in New Japan? I’ll never forget my dad said, ‘Son, you grew up watching WWF, that was your dream, you’re in Japan, you’re doing great, you’ve done it for eight years, but roll the dice.’ I’m glad I did.”

If you were thinking in your 30s about I can’t do this forever, is that still in your mind now?

“In my 20s, I thought if I make it to 30, it’ll be awesome as a wrestler, and in life, I guess [laughs]. Then in my 30s, I thought, well 40, that’ll be really incredible. Right now, I feel better now than I did in my early 30s, and going back to what I was saying earlier about signing with NXT, a lot of people were of the opinion of, hey, he’s an experienced guy, knows exactly what he’s doing in the ring, why is he in NXT? He’s wasting his time in NXT. You hear this so much, and I started to maybe believe it as well, and also, why am I in this Performance Center doing roll after roll and leap frog after drop down, drop down, and run these drills? I just wrestled Ibushi in front of 42,000 people at the Tokyo Dome like four weeks ago, and now I’m in the Performance Center in a factory doing drills with kids who’ve never wrestled. This was going on for about three months to the point where I think I showed up one Monday morning at 8 am for practice, and Terry Taylor was my coach, who I cannot speak highly more highly about, he’s absolutely incredible. I said, ‘Terry, I don’t want to be here. I feel like I’m just wasting my career. I’m 34, I need to be wrestling.’ He said, ‘Finn, I’m teaching you a style that you can perform for another 10 years. If you continue wrestling the way you’ve been wrestling in New Japan, you’ll last about two more years, and I want you to last longer than that.’ So he was very instrumental in kind of helping me tweak my style to be more economical with my movements, with my moves, and really to go from being a good wrestler to being a star, and that’s the person who I credit with that, and he taught me so much. I cannot speak more highly about Terry Taylor.”

If the milestones were get to 30, get to 40, is it now get to 50?

“Now it’s just get to having fun and make sure that I don’t want to overstay my welcome. I still feel pretty good. I don’t feel like I’ve slowed down too much. Well, I don’t know, because I don’t watch my matches back, because I cringe so much.”

Have you watched back winning the Universal Championship?

“No.”

You’ve never watched that match!?

“No, and you know what, I get tagged in tweets daily of that spot, and I’ll scroll away before I hit the wall. I don’t like seeing it.”

You don’t like seeing it, because it brings back a memory?

“It’s just like, why dwell on the past? You should be looking forward, you can’t change the past, it happened. So what?”

When you won that match, in that match, on a scale of one to 10, what kind of pain are you in?

“No pain, but I knew there was a big issue, and it actually came out like three more times in the match, because any time I lifted my arm to hit the ropes, it came out. I remember I got whipped to the buckle one time it came out. So I don’t know if I’ve ever told this story, and I’m not sure if I should, but I remember at one point in the match, so me and Seth, I was very lucky to be in there with Seth when it happened, because Seth is an absolute pro, and we were able to communicate, and I was able to tell him, hey, I’m hurt, so we were kind of calling the match on the fly and editing spots and changing spots and talking the whole time, so the match that we’d done wasn’t actually the match that we’d laid out.

I must give Seth credit, because there was a point, we were outside the ring and I was rolling him back into the ring, and I said, ‘Dude, I’m hurt. I don’t think I’m gonna be wrestling for a while. Do you want to switch to finish?’ And he said, ‘No, stick to the plan.’ I just rolled him back in, and we stuck to the plan. I often wonder what that would have done for my career if we had switched the finish.”

In what way? 

“Well, we’re still talking about this 10 years later, right? Everywhere I go, every interview I do, I get the question, ‘Hey, what would have happened if you hadn’t got injured because you were the champ?’ But if I’d got injured and lost and just went away for nine months, there’d be no like sympathy from the fans, there’d be no what ifs.”

The other what if in that match is if you change the finish, do you ever become WWE Champion?

“I could have been let go six months later before I even came back. Who knows? One thing that does bug me is that some people say, ‘Oh, that guy’s injury prone.’ One major injury my whole career, 24 years, apart from a broken jaw, which is a complete accident.”

It’s not like you tore a muscle running the ropes

“I’ve torn plenty of muscles, trust me. Yeah, actually, I think we are going to talk about the Edge cage match? So three weeks before WrestleMania 39 I get asked to do an impromptu [match]. I’m a Raw performer, but they say, ‘Hey, can you come to SmackDown and do a match on SmackDown? It’s like a six-man tag or something. I remember I grabbed Cruz Del Toro in a front face lock, and I stepped backwards to tag Damian, and as I stepped backwards, I tore my calf. At first I thought like Cruz was messing with me and slapping me in the back of the leg, and then I looked down and his arms were around my waist. I’m like, oh no, this is bad. So I tagged out, and I’m on the apron, I’m stretching it a little bit. Doesn’t feel too bad but I got to get back in there. I’m like doing the math in my head. How long to WrestleMania? How long does a calf injury take to repair?”

While you were on the apron?

“Yeah. I finished the match, and I probably made it worse by finishing the match, because you put more stress through the tear, and people don’t know I was on one of those little scooters for three weeks. We did a promo two weeks before Mania on Raw, and the way we did it, I think Edge was in the ring, and they just brought me out on the stage, but we shot around it, where I kind of like limped out and just stood there, stood on the stage, going, ‘I’ll see you in two weeks at WrestleMania,’ or whatever, and then they killed the lights and I hobbled back, got on my little scooter in the backstage. So there’s lots of little injuries that all the boys are dealing with all the time, and we’re trying to work around.”

Did you know you’d get to WrestleMania 39?

“No. It was a conversation with Bruce the next week; it was actually right before that promo that we were doing. ‘Hey, can you make it? It’s two weeks away.’ I said, dude, I can make it. Just trust me, I can make it. I’m not missing WrestleMania.”

How confident were you? 

“I was not that confident, but I was at the Performance Center every day. We have a great medical team down there, and really, the guys down there got me right, it was right on the limit. The day of, I was strapped up, I couldn’t really flex my foot the way it was strapped, and it did get helped by the fact that it was a cage match, and they didn’t have to move around so much. Actually, a similar thing happened this year at WrestleMania with Dom. I had gotten beat up by the Judgment Day. I think I’d been out for a week. Dom was having a match against Penta on Raw. It’s like three weeks before Mania. I do the run-in, I come back, I beat up JD, I beat up Dom, I throw him over the top rope, and I’m in street clothes. I’m gonna do the dive over the top rope, but I’m in street clothes. So, as I’m running, I wear baggier T-shirts, and I go oh, I haven’t done the dive in a while, and I wonder, is this T-shirt gonna get snagged on the top rope, and am I gonna get stuck like Top Dolla? This was going through my head as I’m running against the ropes, so as I’m coming back I see the boys outside the ring. I said I gotta jump extra high and I gotta tuck faster than I normally tuck, because I normally kind of extend a little bit, but I tucked early and as I tucked, I popped a rib right in the air, not on the landing, or when they caught me, in the air. I popped the rib, and I remember the boys caught me, great, put me down. I stood up, I fired up like this, and I said, f*ck, I popped the rib, no! Then again, same situation, three weeks to Mania. How long does the rib take to heal? Oh, sh*t! So then now it was again just this last WrestleMania, it was race against time to get the rib. The problem with the rib recovery is you can’t do anything, there’s no rehab, you can’t do anything really. So it was kind of touch and go, and that was kind of a factor into why the match was changed to a street fight because I was able to rely more on the toys, the weapons and stuff, than have to actually, you know, wrist locks and twists and rolls and stuff like that.”

So, do you wrestle hurt?

“Yeah, but everyone wrestles hurt, everyone’s dealing with some issue. So I’m not trying to put myself over from being some badass, everyone wrestles hurt, but a lot of people don’t hear these little stories of like the little issues that we go through to get out there.”

In that WrestleMania 39 match, was there ever a point where the match was about to be called off because you were bleeding?

“So me and Edge had spoke before the match, and I said, ‘Hey, dude, if you want to throw the ladder at me…’ There was a spot where he was gonna hit me with the ladder. I said, ‘Dude, if I’ve got my back to you, just throw it and hit me in the back. If I turn, just hit me with it.’ So I’d still got my back [turned], and he starts throwing it, but I guess I turned at the wrong moment, and then no problem, I just put my hands up and block it. But it’s a ladder, it’s not a chair, so the rungs were here and here, and it just went right through my hands, and in that moment, my brain couldn’t understand why it was still coming towards me, because my hands were up. I was like, what’s going on here? So it just went and it hit me. I was like, that stung, but it’s fine. So, I’m just selling on the ring, and then referee Shawn Bennett comes over, and he goes, ‘Buddy, you okay?’ I said, yeah, I’m fine. He goes, ‘What day is it? I said, ‘It’s WrestleMania, dude.’ You sure you’re okay? I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Dude, you’re carved open.’ I’m like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. [He said] ‘They’re telling me we’re gonna stop the match if you don’t get treatment.’ I’m like, ‘Don’t stop the match, I’m fine.’ They bring the doc into the cage, so I crawl over to the edge of the ring, where the door is for the cage, right? So now the doctor is trying to get in the door, but the door is locked. They opened the door, then she left her medical bag outside because she didn’t realize it’s so bad. They needed to staple me up. So then she has to go back out the door, which is on the ramp side, around the cage, over to the bell keeper’s to get the medical kit, she goes back in the door, and there’s a camera here. Now, I don’t know if the red light’s on or not. Now, thankfully, Edge, super experienced, realized there’s an issue, so he goes outside, keeps the cameras busy by looking under the ring, taking out toys, throwing them in the ring. Meanwhile, the doctor’s going, ‘Dude, you’re split open, like we got to staple it.’ I said, ‘What are you waiting for? Staple it.’ She goes, ‘It’s gonna hurt.’ It’s WrestleMania doc. But at this point, then the camera comes around and it’s here, and I guess they were just shooting, but it wasn’t live, but I can’t see if the red lights are on or not, because I’m looking at the doc, so I started saying to her, [in Demon voice] ‘Staple it!’ Because I go into Demon character, to where the doc Michelle just goes [frightened], because she’d never seen me perform as a Demon before, it would have been a while, and she was like new at the company, so we always kind of giggle about that, but yeah, the staples went in. Finished the match. It was fine. I’m sure that footage lives somewhere.”

What hurt more, the ladder to the head or the staples?

“Neither really hurt at all. In that moment, nothing hurts. If something hurts in the ring, you know that’s a serious injury. If you really feel it, most stuff you don’t feel until the next day.”

It’s easy to look back now with hindsight at how big the Bullet Club was, but when you were forming it, did you realize the implications it might have?

“No, not at all. I just wanted to have fun, and originally Bullet Club wasn’t supposed to be Bullet Club, it was supposed to be just me and [Bad Luck] Fale. So I’d been a babyface for six years in New Japan, they wanted to turn me heel, and that was one thing then that made me stay in New Japan. So I was kind of thinking about, oh, maybe it’s time to try WWE now, I’ve done everything in New Japan that I felt like I could possibly achieve. But then the idea came. ‘Hey, would you like to turn heel?’ I was like oh, this is something new, now I can be a heel in New Japan. I can learn more. So that’s kind of what made me stay, and within like two weeks of having the conversation of putting me and Fale together, it was Gedo’s idea, who was the booker at the time, said, ’Hey, you’re always with Karl Anderson, you’re always with Tama. You guys are always together, why don’t we make you guys a group, come up with a name? So I kind of went to the three guys and said, ‘Hey, do you guys have any ideas for the name?’ They said, ‘Nah, you deal with that, dude.’ That’s your department, so I went home, brainstormed a couple different names, landed on Bullet Club. Once I turned heel, I think it was crazy, because we had so much heat. I remember Fale would be carrying me out on his shoulders at Korakuen Hall, and he kind of had to walk through the crowd, and there’d be fans hitting me in the leg, punching me in the leg, giving me dead legs, and then those fans, so many fans, were calling the office to complain about Prince Devitt cheating to win matches that they had to set up a separate phone line to take complaints. Because there’s so much respect, and I guess it wasn’t something that was done commonly, or at least recently in New Japan. So that was like lightning in a bottle, and it was such a short run for me in Bullet Club, but I look back on it super fondly.”

Is it true the Judgment Day was going to be called Street Trash?

“No, so that came from there being a program at Gunther, I think it was Gunther and Dom, and he referred to us all as street trash, and we said let’s just lean into it, we’re the Judgment Day, we’re street trash, and we kind of just leaned into it, but it didn’t really catch on, yeah. People remember, like Bullet Club and The Demon; they don’t remember like Street Trash. It’s not all like home runs.”

What’s the longest amount of time you spent in makeup putting on The Demon?

“Probably six hours.”

And then how long to take it all off?

“I’ll tell you a story. So, we did a photo shoot at the Performance Center. It was like a test paint on a photo shoot at the Performance Center. This was when I was in NXT, and we did it on a Friday; the paint team had come, and they painted me up, but then I was going to train in it, do photos, work around, make sure it doesn’t come off on the canvas, and stuff like that. So, after we’d done it, the team had gone, but they also didn’t leave the remover, which you need a very specific remover, because it’s alcohol-based paint. I can stand in the shower for an hour, and it’ll just be perfectly on me. You kind of have to sweat it out through your pores, and then you need like an alcohol solution to break it down, so it really chaffs your skin, you’ll be really red after it, and stuff. But they’d gone. But this is a Friday night in Orlando, and my sister’s getting married on Saturday in Ireland. So I have to catch a red eye at 10 o’clock from Orlando to Ireland, so we finished the shooting at 6 o’clock, run back to my apartment. I’m showering, I’m scrubbing my face, I get out of the shower, and I look in the mirror, there’s teeth and everything here, there’s a big eye on my back. I’m like, I gotta go to the airport, my sister’s getting married, so I get dressed. There’s still a demon on me here. I’ve got it mostly off my face. Fly to Ireland, land, run home to my parents’ house, get the suit on, put this shirt and tie on. I go to the church, but little did anyone know, if I had to unbutton my shirt, there’s still the demon under [my shirt]. But thankfully she got married by a humanist, she’s very out there a little bit, and so it wasn’t actually a church, and it wasn’t per se, a religious ceremony, so that gives me a little bit more. 

When did you finally get it off?

“The next couple of days. I’ve never told this story before, either. We did the Demon in Saudi Arabia. I wrestled Andrade, and we’ve promoted the match, we fly to Saudi. I’m getting painted, this paint doesn’t feel like the normal paint. What’s going on? I asked the girl that was doing it at the time, I said, ‘Is this the normal paint? It doesn’t feel right.’ She goes, ‘Oh no. They told me I couldn’t bring the normal paint because it has alcohol in it. Alcohol is not legal here.’ I said, ‘Did anyone not think of telling me because I’m the one that has to wrestle in this?’ She goes, ‘Oh no, but I have a solution.’ What’s the solution? ‘Well, if we use hairspray all over you, it kind of sets it a little bit more.’ Okay, well, you’re an expert. So they paint me, they cover me in hairspray. It’s also Saudi Arabia outdoors, so it’s like 100 degrees. So pretty much by the time I’ve gotten to the ring, it’s starting to come off. So then we do the match, it’s a physical match, we’re sweating like crazy. I start as The Demon, I end as Finn in the match. No problem. So we get through the match, no injuries, fantastic, that’s all I’m happy about. Later on in the show was Undertaker Goldberg, and I’m watching a match backstage, in a hallway. I’m like looking at the screen, and I’m like, did something hit a smoke machine in here, it felt like it was being smoked up on the entrance. But it wasn’t, it was just my eyes, because what had happened was the hairspray had ran into my eyes and burnt my retinas. I went blind; I was essentially blind where I had to be linked by the guys, brought out of the building, linked by the guys, just carried up the steps onto the charter. I couldn’t see on the flight. We landed in Germany to refuel the plane. The doc had to leave the plane, go to a chemist, get some special medicine to heal my eyes. Then we flew when we landed in San Francisco, like 15 hours later, and it was just starting to unblur. But I guess all that hairspray had irritated my iris so much that I couldn’t see. That was probably the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me in wrestling.”

Were we ever close to getting the demon versus The Fiend?

“Yeah, I think that was certainly in the works, and something that I always think about and look back on and say, I’ve been very lucky to have had almost every match that I’ve ever wanted to have. But that’s one that I didn’t get to have, and we almost got Sister Abigail versus the demon, and Wyndham had gotten sick a couple of days before we had to switch that match out at short notice.”

But what a match that ended up turning into. You versus AJ Styles, it’s incredible!

“Yeah, and I think that was like our first match ever. AJ is someone who I’ve looked up to my whole career, someone who I’ve admired. You can kind of look up to people, but not really relate to them, like, you know, I’ve always looked up to John Cena as the pinnacle of being like a WWE superstar, but I don’t really relate to him, in the sense of our journeys have been slightly different, the way we work is different. But AJ, I feel like we’re very, very similar. I was just like a couple years behind them, so someone who I’ve always like admired and aspired to be like. So getting to go in the ring with AJ that night was absolutely amazing.”

What’s the story behind the “Finn Freeze” pose you do in photos?

“It was a spontaneous moment, so we were talking about space earlier, and I’d recently moved to Florida, and Kennedy Space Center is just down the road. So I went to Kennedy Space Center with one of my buddies, and he said, ‘Ah, Ferg, take a picture in front of the rocket.’ There’s a big giant like Atlantis rocket or something, and I was just instinctive. I was standing in front of a rocket, and I was like, what does an astronaut do? That was the first one. I posted it and I guess a lot of people laughed at it and caught on. I just started doing it from then, but that’s like how it started. It was complete happenstance. I stopped doing it when I turned heel. No, I’m gonna be a bad heel, and I wanted to like change everything, and that’s why we changed the music and changed the gear and everything. But yeah, that’s where the pose came from.”

What is Finn Balor grateful for?

“My family, my health and my job.”

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The Great Khali (@thegreatkhali) is an actor and WWE Hall of Famer. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Houston, TX to discuss being one of the most famous people in India, how he got signed by WWE, debuting with The Undertaker, transitioning from a giant into a comedy character, starring in movies “The Longest Yard” and “Get Smart”, the origin of The Punjabi Prison match, winning the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, getting inducted into the Hall of Fame, whether he has retired, and more!

Quotes have been edited for clarity.

What does life look like for you when you’re this tall? How do you fly on an aeroplane?

“Yeah, man, this is very hard, especially when I go international. Very tough, because the flight is business class, very small, so my legs. I can sleep, very hard, not easy.”

What about when you rent a car?

“Rental car is a little problem, but still there.”

Are you officially retired in wrestling?

“Yeah.”

Do you think there would ever be a chance you’d come back for a Royal Rumble spot or something like that?

“You never know. Maybe WWE will ask me one day if I can go. Just 1-2 days, not full-time, never, because of my knee, so I can’t go full time.”

How are your knees right now?

“Still here, I just want to take a break for a little bit. Then I want surgery, but I’m just busy every day.”

Are you in pain right now?

“I’m sitting in no pain. But when I especially take the stairs there’s pain, and when I stand for a long time, there’s pain. Otherwise, I’m fine. This is okay. I can do exercise, I can do anything, only when I walk and take stairs, there is pain.”

How did you get discovered by WWE?

“I started bodybuilding, so my coach, everybody says, ‘Oh man, he looks like Kane. Oh my god, man, he looks like Big Show.’ Because I’m very big, very strong. So everybody says  ‘Oh man, you look like a WWE guy. So me and my coach email different schools. So one school responds back, a school from California San Francisco. I send a resume; my arms are 24 [inch] my legs are 35 my chest is a 64. He said okay, if you had that kind of guy, then you can make lots of money per year, so then I start. I will make money, man. I work a police job, but not have that much money. Police job, Punjab police, but little money. So if you have this size guy, you can make a lot of money. So then I come here.”

Did you speak any English when you moved to the United States?

“I might not understand, but I can speak.”

I feel like The Longest Yard changed your life. How did you get cast for that movie?

“I work in Japan, so they are casting the movie. He needs a big guy for the big guys. Goldberg, Stone Cold, Kevin Nash… So he finds me and says, ‘Hey, come over, I want to check how you are. So I just come, he says this is the perfect guy. So speaking English doesn’t matter. You are my guy, you are my man!’ Then he selected me.”

Is it safe to say you’re one of the most famous people in India?

“Yeah, there is a different culture. But I’m the only wrestler, and I think as a top wrestler, and famous, Indian people love me.”

How was the plan for you to debut against The Undertaker? Because what a shot! Undertaker is huge, and then you come out and you’re bigger than him, so how did that plan come together for you to work with the Undertaker in your debut?

“This was the idea of Vince McMahon. I want to say thank you to Vince McMahon. So many guys say bad things about Vince, I say he is a real man. He’s a very hardcore businessman; he never lied to me. He made me a star. I never forget that. Very excited and I’m so happy when I debuted. So Mark Henry had the Undertaker match, then I go out. So first face to face, he started giving two or three chops, I give you this big chop, Great Khali chop, then he’s down. This moment was an emotional moment because when I start wrestling, that’s my dream come true to work for WWE. Undertaker is a huge name, so I chop him, so that’s a very big thing for me.”

Who was your favorite opponent to work with?

“I think John Cena and Triple H. I’m very excited. They never complain, never say, ‘You hit hard. Why do you do this? Why not do this?’ John Cena never complained, Triple H never complained, other guys, some small complaints.”

You went from being serious to being a comedy wrestler. When did that change happen?

“After WWE finds out Khali wants to leave, so then he made me a comedy wrestler, because he wants to kill my character. When I start wrestling in WWE, all of India watches wrestling. Everyone, kids, women, men, young and old. So he’s thinking he wants to leave, so he made me a comedy wrestler.”

Vince McMahon thought you wanted to leave?

“I think so, because I wanted to work on my own thing.” 

When you left WWE in 2014, were you done?

“Yeah, I wanted to work on my own things.”

You are loved by the fans. Why do think that is?

“I have some commandment, then I deliver this thing. You know, I have almost 200 commercials. So I make more money now than I made in WWE. I do so many commercials. Every week I shoot a commercial.”

Can you tell me about the Punjabi prison match? How did this become a thing?

“Punjabi prison match. First, when I had the Punjabi prison match set up for me and Undertaker. They called me. ‘You can’t work this one.’ I said, man, come on, man. I think 2 days before [he called me]. Oh, you can’t work Undertaker. I said, come on, why? ‘You have something wrong with your blood.’ I’m so sad. I don’t know what happened. So I was there. So Undertaker and Big Show in that ring are practising. You can’t work, Big Show and Undertaker work in this Prison match. I said this is a bad decision. All the things build, then 2 days before they say you can’t work. Some health issue.”

WWE made it seem like you came up with the Punjabi prison match. Did you have any idea what this match would look like? 

“My character is Punjabi. Everybody say he worked in the Punjab police, so the idea came from there. It’s bamboo or something.” 

How did you become The Great Khali?

“Vince McMahon. Vince said Great Gandhi or Great Khali. I said I can choose Gandhi, but Gandhi is a peaceful guy.”

You remember dressing up as the tooth fairy with that segment with The Rock?

“Oh man, that’s so bad. Well, you know, whatever. I feel a little embarrassed, tried to kill my character.”

If you had it your way, you would have continued to be just like a monster, a bad guy, not the comedy character?

“I think so, I don’t know, maybe a couple more years.”

What keeps you busy now? You own restaurants, you own hotels. What other businesses are you doing in India?

“I do property business, real estate, and shoot commercials.”

It looked so real when you crushed Rey Mysterio’s head!

“That match, I remember it was in San Antonio. Khali and Rey went face to face, they are booing me, cheering Rey Mysterio. I squeeze him, vice grip, he goes down. After, I go in the parking lot and people are throwing rocks, ‘You motherf*cker!’ So many people. All the guys, ‘You motherf*cker! You suck!’ I remember one time Dominik was backstage, I said, ‘You like me?’ He nodded. Somebody then said, ‘He doesn’t.’That was funny.”

What is Great Khali grateful for?

“My life, my wife and kids.”

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Jeff Jarrett (@RealJeffJarrett) is an AEW wrestler, WWE Hall of Famer and the founder of TNA Wrestling. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Nashville, TN to discuss him and TNA being featured on “Dark Side of the Ring”, being fired on WWE TV, where the six-sided ring came from, his current relationship with Dixie Carter, wrestling Chyna in WWE and TNA, his favorite guitar shots, being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, Taylor Swift babysitting his kids, and more!

This Dark Side of the Ring Season Seven is coming out on July 7. There’s three episodes about you and TNA, and everything around that, and it’s crazy because I feel like they’re just scratching the surface too.

“What’s bizarre is I have been a fan of the show, but I wasn’t out of the gate. Because look, being a third-generation guy, it has told stories that don’t reflect maybe the best light on the industry. But as you kind of dig in season after season, I remember Dutch Mantel enlightened me, and then, of course, the Owen episode, and just different episodes, and I’ve done a few. It’s done in an in-depth, very respectful way. So when they approached me it was like, oh, wow, I’m being approached about a Dark Side of the Ring, and I’ve watched plenty of episodes, and a lot of folks candidly don’t get the opportunity to maybe talk about the light side. There’s a dark side, but my story, as it sits today, it went through some dark components, but coming out of it, I’m very grateful. So, when they approached me, I thought it was really interesting, and you just assume one episode, and we got into, hey, we may end up doing two episodes, and then hey, we may end up doing three episodes. I first thought it was on me, and then when you hear, I’ll call it the other part of the story, the back story, or whatever it may be, that kind of came to light, Evan [Husney] had planned to kind of do a TNA story, and then maybe a Jeff story. Then as they got into it, the network was like, “Hey, man, this is the story.’”

Well, you can’t tell the story of TNA without telling the story of Jeff Jarrett, and they even say it in Dark Side of the Ring: TNA was built out of desperation. Because at that point in time you’d just been fired from WWE, there was nowhere else for you to go at this point.

“Well, it’s funny, we were talking before the cameras rolling about being misunderstood. Being fired, and I’ve been let go, fired numerous times. But the reality was Vince did “fire” me on TV, but I was still going to have a contract for the next seven or eight nine months. So that was a storyline that has grown that Jeff got fired, started TNA. The reality was I was paid through the end of October, and when that was over, I kind of sat back and said, okay. I never made a call to say, ‘Hey JR, Vince, you got a job for me?’ You just kind of look back and know your place in the industry and go, you have no leverage, none. It certainly wasn’t a wrestler’s market. Vince, without a number two, there is no number one. It was Vince owning the entire game, and so that is really the thought process that went through my mind is there’s a real opportunity here. So it’s just one of those things that TNA, just the narrative that is out there, as you say, it built out of desperation. I believe it was built out of an opportunity.”

Do you feel like you’re misunderstood?

“You know, one of the things in sobriety that you really have to drill down on is that I can’t control how other people perceive me, whether they understand me or not. But I will say this: my podcast partner, Conrad Thompson, who obviously I’ve done a podcast every week for five years. When he first approached me, he said, ‘Jeff, you are the most misunderstood wrestling personality I believe in the history of the business.’ That kind of hit me, that’s interesting. For better or worse, I see the wrestling business or I see life through Jeff’s eyes, obviously, but the misunderstood part kind of struck me, in that I can see where Conrad, or you, or others would say that. It started before I went national, and going to the WWF. In the territory days, there’s some folks that knew back then he’s the promoter’s kid, he’s got everything easy, if you talk to the ones that were really around, they would tell you different, and me and my father’s relationship paid for that, and he went out of his way. As I sit here today, I’m very grateful, but he made it a point to make it harder on me than any of the other boys, and I know now why, it was based on the promoter he worked for, Nick Gulas. Nick Gulas had a son named George, and Nick gave his son George any and everything he wanted, and kind of saw how that wasn’t good for George, and certainly wasn’t good for the promotion. So that’s part of me being misunderstood started kind of from day one, and so it’s a part of my makeup that I just know you got to roll with it, and it is what it is.” 

Is it also the balance in TNA of being the owner of the company and also being the top guy? Do you give yourself the championship? If so, how many times? 

“That is something that internally, even Dixie weighed in as we got going along in that I would always stop folks when it really got into a discussion, Dutch Mantel, Vince Russo, Jeremy Borash, Scott D’Amore, folks that were in the room, they were well aware. But when I had to really have that conversation when I knew that it probably needed to be said, I would look at somebody and say, Do you really think that Jeff Jarrett, who has the most money at risk, is going to make a decision based on ego rather than dollars and cents? My money’s at stake. I’m the single largest shareholder of the promotion. I have a fiduciary responsibility to my investors. It was such nonsense and the thought process that he is making himself champion for glory is laughable, especially me being a third-generation guy, and being around the business since a little kid, and it was always so laughable. But again it was something I couldn’t control, so it was what it was.”

Do you feel like you have regrets about the way you booked yourself in TNA?

“None. My track record, I’ll say this: our track record speaks for itself. We went from a Wednesday night pay-per-view only, to Fox Sports Net, to one hour on a Saturday night off prime on Spike TV, to a one hour on Thursday nights off prime, to a one hour prime time, to a two hour of prime time under my leadership. So during that build, and this is what Conrad always gets fascinated by, like, the numbers and the budgets that we worked under. We worked under shoestring budgets. Whether it’s a Conrad Thompson or a Jim Cornette or Dutch or others that work in the middle of it, they understood that the only person that I can guarantee will not walk out and go to the WWE is myself. Also, my philosophy in booking is the babyface chase. I think you have to look at the landscape, and WWE has always had, for the most part, that babyface champion, a touring champion that’s a babyface. I didn’t necessarily think that it fit our model. We had four distinct divisions, and I wanted a heel champion where the babyfaces were chasing, namely an AJ Styles, as we were developing talent.”

The six-sided ring was incredible, and I love the idea that if you’re flicking channels and you see the six-sided ring, it makes you stop. What’s that? That’s different. Where did that idea come from?

“Antonio Peña is a big Double J fan, God bless him, God rest his soul. But we had done a talent exchange, X-Division in the Asylum days, and he came up and he kind of laid out, ‘Jeff, I want to bring you to Mexico and obviously be the antagonist, be a big heel, the American businessman.’ I could remember him explaining, and someone there that was completely bilingual, he went into ‘Jeff, we want to portray you as not only the King of the Mountain wrestler, but also an American businessman that is coming to take over.’ So he really laid the ground floor. So brought me down there, became red hot as a heel, but I can remember showing up for one of the big shows, and there sits the six-sided ring, and this is where timing in our industry sounds so cliché, but timing is everything. I was down there, and I knew that we were in a transition period, about to go to Orlando, just all the different moving parts. Again, the MMA world, we’re now 20-plus years in. If you go back to those days where MMA sat, it was red hot, really hot, and really coming on the scene. So the Octagon was this cool-looking vibe, and these warriors get in there and battle it out, and then I just looked at the six-sided ring and said, okay, this is going to differentiate us from the WWE. It’s going to differentiate us from every other promotion, certainly WCW back in the day, it’s going to be different. And so, when I looked at that from that perspective, I immediately knew I’m taking this back home.”

How’s your relationship with Dixie Carter now?

“It has always been strained. Since before my first wife’s passing, I would say it’s been strained, but I had so much respect for her position. That is the investor’s daughter, in the investor Bob Carter, and Janice played a huge role, and that’s where the talk about stuff being misunderstood that you often hear about Bob Carter, but very few people really understand what a role Jan is. They were a team, they’re a husband and wife, but also a team. But I respected Dixie, and knew that, okay, that’s the financial partner’s daughter. I’ve got daughters, I respected that. So I always handled that situation, and despite what she thought, I tried to look out for her over and over and over. But I mean, talking about Dark Side, the producers had tried to get Dixie to be a part of the Dark Side, to my understanding, multiple times, and she said no, or didn’t call back, or whatever it was. We were on a phone call, and I said, ‘Hey, guys, do y’all want me to call Dixie and try to get her on the show?’ ‘Well, yeah, we weren’t going to come out and ask you.’ I mean, Dixie’s kids, and my sister and brother’s kids, and before my dad’s passing, they live in South Nashville. The kids went to school together. They saw each other socially, so I had no problem, and I’ve seen Dixie occasionally. But I just text her and I said, ‘Hey, have you got a few minutes? I’d love to chat.’ She said, ‘Yeah, give me a couple hours or something.’ So we jumped on the phone, and I told her, ‘Dixie, I know you’ve been asked to do Dark Side. All I really want to say is I’m encouraging you to sit down and tell your version, tell your truth.’ She’s like, ‘Well, I’m not real sure.’ She kind of indicated, I’ll paraphrase, you know, that part of her life is behind her, and all this. I said, ‘Dixie, here’s the real reality in this industry, there’s your truth, and they will say there’s multiple people that are on the show, their truth, and then somewhere in the middle, in there, there’s truth.’ I wanted her to understand that I thought it was in her best interest, and she didn’t tell me no, but she never came through.”

It’s interesting, because if you don’t meet Dixie Carter, TNA probably dies years ago. Because where are you going to get the funding?

“So this is where the narrative, if you will, in that I hadn’t even begun to look for money. So HealthSouth, and that’s another thing, you can only touch on it, and they did go from two to three hours, but you can only touch on so much in this, the HealthSotuh style story in and of itself. Richard Guru, a personal buddy of mine, basically started the funding and said, let me know when you need more type conversation, he was all into it. Well, six weeks into that, the business things go south for him. I never once picked up the phone and said, ‘Hey, Richard, I know you’re in trouble, but let’s figure out something for a bridge.’ There’s so many different avenues that I didn’t choose. When I knew the funding quit, and Richard, okay, I probably need to really think through that, so I immediately, out of respect for every one of my vendors, I didn’t want them a, to hear it from somebody else, b, I wanted to be as straight up and honest. That’s straight from my grandmother, look somebody in the eye and tell them bad news before you tell them good news, and they will respect you immensely. So I went to every vendor, anybody that was in that sphere, and Dixie was one of probably 15 stops that I made around town. The production company, the pyro folks, all the different folks that I knew, that okay, we’re retooling this thing quickly. I went to her and she sat back in her chair. I’ll never forget it, and she’s like, what are next steps? I said, ‘I’m going to go raise capital.’ She said, ‘Do you have any materials?’ I said, nope. She said, ‘Could you put something together?’ I said, I sure could. I had no idea who Bob Carter was, or Janice Carter, or Panda Funds, Panda Energy International. I had no idea that. We had a couple of conversations, but one serious conversation with the folks from Don King. Me and my father were going to go look for money banking that would have raked us over the coals, but that’s another thing that’s misunderstood, that if it wouldn’t been for Panda Energy International, TNA would have gone away. I’m not saying that’s a possibility, but it’s not fact.”

When TNA rebranded in 2024 when it went from Impact Wrestling back to TNA, do you know if there was any talk of bringing this six-sided ring back?

“I have no idea. I’ve told multiple people this story. ‘Hey, what do you think about that?’ I immediately said, about damn time. Yes, it is something that I believe in. This is where kind of a confirmation in that, and look, no need to debate it, but when they went from TNA wrestling and the name of the television show to call it Impact to Impact Wrestling. As a promoter or a marketer, you talk about the old adage, confuse them, you lose them. It just went south there. So 2017 going back, I had longer term plans, obviously that didn’t work out, but when they finally went back, my gut told me, and who knows. I don’t think I’ve even asked about this, but bringing the name back, I thought for sure the next thing that would follow would be a six-sided ring.”

When we talk about wrestling, giving you so much and taking from you, you were so close with Owen Hart. I don’t know if it’s talked about enough, but you were the match after he fell at Over the Edge. Talk to us about the emotions you had as you were going out there

“I’ve covered this a couple of different times. I can talk about it so much more clearly now than I could in Kansas City that afternoon. As Owen would always do, he would find a little nook and cranny. Anyway, we were dressing in kind of a makeup room connected to a bathroom, a little area. He had done the rehearsals, and I was after him, and they called him, ‘Owen, you got to go up, get up.’ So I’m in the dressing room by myself, doing what I always do, tape and getting stretched and all this. The screen came, ‘Jeff, you’re up now.’ I knew that wasn’t right. I’m just like, Owen, there’s no way he’s even had time to get to the ring. I was right, and you know, I just knew. Matt Miller busted in and said, ‘You’re up.’ I’m like, ‘Owen’s up.’ He goes, No. I said, ‘Well, what happened?’ He said he fell. That stopped the match, not good. He fell. So then there was a T-shirt. Grab my T-shirt, run down there. I knew how to promo beforehand, and as I’m walking through the backstage area, that is the heaviness, and I’ve processed this so many different times, I can live it, I have visualized it, I can visualize it. Kevin Kelly, we get in front, me and Deborah and have the interview, Owen’s being wheeled by 10 feet apart. Crazy emotions, hollering, and screaming, and you know 15-20 people following a gurney, and all this, and 3,2,1… Whatever I said, the heaviness was, which I had no idea, but it was on me, and then leave there, like the format process goes, go straight to the ring, and I remember walking out, doing my stuff, and getting up the ring, feeling the top rope, and it was like super, super loose. At the time, again, none of that really processed, and then I walked through the ring, I’m like, damn, but I didn’t really understand that at the time. Went through the match, and came back through the curtain, Matt and a cop were there, and I said, Let’s go. The cop said, ‘You want to get your stuff?’ I said, ‘Give me 30 seconds.’ I literally threw my stuff, got in the car and the cop is driving really fast and he didn’t answer my questions two or three times. I said, ‘Officer, please can you let me know anything? ‘And he just kind of looked over his shoulder and said, ‘It’s not good, Jeff.’ So again I’ve processed this, I didn’t grieve it at the time. In 2017 I went through a deep process to grieve it and really understanding what I went through then, because we went to the service in Calgary, stayed up all that night, went and did Raw the next day. It was go home, change your clothes, pack, go to Calgary, the service back at work.”

There’s a really interesting through line with you and Chyna. Your last match in WWE is with Chyna. Chyna’s last match ever is with you in TNA. What was it like working with Chyna?

“Oh man, God rest her soul. We were just talking about Owen and his wit, Chyna had a unique wit too. But she’s a funny girl, great personality. But it goes without saying, Attitude Era, maybe the height of it. When you look at DX Road Dogg with his intro and his braids and his look, and when you look at the group, Chyna with their build and their look, and again the things that we were doing during the Attitude Era to push the envelope, it didn’t get much more than a push to have a female fight a male for the belt that Randy Savage had, the belt that Ultimate Warrior had. The IC title is the working title; it’s the number two that’s going to take you to number one. The belt was well positioned, the way my character evolved in a lot of ways organically, because had Chyna not had all of her momentum with DX, and we want to do something there, and then here’s this guy over here, and he’d come out of the Double J character, and all of a sudden he’s got Miss Deborah, and then he’s got Kitty, and all that. Then all of a sudden he knocks the hell out of Moolah. Just storyline and kind of step after step after step, so everything was built right before me and Chyna really ever “touched.” But man, oh man, there was some magic that night, and all the drama going on backstage, and she was anxious, and how are we going to get through this, but she delivered like a champ she was. But it was cool, and that moment, being a first on that platform. Chyna obviously kept her career going, but to kind of knight her into that IC title run, we’re still talking about it today.”

How did it come full circle to wrestle with her 10 plus years later in TNA?

“It’s to me so bizarre that you know me and Kurt and Karen had worked the storyline, and that’s another thing about Dark Side. There’s going to be things revealed at all that people are going to go, ‘What?!'”

I feel like you guys touch on the relationship there for the first time, really ever. 

“Definitely. Kids involved. We chose, and will continue to choose the high road, but the real story comes out. I wish Kurt had [been interviewed], he didn’t want to do Darkside, I wish he had done it, but, but that being said, Chyna, we had worked that storyline, me and Karen and Kurt, we’d had our singles. A real trilogy, a cage match in Cincinnati, and, man, if you’ve been in a match with Kurt Angle, you know you’ve been in a match with Kurt Angle. We did that back-alley brawl, but we had our trilogy of matches. I had a match against him in 09 as well, but we had come to a point that we had faced each other multiple ways, but the opportunity came up, and it just fit. But we couldn’t put Karen in a handicap match against Kurt. But to have somebody that was going to be on the opposite side of the ring to face Karen and me, it just clicked. With me and Chyna’s history, obviously with me, Kurt, and Karen’s history, it just absolutely fit. The match – we won’t ever call it a five-star, but boy, oh boy, talk about delivering in so many ways. For one night, it was a blast.”

You have delivered some iconic guitar shots. You already mentioned it earlier, but that guitar shot to Moolah!

“Yeah, and again, I like to bring up my grandmother, because she’s integral. But I’ll never forget Moolah had worked for my obviously my father, but also my grandmother, and so the story’s laid out at SmackDown. I’m gonna hit her with the guitar and all this, and she comes up to me and she grabs me like a grandma would, and she says, ‘If you don’t knock the sh*t out of me when you come through that curtain, I’m going to beat the hell out of you, because that’s what your grandmother would want.’ But no, Kevin Nash was working for WCW, and he texted me the night it aired, and he said, ‘Double J, I’ve seen some sh*t in my time, but that was absolutely awesome.'”

I see the clip of you giving the guitar shot to Beetlejuice all the time. What’s the story for people that don’t know of him even being involved in that, and how did he end up taking a guitar shot?

“So, you know, you just got to say WCW 2000, Mark Madden’s outline on it. Still is a funny clip. Howard Stern, and this is something that when I’m asked about this, you know, Howard Stern, for those that don’t know, Howard Stern in the 90s and his misfits. So they were on Nitro. We were in Nassau, Long Island, so wasn’t a far trip, and they were there, and they were involved in different things, and all this, and somehow, someway, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll get involved,’ and that was an era that they had me swinging guitars every Monday night on Nitro. That whole thing came up, and I’m just like, oh boy, this is going to be interesting. His line, ‘That’s Mr. Slapnuts…’, but it still talked about. Old Beetle, his social media plays are always fun.”

When you’re going to give someone a guitar shot, what do you tell them?

“It’s coming real fast. Close your eyes, tuck your chin.”

Are they worried about splinters?

“Oh, sure. Look, most of the time, of all people, it happens from time to time, things happen, but of all people, there were two consecutive TV tapings in Orlando that I got, and Kurt’s got a bald head, so he doesn’t have hair for it to blend in, and all this. But I gashed him back-to-back tapings one time, so it happens; it’s part of it, and it stings. People are like, yeah, it stings, but it’s not a chair shot, for sure.”

What’s the story behind Taylor Swift being a babysitter for your kids?

“Taylor Swift stories. You know, born and raised, lived in Hendersonville since I was a kid, but Scott Swift, Taylor’s dad, in the financial services business, could work out of his house. Taylor’s got a brother, Austin, but she wanted to be a country music star from a really early age, and so they packed up, and they moved to Hendersonville. Moved down here, and you know, she went to the same high school that all my kids went, and all that. So my first wife, Jill, had gotten real sick, and so just friends among friends around town, and that album Tim McGraw had just come out, so she was just breaking, not on tour, anything is around Christmas time. So a friend of a friend asked her to come over and play for the girls and my wife, and so that’s where the relationship started. In that time, TNA had so much going on there. Wife who’s sick, daughters, just a real challenging time, and so in this community one thing led to another, and it started out with seven or eight of us, and Taylor just kept playing. I’ve said this, it turned into a couple-hour concert. She played everything, but that’s when the girls and her bonded. Then, tough time, and a couple of months later, my wife passed away, and Taylor was with them through it all. She would call from time to time, ‘Hey, what are the girls doing this afternoon? I’d like to come over and make cookies. I’d like to just spend time with them.’ She’d come over and there’s a picture floating around playing the piano, but that’s the side of Taylor people don’t see. The little girl’s grown up, gone to the Big Apple and tying the knot, but she just became what you call a family friend, so I can officially say she’s never been on the Jarrett payroll, so she never had a paid gig as a babysitter, but very, very good to the girls.”

How much did your relationship with WWE need to be mended before getting inducted in the WWE Hall of Fame?

“That is another truly misunderstood kind of narrative. You mentioned earlier, Oh, Jeff got fired. No, his contract ran out. Jeff started TNA in the early years of TNA. I had multiple conversations with Vince McMahon. ‘Hey, Vince, is there any way that we can work together? Is there something there?’ There was nothing. He knew that we were all that. We were certainly not in competition, but as time went on, it was very apparent he viewed us as competition. We were the number two, whatever the gap was, we were definitely the number two. Two hours on network television, the network that he used to be on, and we were successful, 2 million viewers a week. Anyway, so that kind of relationship. Then the call came first week of 2018. Hey Jeff, and the words were not ‘WWE wants you in the Hall of Fame,’ [they were] ‘Vince wants to put you in the Hall of Fame.’ It’s another misunderstanding. My dad and Vince McMahon talked every Sunday afternoon before Vince had his trial, and while it was going on. So Vince knew that my dad and his father were peers, so to speak, Vince Senior being the older statesman, and my dad being the younger of the promoter territory. So a family again, me and Owen had our connection. I think Vince and myself have always had a promoter connection, and so mended fences, I just don’t think that’s probably the correct phrasing.”

Since I’m such a huge TNA fan, I love asking this question. There’s no better person to ask it of than you, who’s on your TNA Mount Rushmore.

“I don’t think you can not have one without AJ, and I know from a business perspective Sting was a massive get early, and then when he signed. You look at Kurt, so those three almost are kind of givens. But when you get into that fourth one, you have to me, you know, in a lot of ways you could say the Knockouts division, long before the Women’s Evolution, and you know, if the narrative is that Vince McMahon took professional wrestling out of Smokey Bingo Halls and put it here. Well, TNA took the bra and panties and put it into competitive women’s wrestling. But anyway, that 4th spot, there’s a lot of, you could put X Division there in totality, you could put the Knockouts, I think when you look at the OGs that really came along, I mean, Abyss is in that conversation. The fourth one is always a tough spot.”

You can make a real case for you too, without you, it doesn’t exist.

“Well, I mean, to me, that’s kind of a given, because when I look, and again, my dad had no interest, none, especially in 2002. He had gotten into the construction business, and then getting it, got he got into kind of the oil and gas part of a construction business, and was really wheeling and dealing very successful at the time, that was my old man. I mean, he had been in so many different kinds; wrestling was his main business, but he had been in multiple businesses, but at that time, he was really successful. My little brother, that’s when he was really breaking in, but he had no interest. So when I think back over, to me, God’s had a hand in every bit of my life, in that something pushed me to go, you know what? Because that’s a big step, I mean, hey, as opposed to, you know what, go back and whatever, work for peanuts for Vince, or go to Japan, or whatever. But for whatever reason, the different conversations, but I was kind of driven in a lot of ways, to go, I’m going to carry on the family tradition.”

What is Jeff Jarrett grateful for?

“To be alive today.”

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Brian Cage (@briancage) is a professional wrestler in AEW. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Los Angeles, CA to discuss winning the Mr. Nevada bodybuilding competition, being cast in the new Steven Spielberg movie “Disclosure Day” with Lance Archer, recovering from a knee injury, his AEW return, wanting to become AEW World Champion, giving Sting his first bump in AEW, how close he came to signing with WWE, and more!

Congrats! You’re wearing the medal right now.

“Mr. Nevada State, yeah, freaking body guy title, body guy medal. I am indeed the number one body guy, no doubt, no dispute.”

Was the plan all along to do another bodybuilding show?

“Not at all. To be honest, I only fully decided to do it like five, five and a half weeks out from the show date.”

So you only had five and a half weeks of prep?

“I mean, yes and no, because I was already in great shape. I wasn’t prepping for a show, but I was just doing everything. People that come around me, they know that I live the lifestyle, like contest prep, essentially, right? So I was like, all right, I won’t binge on anything, I’m not gonna eat anything bad, I’m just gonna go full tilt. Because I wanted to come back in the best shape that I could for wrestling. I had this TV show, I did the sequel to the He-Man movie that I had done years ago, so there’s a bunch of different things, and obviously you just want to come back looking better than you did. That for me has always been like the glass half full for any injury. It always reignites the flame higher and brighter than it was before. It’s not like I was ever unmotivated for wrestling or working out, but I’m like, all right, now I really gotta get into it.”

You’re in the best shape of your life now at 42

“It’s not just physically how I look too, it’s how I feel. I was trying to tell everyone, after all these years of wrestling, my age, everything else, you should be wearing down, and I feel so good. The amount of wrestling training, which I almost never really do a lot of, kind of get back in the ring and work off some rust. But then I was training all the time in the ring, training all the time in the gym. Actually, I’m doing a bunch of MMA and jiu jitsu training, I was just feeling so good. After tons of leg days trying to build my legs back up, and not once did I ever get out and go oh, this hurts, oh, that hurt. Everything was feeling great. I was like, this is the best I think I’ve ever [felt]. I feel better now than I think I was feeling in my 30s. This is crazy.” 

Explain the Body Guy Title to me. 

“So, the idea behind this thing [the championship], I actually got this made beginning of last year. So, what I wanted to do was take it on the Indies, get it over first, and then bring it to AEW. The idea was I would defend the Body Guy title, but the catch is you have to be a body guy to get a shot at the title, and that was kind of my jab at everyone, because then no one would actually ever get a shot at the title, because you’re not a body guy. So that was kind of the loose end. I just thought it was a great idea, and look cool, and I never got to do anything, and I tore my knee, so it just kind of sat there. Then, after winning the bodybuilding show, I was like, you know what, this is the perfect time to bring it back. Instead of bringing the overall trophy with the medal, I’ll just bring the freaking title to represent the overall trophy, and then we’ll just start to incorporate that. So, I had it backstage with me during the segment, and on Dynamite this past Wednesday, and I will be bringing it every week, and we will go from there.”

Do you feel like you’re a big man in wrestling?

“You know what? I’ve actually never called myself that, I’ve always just called myself body guy, and I think that too, because I’m not super tall, and I feel like everyone always acts like I’m a midget now, too. Which is so funny, because I’m so tall to so many people, especially in AEW.”

But it’s also funny that, like, the physique that people expected from superheroes 20 years ago, vastly different from what they expect now.

“It’s like when you bring in these outside athletes who become wrestlers, and only a handful of them become really good. But I feel like it’s because they fall in love with it, a la Kurt Angle, or whomever, and same thing. I think Jackman got so much more jacked because I think he just fell in love with actually training. I know it’s hard, but that’s why he kept doing it for a while, because I think he just enjoyed it, not just for the role but in general.”

So break it down, how many meals a day? What are your macros and your total calories?

“Even with that, too, it’s funny, I ate more carbs this prep than I’ve ever eaten. Usually pretty more of a low-carb, higher-fat guy, not fully keto, but close to it. I was actually vice versa, where it was just as high as protein, because I’m always eating over 300 grams of protein a day throughout the six meals, and then I had carbs pretty much every meal. Sometimes the last meal would just be egg whites, and then I wouldn’t have eaten rice with that. It was mainly just rice, too. Just keep it simple, and it’s easy on digestion. So throwing the fat is probably up to 4,000 calories at the peak of it, but then obviously you pull back towards the end of the show. The week of the show, you start to deplete everything and it’s mainly just protein with the carbs and then you carb load everything else and salt and manipulate your water. There’s all these different little variables that people realize, especially the better you look. I feel like the more self-conscious you are, which is funny, because you want to look like you’re top physical peak. Even right now. I came in, you’re like, ‘Oh, man, you’re so jacked.’ You want to look like that 24/7 but again, when you’re in really good shape, the smallest little water, salt, carbohydrate manipulations can like make a vast difference, which is so crazy how little things can make you look so much better or worse.”

For people who don’t know, you were out for 14 months dealing with two different injuries. 

“So I tore my left quad tendon in a match. So I was even looking at the chronological breakdown of that, because then you mentioned, too, I’m sure we’ll touch on that, me being in Disclosure Day. So something happened to my left knee where I kind of felt it, which is completely abnormal. I kind of felt it in a match before or after Jericho Cruise, and on the Jericho Cruise. Then I remember on Disclosure Day, or during the match there with Lance [Archer], he had actually hurt his back. So Chavo [Guerrero] was freaking out, and didn’t want Lance to take any bumps. We’re filming everything, because if something happens to Lance, and he can’t do anything like that. So now everything that we had rehearsed and gone over, and we’re we’re switching everything on the fly. So now I’m thinking of all kinds of high fly stuff I can do, where now he doesn’t have to bump up. Something like doing head scissors, 619s, I was doing like springboard moonsaults and different divey stuff, and Spielberg popped hard too when he saw me do a springboard moonsault. [He said] ‘You could do that?’ Oh yeah, can do all kinds of stuff. Anyway, so we do the head scissors like 1,000 times, just like a movie. ‘Oh, it’s great, do it again, do it again, do it again…’ I don’t know if it’s because of his back or what, not to throw Lance under the bus, but he wasn’t picking me up, he wasn’t assisting with the head scissors, just me just jumping on my foot. After the 20th time we did it, I remember I hit the head scissors, and we did it differently that time, where I did the head scissors. He feeds up and did a super kick, and I was going to hit a lionsault, and I felt it on the head scissors, oh my knee. As he stood up, and I super kicked him, so I’m standing on that same knee right away. I was like, nope, nope, nope, nope, that knee’s not feeling good. We stopped, and then I had to take a moment out, and I did get to go hang out with Spielberg and sit underneath the little tent and watch stuff and talk to him for quite a while during that, which was pretty neat. But once we’re done filming, we went to Sacramento and I did a spot with Briscoe that kind of hurt my knee. I didn’t see the doctor that night because all my family’s there, close to North Cal, and then the following week we had no like six man tag, and Briscoe wanted to do a similar spot, and I go, you know what, that kind of messed up my knee last week. Maybe do that with Takeshita, and we could do this, whatever, cool. Then the next day in the match with Chris Masters at Only Wrestlers Money Tour.”

“That’s why I kept on like acting up, and I was just thinking, you know, it’s whatever, and because the way it tore, I barely even start to spine buster Chris, and I felt like a piece of paper just tear right off my knee. I knew right away, I fell down, and the ref was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what do you want to?’ I go, ‘Stop the match, tore my knee, I don’t care.’ I had Chris Bey’s Memorial Show the next day against Ricochet and [Rich] Swann, which was excited about. Then my farewell tour in Australia for World Series of Wrestling, which is like my absolute favorite place to go to. So I remember laying there just looking up at the lights, like just so sad and depressed about that. Not so much that I hurt my knee, and that sucked too, but I wasn’t like writhing in pain, it hurt, but it was just more like, you gotta be kidding me. I remember he was trying to help me up, and the crowd started chanting my name like I’m gonna get up and walk off the field. We’re the main event here. I go no, I’m just gonna lay here, everybody can just leave, just let me sulk for a minute. Let me just have my moment. Just lay here. I’m like, man, this sucks, it was what it was, and I had been dealing with my right knee, and I know I had been planning on getting that done.” 

The knees are 100%?

“Yeah, I don’t feel like there’s anything that I can’t do that I could do before.”

So you’re in the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day. How’d you get cast for this?

“So Chavo hits me up for this TV show…”

And Chavo is the guy in Hollywood when it comes to any wrestling scene. 

“He’s like the liaison for wrestling in Hollywood. So, he hits me up for this TV show. It doesn’t happen. Well, it was gonna happen. It gets postponed. And then he goes, ‘Hey, I think you would fit really great for this role. Contact this guy and get him everything he wants.’ So I email him. I get everything he requests. Typical kind of like audition situation, where after a few weeks go by, you don’t hear anything, whatever. Easy come, easy go. So I’m in the gym and all of a sudden, I get an email, and it’s, ‘Hey, I just sat down and watched everything with the director. He absolutely loves you, your look, your persona, your charisma, and everything you do. He says you’re exactly perfect, and exactly what he wants.’ Great email to get. And he goes, give me a call immediately. So I call him, and again, I don’t even know what the project is.” 

You don’t know who the director is?

“Nothing. [They say] ‘Yeah, I was watching it, and Steven loves you, loves you. He just wants you on the set, blah blah blah.’ He keeps saying, Steven, I go, ‘Who’s Steven?’ He goes, ‘Oh, the director, Steven Spielberg.’ I went, wait, what? Steven Spielberg’s watching my stuff and is like, ‘That’s it, I need Brian Cage in my movie.’ I go, this is amazing. He goes, ‘[Spielberg] likes you so much, we want you to work somebody else, preferably another big guy that looks a different type of big than you. But instead of casting it, we figured he just wants you, so you could just pick whoever you want.’ So I was like, what about my buddy Lance? Because he was in some of the photos they sent, my tag partner, and he goes, ‘Oh yeah, we did see him. We thought he looked good.’ I go, I mean, I’m fine with that. They’re okay. So then that’s how Lance got in the movie, too.”

Are you actually being directed by Steven Spielberg? 

“Absolutely, yeah, the whole time.” 

What kind of notes did he have for you?

“Some stuff we filmed, and there’s a couple of specific shots he wanted us to do.”

What kind of stuff are you doing?

“He wanted this one cool diving elbow or head butt off of the back, how it was filmed, he wanted the POV shot. But there’s one other thing he specifically wanted, and we didn’t use a lot of that. We were doing our bit, because I just kind of put together the match, essentially I was like, ‘Lance, let’s just give all of our hits, let’s just do this, this, this, this, this, and this.’ So we’re just going through it, and he loves it, then he was like, ‘Can you guys do from the same [angle]? This angle, that angle?’

Is Chavo Guerrero there the whole time?

“Yeah, he’s the referee for the whole match. So I did the suplex, 619, he did his bossman slam and his finisher, and it was great. Then I said that we had to change some stuff when he [Archer] hurt his back taking certain bumps. But then when I hurt my knee and I had to take a little time out. Then I went and I got my bag and I put on a different knee pad, I taped up my knee and I switched my outfit around, and then Spielberg was like, ‘Hey, come here, come here.’ He’s like, look at this, and he’s under his little tent in this TV, showing me different clips and showing me the moonsault. That’s why I talked to him one-on-one about wrestling. We still wanted to mark out and ask for a picture. None of us did, especially because we don’t have our phones on us while we’re on set. Then even afterwards, we kind of asked, one of the stunt guys, ‘Oh, hey, can we get a picture?’ He goes, ‘You know, it’s kind of like a taboo kind of situation.’ I go, ‘But he talked to us so much.’ He still liked us. I feel like if we would ask him just on the spot, he’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, no problem.’”

What are the goals now that you’re back in AEW?

“I definitely want to branch out and do more on my own, for sure, because I know we’ve had a couple squash matches. I just did that one tag match with Doyle, I do have a couple of different ideas. I do want to incorporate more of this winning this bodybuilding show. I mean the whole while too, I’ve always wanted to do more like solo stuff, because I feel like that’s how I get my stuff in. I feel like that’s how I stand out more, and there’s a plethora, and I think I said this on the last interview, too. There’s so much I feel like I haven’t done in AEW, especially compared to my time in Lucha Underground and Impact. Anywhere else I feel like I’ve done so much more.”

So, is the AEW world title something that you want?

“Oh, of course. I guess even then, well, we have so many titles there. I mean, I’ll take whatever I can get. What I do really want to be part of this year, for sure, is the Continental Classic. Obviously, that’s not until the end of the year, but that’s something I definitely want to. I would love to build up enough repertoire to have an awesome Continental Classic run by the end of the year.”

You look better than you’ve ever looked. You can obviously work in the ring. What else do you need to do to get to that main event level?

“I don’t know, and everybody goes, ‘Oh, you need someone to talk for him.’ I go look, am I Ric Flair on the mic? No, I’m not. But there’s plenty of great promos I’ve done, there’s plenty of good promos I’ve done. I just haven’t got to do that many promos. Every time they put a promo on social media, on anywhere, because remember we’re tracking this too, for a while. But every time, too, originally it was like that was Brian Cage’s best promo. I go, that’s funny, every time I cut a promo, it’s my best promo. So is it the fact that I can’t cut a promo, or is the fact that I just don’t get to cut that many promos? There’s a difference between not getting to hear me talk and not being able to talk. Am I as good as MJF? Obviously not, but I can do much better, I think, than people realize to give me credit for it. Again, just because there’s never any legs to it, too. Because if I’m just cutting a good promo for the one off match or this or that, that’s great, but then it’s here and gone. Five star matches on the independents or on AEW are great, but if it’s just a flash in the pan awesome match for no reason, it’s awesome, but then there’s no membranes of it. Because you can have a four star match with an amazing build and program that will be a lasting memory, as opposed to a freaking killer five star match that was just for no reason.” 

I think there’s a lot of trust in your abilities, because you were the first one that got Sting physical for the first time, I think, since he left WWE in 2015. You gave him a power bomb, so that’s his first time getting physical in six years at that point. What’s the conversation like with Sting as you’re figuring all this out?

“Well, I remember being in the office with Tony Khan, because I know he wanted that to happen. It actually happened sooner than expected, because there was some crazy storm and a lot of people got like stuck in Texas, and Tony’s like, just do the power bomb tonight, and Sting was just kind of like, let me know, okay? And [Tony says] ‘Brian’s so great, I know you’ve worked a lot of great big guys, but Brian’s so athletic, and he’s so safe, and he could do this, it’ll be awesome.’ I’m like, yeah, I got you, and he was like, okay. We didn’t talk a lot, he felt secure enough, and I’m like, cool. Actually, I tried not to overthink it, because I was like, look, I can go out there and give him the most perfect power bomb of all time, and if he’s hurt, it’s my fault. Also I have to lay him out, so I can’t kill him, but I also can’t play patty cake with him, and make a little nice cozy bed, and lay him down gently either. So I was like, you know what, I’m just gonna power bomb him like I would just power bomb whoever. So I just erased any thought of it, not to overthink anything, and I power bombed him. Everything went fine, and I went backstage with, oh man, it was rad. I just freaking power bomb Sting. I’m like, that’s awesome. Because not only to give him his first bump back and be trusted with that, but he was also, and I told him afterwards, Sting is my very first wrestling action figure I ever owned, as well, too. So, to you know, look forward 30 years later, and me giving him a powerbomb, that was awesome.” 

You recently re-signed a contract extension with AEW in 2024 and I know you talked about you were going back and forth. Were you going to re-sign with AEW or were you going to go to WWE? How close were you to going to WWE? 

“I mean, there was a lot of interest, and it’s funny, because I wanted to go there. I mean, you don’t know what you’re gonna get either place. There’s no guarantees. They could say that, you know, we’re gonna use you this way, that way, whatever. But obviously, you don’t know anything. And after going back and forth, all the different pros and cons, a lot of stuff with AEW just seemed safer, if you will. It’s pretty hard to have some sort of security in this business, but I’m like, I’ve been here for a while; they [WWE] just randomly release anyone. A lot of the perks, so travel is way [easier]; he [Tony Khan] pays for all the travel, so hotel, ground transportation, and airfare, whereas WWE is just airfare. We’re an actual independent contractor, so I can do anything else outside of AEW, which is a plus too. Then I felt like I don’t have a fear of getting released if I stay here too long. The longer I feel like I can just keep staying to have longevity.”

But ultimately it came down to job security?

“Big time, that’s the main one, and just longevity. It’s so much more chill there. I mean, obviously, I haven’t been in WWE for a long time, was there developmentally years ago, many years ago.”

When you were there in developmental in 2008 and 2009, was there any talk of bringing you to Raw or SmackDown?

“There was. And then actually, even the day I got released, I thought I was getting the call to go up to Raw. Everyone thought that. I was so flabbergasted when I got the call, and I’m thinking I’m getting raised. I think I’m getting called to TV, I’m thinking I’m getting both, and they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve come to terms with your release.’ I’m like, wat the? You called the right person? But I mean, I left my time there, and I have nothing bad to say about in that regard, but you know, it’s been a back-and-forth thing, and there is the what if, and the WrestleMania moment that every fan has. But at the same time, I do feel like there’s a nice feather in my cap to have been as successful as I’ve been, to have the house, I have the cars, I have the life I’ve had, to live the career I’ve had, without ever having, like, the WWE rub, I do feel like that’s that’s been kind of a nice little bonus, which is pretty hard to get.”

What is Brian Cage grateful for?

“My health, my family and my faith.”

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Preorder Big E’s new book “How I Got Over” at https://howigotover.com

Ettore Ewen (@WWEBigE) is a former WWE Champion and panelist best known as Big E. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Oakland, CA to discuss his upcoming memoir titled How I Got Over, why now was the right time to write the book, overcoming many physical and mental struggles over the course of his career, winning Money in the Bank and then the WWE Championship, his career-ending injury that occurred during a match on SmackDown, being kicked out of The New Day and the follow-up, KofiMania, original plans for The New Day, Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods leaving WWE, and more!

You are so open with your experiences in this book. It’s raw what you speak about. Were there certain topics that were difficult for you to write about?

“I think they would have been difficult if I started writing the book a few years ago, but not really. I’ve really been excited about this. Sterling K. Brown talks about being naked with your clothes on. That idea of being so transparent and open and honest, and honest with yourself as well. So, for me, the last few years, the thing that’s excited me is I want to make art, or shows, or books, or series, whatever it is, I want to make things that are raw, that are honest, that are open, because I think a lot of times when you see someone who has attained something in life, when you see someone who’s on TV or doing certain things, you think they are free of problems or free of cares. But I shared a locker room with so many people, I think there’s so many people who gravitate to pro wrestling because there’s this hole inside of them that they’re trying to fill, and I talk a lot in the book about that hole I was trying to fill. I think a lot of us deal with imposter syndrome, a lot of us quietly fight our own mind, so I wanted to just kind of shine more light on this myth that so many people have about people who are public figures and thinking that life is easy or smooth. That’s not to say that I want you to say, ‘Oh, woe is the guy who is making millions of dollars.’ That’s not the point, but I think when we can understand that the human experience is so universal, and that whatever walk of life you come from, that so many of us experience so many of the same struggles, maybe some of us on TV are better at masking them, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the same fights or similar fights. So, I just thought the more I could be open and honest, the more I would be able to connect with people who are struggling right now.” 

I love the double meaning of your book title, How I got over. You immediately think about the wrestling terminology of how you get over in the ring. But it’s also for you, how you got over depression, how you got over abuse growing up, how you got over a career-ending injury. How do you dive into all of that in the book? You got over a lot of things that some people may never get over.

“Yeah, a lot of that, it’s a journey. I think being able to better understand myself and my own mind was certainly a journey, and I’m so grateful for therapy in college. It was one of those things where I didn’t grow up in a household where therapy was something that was pushed. It was a man doesn’t show his feelings, he keeps everything bottled inside, he doesn’t cry about what he’s going through, so I had to unlearn a lot of that. I was forced to go to therapy at the age of 19, and I was so fortunate to have an incredible man in Marvin Sims, who, unfortunately, is no longer with us. But he was someone who just took his time with me, and I don’t think I’d be alive if it wasn’t for him. So, it was therapy. I needed medication at the time. I talk about being on a serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, an antidepressant, and an antipsychotic in college. It was that, but for me, man, I really beat the drum so much. If you follow me on Instagram at all, for the most part, you probably see a lot of stuff from Headspace, but I’m a big believer in meditation. That was the app that I used, and it just helped me.”

“I think meditation really can help anyone. One, it’s just allowed me to be so much more present, instead of me worrying about the future. I had so many injuries in college, I tore both my ACLs, I broke my right patella, tore my left pec, all in two and a half years. Every time I had an injury, I got back on the treadmill of overthinking, and my depression got worse and worse and worse. But meditation really just allowed me to deal with a lot of the ups and downs of life. I felt that before, my depression controlled me. I would have to deal with its ups and downs, and its ebbs and flows. But meditation just really allowed me to be at a point where I was able to kind of withstand anything that came my way, it really just gave me such a strong foundation for my mental health. Where, okay, bad things are gonna happen, that’s life. So I’m so grateful, because if it wasn’t for finding meditation during the pandemic, I don’t think I would have handled the injury well. I think I would have spiraled, because I had so many things being thrown at me. One doctor was talking about putting me in a halo, where they drill into your skull, and that was a possibility at one point. They drill the screws into your skull to attach this halo that I would be in for three months. Another option that was discussed was fusing my C1 and C2, and one doctor told me effectively I would be disabled because I would not have the ability to rotate my neck enough to be able to drive, so there was that. I get to the hospital as well, and they told me you were just this close to stroke or paralysis or even death. So I think years before, if I didn’t have the mental tools, I think I would have plummeted. My mental health would have been in a very, very bad place. But I’m so grateful to have had the tools now to be able to deal with all those ups and downs.”

Every time we’d see you in WWE, you’d be so upbeat, a beaming smile coming out of your face. There’s this quote in the early part of your book. “I was colorful and comical. I took great pride in being the escape for others that I had so desperately needed throughout my own life, but I still so often felt hollow. I still constantly thought about what it would be like if I never had to wake up another morning.”

“Yeah, I think people are very used to seeing a certain side of me, it’s something I talk about in the book as well, but I think of the comedians that I loved that ended up struggling with their mental health. I think, like Robin Williams, how I could never understand, how can someone who brings people so much joy struggle?” 

What an interesting dichotomy to go from being beloved. You go out in front of the WWE Universe, everybody’s chanting your name, chanting for The New Day. When you leave, fans are asking for your autograph or asking for a photo, and then you go back to the hotel, and it’s the complete opposite.

“You still have to be you. As much as I loved being able to entertain people, and especially when we were really taking off, that time together was so fun. Kofi and Woods, we talk about all the time about the bond that we built, our brotherhood, it was so beautiful, and it just moved me so much, and it’s so meaningful. But ultimately, you still have to put that aside, and you go to your hotel, you go home. It’s like something I talk about in the book, but that idea of wherever you go, there you are, I can’t run from me. That’s the thing too, I think about in my career is I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve wrestled RVD and Randy Orton in South Africa, I’ve been to Japan at least a half dozen times, wrestled in Europe more times than I can count, I’ve been all over the world, but I’m still in this vessel, I’m still trapped in my mind. It doesn’t matter how much money I make, doesn’t matter how many things I do in my career, how much I travel, all these things that are additive and bring my life more purpose. Until I fix me, until I address the things that I’ve been running from for so long, until I stop trying to shove those childhood wounds inside some closet, and forget them. Until I empty that out, until I actually face it head-on, I’m still going to have to be me. I’m still going to have to fight my mind. So, yeah, it took me a very long time to understand that those trappings, and all the other things you can do in life that are worth celebrating, and I’m proud of, they don’t erase who you are and how you feel about yourself.”

You went from the highest of highs being WWE Champion, you lost the WWE Championship in January of 2022. Two months later, March 11, 2022 is when you break your neck. So to go from that high to that low so quickly, that could have broke you.

“Yeah, man. I had a friend of mine who I’m now super proud of. He’s in LA. He used to work in social media for WWE, Anthony, but he’s doing his acting thing right now and doing well. But we used to have this thing, because we were both kind of quietly struggling with our mental health at the time, and he used to refer to me as the sad clown, because he was one of the few people who knew what I was going through and experiencing. We would also have this joke, and it was a dark joke. But his little thing was, ‘As soon as I retire, within 48 hours, put me on suicide watch.’ Because for me the thought was I always have this constant distraction of travel, of doing shows, you don’t really have time to sit with your mind. But I had that. But when all that stopped, my fear, and I had a real fear of when all that’s over, and you’re home alone, there’s no running from yourself anymore, now you have to really confront your mind and what you’re going through. So for the longest time, I had a real fear that if this came to an end, I don’t know how I would be. I don’t know what would be next for me. I don’t know if I would immediately plummet back to everything I’d struggled with.”

“But yeah, going from having the title, dropping it. We had that Day One PLE in Atlanta, losing to Brock, which initially that was supposed to be me and Seth. It’s supposed to be a singles match, but then Kevin Owens got added to it to become a triple threat. Then Vince, at the time, loved Bobby, so Bobby gets added to it, becomes a four-way. Then, at the time, I don’t know if you remember, Roman gets COVID, allegedly, who knows? But that was the rumor, he got COVID, so he couldn’t be there. So Brock needed a match, so he gets added to our match, and what was supposed to be a singles between me and Seth becomes a five-way, where Brock beats me for the title. But that’s the business, and honestly, the fact alone that I got to be world champion, a guy like me, is pretty incredible. It wasn’t the run that I wanted by any means, but I’m grateful that I got it. But to go from that, to having certain Raws where I felt like I was probably in five or six segments, and then I would have to do the dark match, I’m doing pre-tapes, and there’s a lot on your back. Going from that to immediately being thrust back into, and look, I love the boys, I love The New Day. But to go from, hey, you’re on the show alone, I think they were on SmackDown at the time, I was on Raw, to immediately be like, okay, the idea of you even trying to fight back or get another opportunity, we’re not doing that. Get back to the tag team, it was demoralizing, but the wrestling business is filled with ups and downs and ebbs and flows, and I think a lot of talent get too caught up in kind of the ebbs and flows. You have to be able to ride that wave. So for me the idea was always to fight back, but it was disheartening to be thrust back into a tag team, and then it wasn’t long after that where I get dunked on my head and my career is over. So yeah, a lot of life changes in a couple of months, but more than anything, I’m just so grateful that I had the tools with meditation to be able to deal with it all.” 

Do you remember everything from the night you got injured? 

“Yeah. So I remember we had the tag team match. Thankfully, I didn’t have a concussion at all. I didn’t end up going out, none of those things. So I was with it the whole time. So we had this tag team match, and it was me and Kofi. Woods at the time, I think, was out. Can’t remember [specifically why], a nagging injury he was out with, but he was close to coming back, but he wasn’t quite ready. So it was me and Kofi against the Brawling Brutes. I think Sheamus was on the floor at the time, it was Pete Dunne and Ridge at the time. So we had the tag team match, and I knew it was Kofi and Pete were in at the end, so I think me and Ridge need to figure out some way for us to be low at the end. I know a lot of the feedback I was getting oftentimes was, okay, not only are you a former world champion, but you’re a bigger dude as well, so they wanted me to have something where I was put down for a while. So instead of, hey, take a super kick and you’re down for the finish, sometimes I need to take a bigger bump to justify being down at the end. So I thought, okay, I’ll miss the suicide spear. I was going to take off to hit Ridge, he was going to move, and I actually ended up missing the apron, because oftentimes, when I missed suicide spear, I like to post on the apron as I spill out, so the tumble isn’t quite as nasty. But I ended up not having enough room to do that, but I ended up taking the spill to the floor. But the plan was for Ridge, I asked Ridge what do you want to hit me with? Because we’d worked for a little bit, and actually really liked Ridge. We worked a couple of times. We worked a singles on a house show around that time, I think the three of us did a pretty good job. For us, the idea of, let me just go in, hit on my moves, and make myself look good. It’s not something we were ever invested in. The teams we worked with, we always wanted them to come out [better]. Whether they ended up winning at the PLE, if that was the culmination of the program or not. We wanted to make sure that every team we worked with, our hope was that they came out looking better than they came in. So Ridge, he said he could do an overhead suplex, and I thought, you know, I do overheads all the time. Ryback used to give me overheads. I don’t take a ton of overheads, but Ryback used to give me overhead suplexes. Never had an issue with it, so I thought, yeah, let’s do it. So he moves on the spear, I end up spilling to the floor, announce table side, and I remember just feeding up, and there he hooks me, things feel okay, I end up going up in the air. But I could tell I don’t have enough clearance, but when you’re launched, there’s not a whole lot you can do. I can attempt to put a hand down, but at the time I couldn’t really [react]; it happened so quickly, there was no time to really post or try to bail. So yeah, man, I immediately feel myself get dumped on the top of my head and spill to the floor. But honestly, at the time I didn’t really think much of it.” 

Were you in pain?

“No, not really. I was able to move my fingers and toes right away, just to make sure. I was like, that’s fine. I didn’t go out at all, I didn’t have a headache, didn’t have a concussion. I thought, again, I’m by no means a medical expert, I thought maybe I got a contusion, some kind of neck contusion or something. Let me just stay down for a little bit. I was like, ah, this isn’t great, but I’m not in pain. Maybe I’ll be out for a month or so. Just let this thing heal up, and I’ll be fine. Not a big deal. Thankfully, Dr. Pescasio, who always sits ringside, well, there’s always a doctor sitting ringside, but at the time she was sitting ringside, also from Tampa, my fellow Tampanian. So she was there, she saw it immediately and rushed over. So before I really even had a chance to kind of get my bearings and start moving. I had to be down anyway, so I figured, like, I’m here selling, so I’m just gonna be down. She rushes over, and I felt like it all happened very, very quickly. I said it tongue in cheek, but the very first thing I say as she rushes over is ‘I need to get a new job.’ Just because, you know, between all the ACLs and the right patella and the left back, and I had a herniated disc, I actually missed some time Survivor Series during the pandemic because I herniated a disc. I missed that Survivor Series. I was supposed to be on the Survivor Series team, but I missed some time because I herniated a disc in my neck, and it wasn’t that bad, but I had some weakness in one of my arms, and just not something that I wanted to mess around with. So I was just thinking about all the injuries and everything I’ve done to my body. I told myself for the longest time, see, I’m grateful for the old timers and everything they’ve contributed, but I see so many of the vets who are in their 40s and their 50s and 60s, and so many of them struggled to get around. I put my body through a lot, but I want to have a life afterwards. I want to be able to move around and to enjoy life and to work out and not be in constant pain. So I just kept thinking I put my body through a lot. But anyways, the doctor gets there and we get to the finish pretty much right away, I remember Kofi circled around to check on me, but it was pretty quick where they were getting the EMTs there. They put me on a board, they strapped me in. I just thought, okay, maybe this is a bit much, but with neck stuff you always want to take precautions. But thankfully, the hospital in Birmingham, which is where I went to get my meniscus done, so very familiar. It was very, very close to the arena. They ended up putting me in an ambulance, felt like I was at the hospital, felt like five minutes later. Then they ran a battery of tests and took some scans. Wasn’t long, I think Woods was in town, I think it was backstage, actually. So, the boys brought all my stuff, they grabbed everything, brought it to the hospital, and just stayed. They had a town to get to the next night, I believe, but those guys are family, so they stayed, made sure I was okay, and we just kind of waited for a while, and the news I got was sobering. I did not expect to hear that I broke my C1 in two places. I broke my C6, but the fact that they were so flippant about my C6, ‘Ah, the C6 is not a big deal. It’s a C1 that’s the real concern.’”

“Of all the vertebrae, that’s the one where, like, everything’s on the table, as far as stroke, paralysis, death, all the things that are life-changing or life-ending. So, yeah, getting that news was okay, life is going to be a little different. But honestly, even after they gave me that diagnosis, there was still some hope that I would be just in a hard collar. I can’t remember if it was six weeks or eight weeks, but somewhere in that four to eight weeks, so a month or two of being in a hard collar, and they thought there was a good chance that I could come back. But we took more tests, and honestly, the issue long term was [with] my C1 so I have what’s called a burst fracture or a Jefferson fracture, and that’s when the C1 it’s like a ring, and on opposite sides of that ring are where the C1 was broken, and those spaces were healing with new cartilage instead of forming new bone, so I didn’t have the same kind of integrity of the C1. So that’s been the issue, for my day-to-day life, very normal, I have no issues, but returning to the ring, and if this happened again and I don’t have the same neck integrity, that could be it.”  

That moment changed your career. It also changed Ridge Holland’s career a lot. He got death threats from this. When did you connect with him, and just chat about it?

“It was pretty quickly. I don’t remember the exact timeline, but we ended up talking pretty quickly thereafter. He got a lot of hate, he got threats. On one end I can understand a lot of people. I can appreciate the people who are supportive of me and who wanted to see me continue to wrestle, and felt like he was the reason that I couldn’t, but I know what I signed up for. I know things go awry. It was never malicious. It was never intentional. I felt for him and continued to feel for him. He actually sent me a 10-pound box of meat as an apology, which felt like a very manly thing to do. Here’s a bunch of meat. At the time I really wasn’t eating much red meat, so I was like, oh, this is great, but I sent that to my creative partner, Johnny. Someone enjoyed it, at least. But no, we talked, and he continued to check in. I actually ran into him briefly at the MGM Grand in Vegas for Mania this year. He was on the move, and I was on the move, and there are fans around too, so it’s pretty quick. But it was good to see him. It seemed like he was in a better place, but yeah, I know it really altered his career, and I tried to put out a statement or two to tell people there’s no ill will whatsoever, please leave this man alone. But more than anything, he has a family to take care of. He has kids, and to see him, one, he dealt with a devastating injury of his own. He dealt with losing his job. I really felt for him, continue to feel for him, because I tell people I’m in a great place, I’m very thankful. I still am continuing with the company, doing broadcasting work. I am good, I am truly, truly good. But, yeah, I think he was just in a very difficult position, and I really hate that his tenure in WWE, for the most part, a lot of it’s going to be defined by the injury and his role in it. But I really feel for him and for his family, and I truly hope he’s in a better place. I hope that’s all come to an end, because a lot of people crossed the line and went too far.”

I think a lot of people look at previous neck injuries. Edge came back, Paige came back, Brian Danielson came back. I think a lot of fans think, well, why can’t Big E come back?

“All neck injuries are different, and that’s what I found as someone who is going through this, because my injury, my C6 is broken, but the primary concern, of course, is the C1. Because it is so high up in my neck, and because of the nature of it. Is there a doctor out there who could probably clear me? Maybe. I don’t know, I haven’t done any doctor shopping, but I’m really grateful. So, Tyson Kidd, TJ Wilson reached out to me right away. He and Nattie, I have so much praise for them, because Nattie came by. I don’t live in Florida anymore, but we lived about half an hour from each other. She would stop by, bring by calcium supplements. She would come by to just talk about what TJ went through. My neck injury in many ways, I think of his, and I think mine is nothing compared to [him]. He is fortunate to be alive, and it’s been so beautiful to see how he walks around and how good he is now. But he connected me with Dr. Juan Uribe, who did his neck surgery, I believe, but just a spine expert, and he looked at my scans, and man, it was almost a tone of ‘Please, even if they clear you, please consider being done.’ I talked to a few other doctors who looked at my scans as well, and they felt the same. So when you hear that you are this close to having a stroke in my mid 30s or being paralyzed or dealing with, even if it’s just dealing with atrophy or constant headaches, I feel like, and it’s something I mentioned in the book, as well. It feels like living in a dangerous neighborhood, and you always hear gunshots going off, but finally there’s one that whizzes right by your head, and you’re like, Okay, it’s time to move now. I know I was living in a dangerous neighborhood, I know things were a little perilous, but I’ll be okay, it’s not gonna happen to me. You realize how close the end is for you. In the actual moment, I did not feel like I was going to die. Do not get me wrong, I didn’t feel like I was close to it. I was not worried about it. But when you can understand that if things went just a little bit different, if there was a little bit more movement that could be it. It’s like, man, that is very, very sobering. So, is there a possibility that even if my C1 ossified, and it was forming new bone? I think just knowing that people who do this for a living. Some of the best spine specialists in the world have implored me to hang it up, or to consider hanging it up, I think that’s that’s enough for me. I’m 40 right now. There’s so many other things in my life that I’m excited about that I want to do. 

I’m engaged. I’m about to get married in a few months. I can’t fathom telling Kristen I’m gonna roll the dice with my health and my life again. I can’t do that to her. To finally get to this point where I found my partner, who I want to do the rest of my life with someone I adore. We have so much fun together. The cliche of my best friend can be a cliche for a lot of people. It’s real for us. The idea of so many things in my career I’m excited to do, but if that all goes away, if someone says, ‘Nope, we don’t want to see your face anymore, we’re done with you.’ I will be so content just to be home with my woman and enjoy life. I think when you’re on that WWE hamster wheel, and this is all you know, this is all you are, I am so thankful for it. I am so grateful for it. But I think being having a bit of a foot out of the industry as well has allowed me to understand there’s so much more life out here. Even just having my weekends again, to be able to travel, to hang out with friends, to connect, to go on vacations. I’m so grateful for all of that. So maybe one day I could get cleared. It’s just not a gamble worth taking. It’s when you understand the importance of your C1 and the potential costs. I’m just not willing to take those risks.”

I think people forget that New Day was not over when you guys debuted. People hated you.

“No, it sucks. It sucks, man. We were motivational preachers. “

What was the original pitch?

“So the original pitch was for us to be the new Nation of Domination. So it was me. I don’t know if you remember Abraham Washington. So Abe Washington had a talk show on WWECW where Tony Atlas was his sidekick. All he would do was just laugh from time to time. But I’m telling you, people didn’t get to see the best of Abe. Abe is one of the best talkers I’ve ever been around. He would come into FCW, and he would cut these promos for Dusty. We would usually have these hard outs. You have a minute, maybe give you a minute and a half. Alex Riley and Abe Washington were the two guys who had an exception to just go. People didn’t get to see the best of Alex Riley as a promo, either. Dude was just incredible on the mic, but Abe was also just a masterful talker. 

So we were in FCW, it was me, Byron Saxton was still an active wrestler at the time. It was me, Saxton, Woods, and Abe. We all talked, but Abe was kind of positioned as the leader, and we had this group, and Abe was very much someone who unfortunately liked to push the envelope a little bit too much. I’m not going to talk about the reason he got fired, you could look that up. But he’s someone who always liked to kind of to put his foot over the line and see how far we could push things. We originally called the group the Clan, and it stood for Citizens Liberation of American Nationalism. It was supposed to be this militant black group, much in the vein of the Nation of Domination. We all grew up loving The Nation, and we wanted to do something in that vein. That group initially, it was initially the Clan, then we became The Plan, because the office said we’re not doing that. So we exchanged citizens for people, so that was it. We came out in white and red, so that very first suit that you see Woods come out in, that was like his old stuff from when we were pitching The Plan in FCW, so we never got to do that on FCW TV. We did a few weeks of that, and then eventually the office in FCW said it’s dead, you guys can’t do this anymore, move on. But Woods, at the time, talks about having the worst debut of all time, because he comes up as R-Truth’s friend on the main roster, and almost right away, he’s kind of getting squashed. But he comes up to me, it was Extreme Rules of 2014 and he and Truth had a handicap match with Rusev. They both get killed, really, Woods gets killed within, I feel like a few seconds, and he was done for. Then Truth gets squashed right after. That same day I dropped the IC title to Bad News Barrett, who was red hot at the time. The death nail, I think, as a babyface is when you go out and when they don’t care at all. But to have fans when I’m blowing my comeback and they’re booing, they’re booing everything, they don’t want to see me. I was also a very boring character was kind of dead in the water. Barrett was a lot of fun. 

So that same day, Woods is dead in the water. I’m dead in the water. Kofi is a guy who has had five, six years into his main roster run, already a guy you know is going to be good, but kind of just seen as by the office as a good hand. So we kind of get to Kofi later, but Woods goes in and pitches the writers that day, pitches them this idea of doing a new Nation of Domination. They essentially laugh him out of the room, and he comes up to me after my match. I dropped the title, and he said, ‘Hey, what do you think about starting this group, kind of similar to what we did in FCW?’ I said, ‘I got nothing else, man.’ I always respected Woods as someone who was a very, very creative guy, just someone who was always pitching, always thinking outside the box. So I thought, man, you know what, he’s someone who I think has a ton of ideas. Let’s give it a shot. Honestly, that same day, I was told by creative, I was told by Road Dogg, ‘Look, we like you, but we got nothing for you. Essentially, we need you to go into pre-tapes and just try stuff.’ I went into pre-tapes that same day, after I don’t know if it was before or after talking to Woods, and we just tried stuff, and just tried a bunch of deliveries, and actually the last thing I ended up trying was, I grew up in the church, I grew up actually doing some preaching as a teenager myself in my dad’s church. So that oratory style was always very natural for me. I never wanted to do anything sacrilegious or blasphemous, so I always kind of avoided that, but I just thought there could be a way to do this in a way that’s not offensive to people who believe or Christians. I’m not trying to do anything that upsets people.

So I just kind of went into pre-tapes and started doing the ‘next week, I’m about to grab the title…’ I feel like I can just riff and just do it. The great thing with that delivery is it’s always easy if you lose your place. It’s very easy to have a moment to repeat and give yourself a moment to come and kind of come up with something. So that style of promo and delivery was something very natural for me. So just knowing that the office really had nothing for me, that Woods was in need of something. I just said, ‘Let’s do this, man. Let’s give it a shot.’ Woods first came up with the idea of adding Kofi. I love Kofi. We interacted a little. He and I both trained at Cena’s gym, so I’d see him in Tampa from time to time. But my fear is they would never let him turn heel, and I thought for us to work as a group, we needed to be heels. So, from there, I don’t know if I fought it as much. I was just like, I don’t know, but eventually I get on board, and I say, okay, let’s talk to Kofi. Interestingly, Kofi, at the time, was kind of not really having the best time wrestling, and it was interesting, he even himself, he was thinking, “Maybe I want to retire early, maybe I want to be done. I kind of feel like I’ve kind of hit my glass ceiling. I think I’m good. But eventually we were kind of floored with how excited he was at the idea, and he was in, so we just kind of went from there, and we ended up spending months and months pitching that militant group. We actually got to be on TV. We were in South Florida when Woods comes out in that white and red suit and tells us we’re no longer going to be glad-handing and kissing babies and shaking hands, and we’re going to take what we want, and we did that for about a week.

That idea was shelved, and then we had to go back to repitching, but eventually we got to be The New Day that people knew and loved. But it was months and months and months of pitching. The three of us were on house shows together. We didn’t have a name, but we got to work on chemistry, but we very quickly realized we have something here. We see the business the same, we want the same for each other. We never wanted one leader. We always liked the idea of all three of us being viewed in the same plane, and we just had so much fun together, so we knew it’s worth dying on this hill for, because we all were in desperate, we were all searching for something.”

How did ‘Don’t you dare be sour…’ become your catchphrase?

“So Vince wanted us to have some kind of an intro. I never wanted to be the focal point of the groups, because I did not think that was fair to the other three. So we went into the studio, we got to work with Jim Johnson, the legend, to actually be in the studio with him in Stanford. So we went up to shoot our vignettes, and we also got to be in the studio with him to work on it, and it was just so great to hear his ideas, and to chop it up with him; it was awesome, such a great experience. So I went into the booth, and one thing they wanted is for me to lay down a bit of an intro. So ‘It’s a new day, yes it is.’ We did that. So I thought, okay, this is our little preamble, because I always think with wrestling themes, you always want that when you hear the glass break, you know it’s Austin in two seconds. I always want that within two seconds, I always want to know exactly who it is. So, I thought that was our thing. Okay, we have the ‘It’s a new day, yes it is.’ We’re good. But the office, they wanted something else on top of that. Okay, I guess I’ll try something. I want to say we were tinkering around with a few different things, I’d have to go back and listen to those first couple ones, because I know I didn’t have [my idea]. My thought was I’ll come up with something new for each town, and we did something like we were in Fort Lauderdale, and the only reason I remember this is because Austin Woods and Kofi would often mention it, but my first one was something like all ‘Fort La De Daddy, you feel it in your body.’ I came up with a different rhyme, and I forgot how I closed it, but I was like, this isn’t tenable. I’m not going to be able to come up with something for every [town], especially then. If you’re on the Raw loops, you’re doing five shows a week, every single week in a different town. I’m not going to have the time and the acumen to come up with a new little four-bar rhyme for every single town. So I don’t remember exactly how we settled on it, but I kept tinkering around with it a little bit, and I’m sure I probably saw one of those hand dryers that says feel the power, because people send that from to me from time to time. I’m sure it was that being in my head, but I just wanted something with Oh [town]! We decided fairly early that feel the power was something that was going to be a good catchphrase. We just kind of worked backwards from there with the don’t you dare be sour, okay, that’ll work. So we tinkered with it a little bit, and then I just felt like, okay, that’s that’s the thing moving forward, and it’s been great, because now not only do I have a thing that works for the new day and in wrestling, but also I got to do the intros for Nascar. So it’s like, okay, I have this built-in thing, I got to do the last two walkouts for Showtime Sean Porter, in boxing he fought Errol Spence, which was a big deal. I got to do that walkout for the Bud Crawford fight as well. So now having this built-in thing that I can kind of tinker with, I’m on Cameo, and right now I’m doing a lot of stuff. So all my cameos right now, the proceeds are used to go to Feeding America.”

Talk to me about the buildup of them turning heel on you.

“So, I know a lot of the complaints afterwards were, ‘If Big E wasn’t going to get cleared, why are we doing this?’ We were not in limbo about me being cleared or not. We knew that those guys really wanted to turn heel, and they wanted to do something with me that would service that. Initially, the goal was Jey was a babyface at the time, very hot, and the initial thought was, okay we’ll do something where the physicality is on Jey, that gets shut down. We thought, oh, R-Truth is beloved, maybe the physicality would be on Truth, that gets shut down. So we thought, okay, these guys want to turn heel. I know I’m not going to be cleared. We’re not leading to anything with those guys, so they kind of came up with a bit of an idea, and I thought, okay, cool, this is what you want to do. I’m still in this position where I’m with the company, and it doesn’t behove me for me to be a heel commentator, that’s not what we’re trying to do.

So I was like, this is the message I’m putting out in the world. I’m talking about meditation and mindfulness, so I’m gonna remain a babyface. Those guys will be heels. So it wasn’t long before we all kind of put our heads together, and we had this idea. We never really had seen a turn with no physicality. In the month or so prior, those guys were doing such a great job of building tension between the two of them. I still remember that one promo they cut where they lose the tag match. I feel like we do it less these days, but that follow shot, where the camera is with them with their frustration at the end of the match, follows them through Gorilla to outside of Gorilla, and we see Kofi and Woods just saying terrible things to each other. I think what I love about that moment is we have been so purposeful about always talking about our brotherhood, how close we are, never breaking up, we love each other, we’re always fighting for each other. The importance of KofiMania and the sacrifice of me and Austin to make the sacrifice for Kofi, because we love him so much. 

So this is the first time you really see any real tension, and it’s like this idea of the worst things that you’ve been holding on that you can’t say to your brother because you love him, but these things have been floating in there. But now in this moment of anger, saying the things that you can’t take back. So those guys did such a phenomenal job of building tension, and the timing was also great for me and the message I was putting out in the world, because the Players Tribune article actually came out the same day we did the turn. So that comes out that morning, and I think one of the lines in there was about how The New Day saved me, about how this brotherhood and this path we took together just changed me in so many ways. So to have that heartfelt thing come out, talking about my own struggles with mental health, and then that same day, have the breakup, it just felt so juicy. But for me, we always had to be so, we often refer to it as happy clappy. That idea of we drop a title, the next night [we are happy], and that was the directive. Hey, you still come out with a big smile on your face, you still come out clapping. We never really got to do anything with some real, you could argue KofiMania had emotional weight, but nothing like this.

So, the idea of doing something with some real gravitas, or something that actually hit people in the chest, was exciting. So, I had some feedback, and I thought the idea of, please forgive me audience, but I thought the idea of throwing out this hook of I could return, I could help you remember who you are, I could come here, I’m not cleared yet, but I’ll be your manager, I’ll be here with you weekly, we’ll bring back that old New Day that people remember and love, we’ll get our juice back. I love the idea of throwing out a hook that got people up, and then having those two take it away, and just that moment of, and for me too. With the article, I was reliving a lot of my pain, a lot of my struggle, and I just wanted to stay in that feeling, as someone who is trying to do more acting and learning more about actors’ process, I wanted it to feel real and genuine.” 

We felt it!

“Thank you. That’s what I wanted. So I tried to stay in, I tried to keep those feelings in mind and thinking about my angst, and carry that with me to that performance later that night, we were in Everett, Washington. I had so many people reach out and talked about, look, I know this is entertainment, I know it’s a show, but man, it’s heartbreaking. I had so many people, people who know that what we do is a work, who were like, ‘Is this real? Are you guys actually talking? I know it’s a show, but is this real behind the scenes?’ But I love that we were able to really hook people. I think, unfortunately, you know, those guys were getting booed out of the building for the first several weeks. It’s the follow-up that, unfortunately, I don’t think went as well as we all would have liked. I even pitched an idea. I love the idea of me sitting for the Rumble. Imagine Kofi does a save where he ends up on the barricade. There’s some dude with his hat low because they were taking shots at my fiancée at the time too, so I love the idea, maybe our hats are real low at the time, Kofi lands on the barricade. We tilt our heads up, take our hats off, and then maybe there’s a swipe of the foot, and we cost him the Rumble, he goes out, something like that. But creative had other plans, I was told, ‘Hey, that’s something we can get to later, ‘and I’m not a save it guy. Oftentimes, people like, oh, let’s save that idea for later, but things with creative and direction move so much, we have a great idea, let’s capitalize on it now. But ultimately those were the two who were going to carry it. Creative had ideas. My role is now as a broadcaster for the PLEs, so ultimately I just thought let’s try to make this break-up the best we can, and the rest is in their hands. So unfortunately, the follow-up of that turn didn’t go the way we wanted, but we were proud of the initial heel turn.”

Was it the frustration of how that heel turn went that led to Xavier Woods and Kofi Kingston leaving WWE?

“I don’t want to speak for them. I know when the time is right, I’m sure they’ll have a lot of things to say. There are things out there about pay cuts and whatnot. I just know, look, this ownership is not the same ownership that existed when we first signed to the company. It is their company, it is not ours. So they make their decisions with how pay goes, and ultimately, we all have to abide by that, and you understand that it is not your ball. It was not our ball when we first signed to the company. It is not our ball now. It is someone else’s ball to determine when you get in the game and how many carries you got. So they made a decision, and I just kind of want to leave that in their hands to be able to decide. I can’t fully speak to a lot of that, but I think we, as performers, we all want to feel valued, you want to feel like people want you here, there’s a plan for you, and we’re going to compensate you accordingly. When you feel like that plan is not in accordance with your plan, or the money doesn’t line up with the way you see yourself valued, you have to make a decision on whether you’re going to say, “Yes, this is what I will accept, or “No, this is not what I’m going to accept. So they made a decision to step away, and I respect [that]. Those guys will always be my family, regardless of what company we’re in, regardless of how old we are. What we built is bigger than companies, it’s bigger than our industry. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be in the financial position I’m in. I wouldn’t have the breadth and myriad of incredible experiences, even just getting comfortable in my own skin. I credit those guys for so much of that. I look back on our time in The New Day, and we could talk about how my career was cut short, we could talk about the things that didn’t happen in my career, but I knew I was in the good old days. When I was in the good old days, I knew this was it, and I was able to enjoy it. You’re always pushing for more. You’re oftentimes annoyed with booking or disgruntled with certain decisions, but I knew we had lightning in a bottle, and not just on screen, but off-screen. The way we traveled together, the amount, the laughs we had, I can’t tell you how many times I had to wipe tears of laughter out of my eyes. So many times when we were just, we had too much fun. I don’t think we ever had a blow-up, we never had an argument, we never had a time where we butted heads, really ever. If we had any minor disagreements, they were about creative process, and we were able to get on the same page immediately, the way we work together, our synergy, it’s special. So those guys are family, and will always be family. And I will always root for their prosperity. I will always, always root for their fulfillment. I just want them to be happy. So, if they’re happy at home, if they’re happy wrestling in VFW halls, if they’re happy doing conventions, gaming, whatever it is that they want to do with their lives that fulfills them, as long as they ain’t hurting anyone, fully support it.”

“Big meaty men slapping meat.” Had you ever said that before?

“No, no, no. I think it was my first time, and that silly clip I feel like is going to outlive me of all the things I’ve done in my career, but I’m grateful for it. So, and the really cool thing is a lot of times the clip gets shortened, so you don’t see who asks the question. That’s my guy, Rashad Dunn, former Iowa football player. We came in, we’re the same age, he’s like three, four days older than me. So we came in at the same time, we were roommates for two years. We still talk all the time. We have this core group of guys who lived in a house, actually the same house, so George Kittle has 830 Miller tattooed on his ass, because that’s that’s the house, CJ Bethard, who played with the 49ers as well, also went to Iowa, so those guys many years after us, they lived in the same house that we lived in, 830 Miller in Iowa City, that was our house as well. So Rashad, we flew him out to do the podcast, and we did this mailbag episode, and he asked me the question, so the guys are already getting primed for it. Because we do so much press together, we did so many interviews, they knew I was doing the Goldberg, and I would always, I would always ham it up a bit. I mean, I hammed everything up, definitely at the time, too. So they knew the Goldberg answer was coming, so that’s why you hear some of the little giggles and the tee hees coming already, but we would always have a lot of fun anytime people would ask us, our dream match, I knew every time Woods was going to say Too Cold Scorpio, he’s a huge Too Cold Scorpio fan, just his athleticism is kind of just ridiculous for a guy of his size. We always knew that Kofi was gonna answer Shawn Michaels, and they always knew my answer was Goldberg. So, yeah, the Goldberg answer just came out, and we all had a fit of the giggles, and sometimes you’re just feeling it, and it was just one of those moments where I started getting hot, just I felt the sweat come in. But just the energy of the room was a lot of fun, and yeah, and then a bunch of nonsense proceeded from that. But to see years later to hear meat chants at shows. I’m not saying this is the reason why, but you know, Booker now is doing the ‘No bread, no water, just meat.’ The fact that people understand you when you’re in a wrestling setting and you’re talking about meat, whether it’s the big meaty men or the big meaty ladies. I love that is the way you describe a hoss match. And to this day, on Twitter, on Instagram, I will still have people tag me. ‘Oh, I know Big E is smiling now.’ If there is an Oba Brock match, or even like an indie match, where two big men, or two big women are going toe to toe. So it is a very, very silly, silly thing. I thought we were gonna be able to make merch. What I was told at the time that legal said no dice, so there’s no merch. But it’s a lot of fun, and I’m glad of all the things we’ve done, I’m glad that’s followed me.”

What is Big E grateful for?

“My fiancée Kristen, for wrestling, and this community.”

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Paul Heyman (@HeymanHustle) is a pro wrestling manager and WWE Hall of Famer. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Stamford, CT to discuss how he brings out the best in the wrestlers he advocates for, being aligned with top stars such as Brock Lesnar, CM Punk and Roman Reigns, how he became Roman Reigns’ Wise Man, why Curtis Axel and Cesaro didn’t work as “Paul Heyman Guys”, being in the ring with Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 42 when Lesnar appeared to have retired, what he does behind the scenes in WWE, why he left WWE in 2006, how close he came to joining TNA, and more!

You are an absolute master at the little things. I believe that’s the big reason how you turn good into great. Where does that come from for you, mastering those little things?

“I mean, well, thank you for your kind words on that, but it’s just the desire to do something substantive, it’s the desire to do something better than other people do it. It’s the desire to achieve greatness. It’s the adrenaline rush. It’s the dopamine effect when you achieve something that seems to be unachievable, and whether that’s a nuance in a performance, getting that out of someone else, collaborating with someone on their efforts to achieve that greatness. It’s just the pursuit of something that you can be proud of, that you can look back on if you choose to look back on things and say, yeah, that I really enjoyed doing that. That gave me a high that’s not available through any kind of drug, any kind of sex, anything else in life, with the exception of quality time with your children. Outside of that, it’s chasing that high. What makes Mick Jagger and Keith Richards go on stage at their age when they certainly don’t need the money, and tear the stadium down, not only doing classic Rolling Stones music, but new music that they still to this day choose to write, what drives that? What makes them want that? Why is Clint Eastwood directing movies in his 90s and they are Academy Award-level movies? Because there is a need, there’s a yearning, there’s a craving, there is an insatiable lust to go after something that you’re passionate about and want to overdeliver, even past your own expectations.”

Where do you think the Paul Heyman character ends and the Paul Heyman the man begins?

“Depends on the day, depends on what’s needed inside of the performance. The persona of Paul Heyman is carried a lot by the real-life experiences of the person Paul Heyman. So, if I’m asked, I’m not a good actor. I’m not a trained actor. I never went to acting classes. I was never trained to be an actor. I’m not a good actor.”

I would disagree with that. You are a fantastic actor!

“Well, thank you. I’m a method actor. I find things that trigger the emotion that has to be presented within the scene that we’re presenting. So I have to rely on things that I can relate to, so therefore you’re getting a lot of me within the character, but it’s clearly a persona that I’m putting forth, and it’s a skin that I’ve learned to be very comfortable walking in. Ric Flair, famously or infamously, has said many times, the day I’m nervous walking through the curtain is the day I don’t walk through the curtain, and it’s funny because to me, the day I’m nervous walking through the curtain is the day I don’t go, because I’m not nervous going out there. I’m a lot more comfortable in the middle of the ring with a live microphone in my hand in front of 20,000, 30,000, 70,000, 5,000 people than I am just sitting here talking with you right now.”

How did it become a thing the way you say Brock Lesnar’s name, because there’s a lot of fans out there that can’t just say Brock Lesnar. They say Brock Lesnar!

“Well, that’s all branding, I mean, that’s all a matter of what is the emotion that you want to convey. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. I tell that to everybody. The first thing, if someone comes up to me with a script and they say, ‘Oh, these are the words…’ The very first thing I do is, ‘Are you ready? Tell me what you need to do. Tell me your assignment.’ When Joey Styles first came to ECW, Joey Styles would say, ‘We are here live at the ECW arena…’ Stop, cut, break. If you go to Rome and you go to the Sistine Chapel and you look at Michelangelo’s work on the ceiling, do you sit there and say, ‘I’m here at the Sistine Chapel…’ Michelangelo painted that. ‘Look at this ceiling, it was painted by Michelangelo on his back for 5, 10, 15 years,’ whatever the story is. Say the ECW Arena like you’re saying Madison Square Garden, like you’re saying Yankee Stadium, say it with such honor and prestige that it carries weight. So Joey Styles would say, ‘We are here live at the ECW Arena…’ and it’s looking up because it’s majestic, it’s opera, it’s operatic, so it’s never looking down the ECW Arena. It’s the ECW Arena, so everything that you want is about the manner in which you present it.” 

When you’re managing someone on screen, it doesn’t end when Raw ends or SmackDown ends. When you’re a Paul Heyman guy, this is all throughout the week, this is all the time. What does that look like?

“Well, again, it depends on the person that we’re talking about. The way I work with Brock Lesnar is a lot different than the way I would work with Roman Reigns. The way I would work with Roman Reigns is a lot different than the way I would work with CM Punk. The way I would work with CM Punk is a lot different than the way I would work with Bron Breakker. It really depends on the need of the artist. What does it take for Brock Lesnar to achieve the greatness that I know Brock Lesnar can achieve? What does it take for Roman Reigns to achieve the greatness in the form of The Tribal Chief that I know that he can achieve, and whatever it takes to get them there, I’m willing to do, because I want to be in on that greatness. I want to be challenged to rise to that occasion. If all they have to worry about is the actual performance and everything else is taken care of, okay. What’s your nutrition for the day? Tell me your nutrition for the day, so that when you arrive at the arena, that food is waiting for you. It’s prepared, it will be delivered to you at the time that you eat. You eat at 1 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 5 o’clock, 7 o’clock? You eat at 1 o’clock and 7 o’clock? Is there a particular type of vehicle that you are more comfortable being driven in than another type of vehicle that takes you to the arena, so that when you’re in that vehicle, you can think about your performance. If we just designate the fact that the performance is everything, it’s the end-all, be-all. It’s what we spend our lives crafting and desiring and wanting and needing, and the need to achieve something within that performance at a higher level than everyone else on the roster, if not in the entire industry. If we disagree, if we just come to the understanding that we both want it that bad, past the point of obsession, past the point of it even being a healthy obsession that we’re willing it to be an unhealthy obsession in that pursuit, and we both agree to it. Let’s go for that. That’s where I go, and I fall short of my own expectations many times, but I won’t let you fall short of yours.”

It’s interesting, because there’s that moment in 2020, and wrestling’s in a weird spot with COVID. When that camera pans out, Roman Reigns is sitting on the couch next to you. Everything changed. As I understand, Vince didn’t like this couch you were sitting on. What’s the story behind that?

“Vince thought the couch was not opulent enough for a character that was then going to end up being called The Tribal Chief. I can’t disagree with him, but we were in a rush to get that done. Well, the original idea was for us both to return at SummerSlam, and then be on TV that Friday and lead into Payback that weekend that we built to in the rematch where the title went to the Tribal Chief Roman Reigns. I thought let Roman return, give that moment to The Big Dog, and then that Friday on television, he’s not cooperative in the triple threat, he’s not cooperative with Adam Pearce, you know something’s up, but you can’t put your finger on it. Go to him sitting on the couch, and Pearce is looking over going, what the f*ck is Heyman doing there?! But you don’t know that Heyman sitting there, and at the last second pull out because Roman says, ‘That’s not a prediction, that’s a spoiler.’ And you see Brock Lesnar’s advocate sitting with Roman Reigns after all these years, and I just hit Roman’s tagline of ‘Believe that,’ and off the air. So for five seconds you see us together. Did I just see that? You’re rubbing your eyes, and you can’t believe what you saw. And then that weekend get the title on Roman, and then the next Friday is our first appearance, truly together in front of the cameras as a unit, presenting our case as to why this act is a game-changing act, and will create history in WWE.”

There’s a certain way you look at Roman Reigns. What’s the thinking behind that? 

“Uninhibited, uncontroverted, absolute devotion under any and all circumstances. If the room is on fire, and he says we’re going to run through the flames to get to the other side. ‘Yes, my Tribal Chief, I will go with you, my Tribal Chief. For I believe in you to such an extent that if you say we’re going to run through the fire and go to the other side, I have absolutely no reason to doubt the fact that we’re going through on to the other side, my Tribal Chief, and I will light myself on fire for you, my Tribal Chief, to protect you from the flames, for you are my Tribal Chief, and I acknowledge you. My world is built around that acknowledgement.’ It’s just devout worship, it’s blind devotion. It’s also the way, to be blunt, I used to see some people in a room when Vince would talk. It was just amazing to me that if you’re in the room and you’re not there to give a contrarian opinion, I don’t know what you’re in the room for. Because then you just inevitably become a yes man, so there were too many people, too many times that anything that Vince would say, it was never offering an opinion of, ‘Hey, that sounds great, and what if we did it this way too.’ Where’s your own input into it? In watching that, and in seeing other people, you know, just in Hollywood, do it too. Just, ‘Oh, that was so magnificent! Academy Award! Yes, yes! Oh, that was wonderful!’ It’s like, really?”

That sounds like fear?

“Yes, and in many ways it is fear, but it’s also devotion. It’s also just an absolute worship, an absolute giving of oneself to the Tribal Chief, because you must. Because to be in the Tribal Chief’s orbit, to have the Tribal Chief’s attention and to receive any acknowledgement. If you go back and you watch the time on the couch, he looked to me because he had to bring the camera to me, that was necessary. Once the Tribal Chief won the title. I told him, don’t look at me on the entrances. Hold out your hand for the championship and take the championship, but don’t [look at me]. Even when you call for the mic, don’t look at me, nothing. Don’t acknowledge me. Wait till I earn it. Give me a few months of service to the Tribal Chief, service to the cause of the Tribal Chief, service to the Island of Relevancy, service to The Bloodline. Then I will have earned my stripes enough for the Tribal Chief to say, ‘Thank you, Wiseman.’ That’s it. A lot of times he does. He looked this way, and I’m over and say, ‘Wiseman?’ And I come over his shoulder. ‘Yes, my Tribal Chief?’ And he wouldn’t look at me, because for the Tribal Chief to look at you, you have to earn that. It’s a matter of placing him above God, and if you can create that deity above the deity, then you have firmly established that’s the sun around which everything else orbits, that’s the energy in the room, that’s the oxygen that we all crave, and if you, and if you position him in that way, then it just makes him so much more of a bigger star.”

It’s so easy now to look back and go, of course, this character would work. We have the benefit of hindsight. It’s been six years, of course, it works, but was there anyone at that time that didn’t think it would work?

“Well, you know, it’s just the little things that go into it. The first time I came up with Tribal Chief, [Vince said] ‘Really? You want to call him the Tribal Chief?’”

What did Vince want to call him?

“Oh, The Big Dog, Roman Reigns, with his advocate, Paul Heyman. I said, ‘Well, I can’t be his advocate as Brock Lesnar’s advocate. We have to have something different to Roman Reigns, and Roman Reigns has to be different. You got to pull the trigger on this. This has to be as much of a seismic shift as The Deadman becoming The American Badass. This is a whole new character. This is a whole new persona, and he could not have played this persona earlier, because he was too young to do it. He needed to weather the storms to become the Tribal Chief. We grew up with him, almost like he was a child star, in that we saw him from his young days, fresh out of college, and he grew into this Tribal Chief.”

What a beautiful moment you and Brock Lesnar shared at WrestleMania 42. Can you take me into the ring? What was the conversation that you guys shared during that long embrace?

“I thanked him for everything. He thanked me for everything. I told him that I love him. He told me that he loves me. Then I asked him if he finds it funny that the two of us are standing in the middle of the ring, in the middle of the stadium, in the middle of WrestleMania, being broadcast all over ESPN, telling each other that we love each other. I said, ‘This is kind of a surreal moment.’ He goes, ‘F*ck them! Don’t worry about that, this is just for us.’ Okay, my beast. Happy to happen, happy to participate in the moment. It was just a very personal moment that we were not hesitant to share with the rest of the world. It was a very emotional moment.”

I guess that it was a moment to say thank you, but it wasn’t a retirement; Brock Lesnar is still competing

“Indeed he is.”

So what do we make of that moment? What should we make of that moment at WrestleMania 42?

“Remember how I felt if I’m an audience member. I would remember how I felt watching it. I’d remember what that moment was. I remember all that it encompassed, and I would be appreciative of the fact that I got to live that moment and experience it and hold it in my data bank as a fan.”

You’ve managed so many champions, so many Paul Heyman guys have gone on to be champions. I don’t know if you’ve talked about this before. What was the original plan with Curtis Axel? Why didn’t that one work out?

“Because I don’t think it was meant to work out. I don’t think there was ever an overall grand scheme to move Curtis Axel all the way up the ladder. Curtis Axel filled the need for there to be people around me to feed to CM Punk at the time, it’s the same thing that happened with Cesaro. You look at Cesaro, and he checked, especially at that moment in time, he checked every box to become a top star. Everyone who got into the ring with him came back into Gorilla, saying, ‘Give me him.’ Everyone, I remember John Cena worked with him on television and came back and looked at Vince and said, ‘I could main event WrestleMania with him.’ And probably could have, and should have. Cesaro was placed in that position the day after Brock Lesnar conquered The Streak, so that when Brock took his hiatus, I had an excuse to be on television to say my client Brock Lesnar conquered The Undertaker’s undefeated streak at WrestleMania, and you needed an excuse to have me out there on television, and if you put me on commentary, I can’t say it for two or three hours, I have to say it with impact once a week, just drill that into your head, reinforcement, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. So Cesaro became the excuse to see me say the line. Curtis Axel was cast as Paul Heyman guy, generic Paul Heyman guy. You may as well have put a mask on him and call him the Mad Russian, Mr. X, the assassin, the punk destroyer, so that we could feed the babyface CM Punk, and that’s a shame for Curtis Axel, because he had a lot more to offer, but he delivered in those matches with Punk, and that was the assignment, and once that assignment was over, there was no plan to propel him further, and he didn’t have the cache to go in and pitch for something that would continue the momentum coming out of that program.”

So there wasn’t a long-term plan for either of those guys?

“I don’t believe so. If there was, I was never clued in on it. When I was told I was getting Curtis Axel, my question was, what are we doing with this, and Vince’s answer was going all the way to the top. I don’t think Vince really felt that about him, and I don’t think, I mean, I could tell by the third week I was with Cesaro, oh, I understand what we’re doing here, I get it. I see how this is going to play out, that as soon as Brock is back, this is going to get discarded.”

I think that people just think that you’re an on-screen character, because that’s just what they see on Raw or SmackDown, but what is your role in WWE now?

“If I were to list my scope of services, what would be number one? I’m the liaison for some talent, in terms of I’m the creative liaison between that talent and the creative team, the creative team and that talent, so a lot of the creative will flow through me in both directions. I handle a lot of the behind-the-scenes business for members of The Vision, obviously for Brock Lesnar, and there are others, more so on Fridays than on Mondays, because Mondays I’m on air a lot, I sit all the way in the right corner in Gorilla. Paul Levesque is up in the position with the headsets on, Bruce Prichard or Ed Koski or John Beckstrom or Ryan Ward will sit next to Paul, so of the 1,000 details per show that Paul has to hold on to, anything that needs to be taken care of. Okay, take care of that. As he navigates the macro, the micro will fall down to the person next to him. In front of them will be [Billy] Kidman or Jason [Jordan], who keep the show honest in terms of time, commercial breaks. We have to hit this crossover, we have to be off the air by this moment, and next to them will be the producer of the segment on headsets, to this side will be the writer of the segment on headsets, and next to the writer is me, and I just sit there and I watch the show, and I’m watching for things that ‘we need to follow up on that.’ ‘Oh, you know what? Let’s not follow up anymore on this.’ ‘Let’s pull that segment coming up in 12 or 13, because it’s a good mystery as it is now.’ I can give instant feedback during the show, but more importantly, I’m there for any talent. I’m there all day for any talent, top to bottom, newcomer to veteran, NXT talent moving up to legend that’s there for a cameo. I’m there for anybody that wants to talk about their performance that night, or their creative process, or how they’re going to approach a certain scene, or their match, or their finish, or anything that they want to talk about in this business. In the art form of the presentation, immediate or long-term, I’m there to talk to them. If I can have the liberty of using this phrase to bestow some wisdom upon them.” 

Fans feel like they know so much right now, especially because all of this information is constantly in our pocket. They feel like they could book this show better than anybody. What are wrestling fans not understand about putting together a wrestling show?

“That it’s not about the immediate moment. You asked me before, what I do behind the scenes in WWE? I do not go into the weekly television meetings. I don’t get into that level of micro anymore. I stay very macro. I attend the long-term meetings, the long-term creative meetings. I take the ride up to Stanford. I sit in on those meetings and love those days. My latest obsession has been, let’s book out SaudiMania. Let’s get that done.” 

So, you’re already looking at that now?

“Oh, I’m looking at the year after Saudi. If it was up to me, and it’s not. Let’s start there. We’ll change it every week if we have to. We’ll change it every time we meet, but let’s get something that we’re building towards. Let’s write the last page now, and then let’s build towards it. I would love to know what we’re doing the year after Saudi at WrestleMania. I’d love to have a concept for that. Who is Roman Reigns’ opponent then? Who’s CM Punk’s opponent then? Who’s Logan Paul’s opponent then? Who’s Bron Breakker’s opponent then? Who’s Seth Rollins’ opponent? Jade Cargill, Becky Lynch, Liv Morgan, Rhea Ripley. What are we building towards? Because if we know that and we have a concept for that, then it makes SaudiMania really easy. It’s not about, oh, you know what I would do this Monday, okay? But how does that affect next Monday? How does that affect what I want to do in January? How does that affect the Royal Rumble? How does that affect SaudiMania? How does that affect what I want to do the year after? Here’s an example. Okay, right now we have lined up for Crown Jewel, the trilogy. The champion on Raw is Roman Reigns. The champion on SmackDown is Cody Rhodes. It’s 1-1. If they both retain the titles all the way to Crown Jewel, we get the trilogy at Crown Jewel. What an enormous main event. What a prestigious main event. What a historic main event for Crown Jewel. You want to sell Crown Jewel, you want that to be one of the biggest PLEs of the year. You want that to be a hot ticket, both in terms of selling tickets and on the secondary market? Put the trilogy match there.”

Earlier, you mentioned working with Vince McMahon. What’s the story behind you leaving WWE in 2006. What led to that?

“We had very different visions for the rebirth of ECW. I was a lead writer of the third show, Raw, SmackDown, ECW, and he was the chairman of the board with 85% of the voting stock. One of us had to leave. Don’t know if you’re a betting man, if you’re gonna place a bet on which one of us was gonna leave, I think the [man] who’s just merely the lead writer of the third show, is going to be the one whose ass is out the door, not the chairman of the board with 85% of the voting stock.”

What led to that? What led to just the relationship falling apart?

“The rebirth of ECW.”

But One Night Stand went so well?

“Because it was a one night stand, and One Night Stand 2005 was a magnificent event that was as authentic an ECW presentation as we could put on in 2005 including but not limited to, but certainly highlighted by the Sandman’s entrance, which I fought for to the point of almost getting fired.”

Because Vince didn’t want to pay for Metallica?

“Right. When that music hit, everyone at the Hammerstein Ballroom knew, wow! This is a real ECW show. This is how it felt back in the 90s, and in 2000. 2006 I thought was a B minus show that had a main event that was so memorable that the audience made such a spectacle of Rob Van Dam versus John Cena. Because in ECW, Rob Van Dam never had a world title shot, 23 months as the world TV champion, and for most of those 23 months, the world TV title meant as much, if not more, than the world title, because it was held by Rob Van Dam and pushed in that fashion. But Rob Van Dam finally going for the big title against John Cena, who was the antithesis of what an ECW fan thought should be a performer on an ECW show, and their main event was so memorable for the audience’s reaction. The character of the audience was the star of that show, and the fact that Rob Van Dam won made that show popular, acceptable, beloved. Coming out of that, had we presented somewhat of a new style, a progressive, innovative approach to professional wrestling in 2006 that was a genuine alternative to anything WWE was offering at the time on Raw or SmackDown, it could have been a hit. But instead it just became a third brand utilizing stars off of Raw and SmackDown. First move I made in the new ECW, I brought CM Punk up from OVW. I wanted Rob Van Dam to be the legend from the original crew, and then you sprinkle in all these other ECW originals as we move the new stars up into the spotlight of what would become a new version of ECW, which was at its worst a complete alternative to anything else that’s out there, and instead that it was not what WWE was willing to put on the air, and was amongst the most miserable experiences of my entire life, because it became very personal between me and Vince very fast, because I spent seven and a half years of my life building a brand that at some point became more of a cause than a business. So when you give your life to the cause, you give seven and a half years, and these are prime years too.”

“The worst day of my life in ECW was still a wonderful day. I was living out a dream and fighting for my life doing it, and knowing that I’m fighting for a cause that I believed in. So, no one drank the Kool-Aid of the cult of ECW more than Paul Heyman did. I gave seven and a half years of my life to that cult, to that cause, to that mindset, and to Vince, because he was bored with no competition. WCW is gone, ECW was gone, TNA was nothing in terms of capturing Vince’s attention. So, what did Vince McMahon get to do? Oh, God damn it, I get to change an ECW booking on Paul Heyman. It’s power, it’s how Vince operates, and so it became a very personal tug of war between whose vision will be implemented for ECW, when the whole dynamic was let’s create a third brand that’s a true alternative to the other two, so it just became a miserable working environment.”

What was the breaking point? 

“The breaking point was a week after we started, and I couldn’t take it anymore then, and still had to last another six months in the job. The breaking point was the December to Dismember. Coming off of Survivor Series, it was obvious to me that CM Punk was embedded in the zeitgeist of the mindset of the audience in WWE of who is the next big star. He captured the imagination of the WWE crowd, and if we could get the title on to Punk and put Van Dam on the chase, we were getting Bobby Lashley. Put Bobby Lashley on the chase, and the rest of the characters in ECW would rise with the tide as the hottest sensation in WWE, CM Punk, is our champion. Rob Van Dam, who would still be more popular than Punk in the moment, going after the title. Bobby Lashley being anointed as the next big star coming off of SmackDown and changing his style to a more MMA-based style. Wow, we could have really taken this to where, by Mania, ECW would have been red hot. Instead, because I was so infatuated with the idea of an ECW with CM Punk as the champion and Rob Van Dam on the chase and Bobby Lashley on the chase, that Vince said no I want the title on Bobby Lashley. We’re going to beat CM Punk first in the Elimination Chamber, and we’re going to beat Van Dam second in the Elimination Chamber, which was a matter of spite. Once we get to that, that now I’m affecting everybody else’s career, number one, number two, I’m affecting the audience having a chance to like the product because the product is being sabotaged by the very person who wants something out of the product for it to be profitable, but he can’t get out of his own way in terms of competing with me behind the scenes for the decisions that are being made on a product that is still associated with me instead of with him, so just the clash between the two of us became just a god-awful miserable experience that one of us had to escape and he wasn’t going anywhere.”

Was there ever talk in 2006 of you working with TNA behind the scenes?

“Not in 2006.”

At what point did TNA reach out? Was this ever?

“2010.”

Were you ever close to working with TNA?

“Depends on the perspective of the person that you’re asking. You’re asking me, was I ever close? I don’t know. I certainly told them what my five-year plan was, and I talked about this on Ariel Helwani’s podcast back then, going to get rid of everybody over 40, going to get rid of all the legends, going to keep one. Back then they had way too many legends. It was an old-timers game, and some of them had years left to give, but they got lumped in with the other veterans, so they seemed older than they were.”

For so long, there was no competition in wrestling. Now there is. Is wrestling in a better place now because AEW exists?

“I certainly hope so. I mean, it shortchanged the compensation packages for a lot of talent, because there was a wolf across the river named Tony Khan that had a billion dollar checkbook that he could afford to pay a lot more money for talent than talent was making back in 2017, 2018, 2019. So it certainly changed the compensation for talent, and they’re on a viable network, they have a style that’s different than WWEs. They present an alternative, if not a competitive brand. I look at AEW, and I realize the influence that ECW had on that project, on that product. For example, like Moxley is a total ECW Sandman, New Jack style performer. But if you look at the AEW style, it’s Rob Van Dam versus Jerry Lynn from 1999. AEW is RVD, and if you were a fan of what RVD and Jerry Lynn were doing in 1999 a lot of what AEW presents today is derived and is influenced by what RVD and Jerry Lynn were doing back then.” 

Why didn’t Shane end up buying ECW?

“Vince found it more valuable to have, as Vince would say, I’d rather have Paul Heyman in the castle pissing out than out of the castle pissing in. It’s the same move that Apple made in buying Beats. Apple didn’t need Beats, Apple wanted Jimmy Iovine. Vince McMahon was tired of me being out on my own, being an independent, doing my own thing. Decided we need Heyman and wanted Heyman involved, and to get Heyman, you had to at least secure the assets of ECW, or promise the bankruptcy court to secure the assets of ECW, so that there’s a curator for our library, and along with that comes Paul E.”

You had an exceptional tan on TV for a few weeks. What’s the story behind this deep tan?

“I was competing with Bron Breakker as to who could look more ridiculous with the self-tanner that we were applying. Actually the time that I did that, I needed it because I looked god-awful at the time. Here’s something I’ve never revealed publicly, and it just goes back to how you approach this industry or performing in and of itself. I know the exact episode that you’re talking about, because it’s a meme now, where I crashed out when I was talking to Jey Uso, because Jey Uso said I screwed over the Tribal Chief, and it’s like, ‘No, it’s always my fault, it’s always me, me, me, but not this time, I’m not the one, I’m not the betrayer, I’m not the double crosser…’ That crash out was very real to me, because at the time, I always get sick right after WrestleMania, because I wear myself so down going into WrestleMania, so I always get sick. I always end up with a sinus infection, or bronchitis, or something, inner ear infection. Something goes wrong with me the week or two after WrestleMania, every single year. At that particular moment I got a kidney stone, or several kidney stones, and in passing the kidney stone it was so sharp it cut my urinary tract, and besides cutting my urinary tract, it left my urinary tract in a position to where I could catch an infection, and man, the last place you want an infection like that is in the urinary tract, because it’s tough to get rid of. So now the urinary tract inflames, presses up against the prostate, irritates the prostate, the infection now starts to spread, and now the infection is in the urinary tract and in the prostate, and it’s spreading through my system. I end up in the hospital. Shout out to White Plains Hospital, because, wow, they took wonderful care of me. I end up in the hospital, and all I’m asking is, I have to be out of here by Sunday night, because I have to be on the jet on Monday to go to Raw. They’re looking at me saying, ‘You have a very serious infection.’ I mean, they’re bringing in people from infectious diseases, because I’m allergic to penicillin, number one, and number two, any antibiotics that they’re giving me, none of them are working. Infection is getting worse. My temperature is rising, and the effects of the infection are taking hold, but I won’t miss work. So I checked myself out that Monday morning. I chartered a jet on my own to Raw, did Raw, flew on the WWE jet back to White Plains, checked myself back into the hospital, didn’t tell anybody. Meanwhile, when I did that scene, and for a couple weeks afterwards, when I would jet myself to Raw, take the jet back home, check myself back into the hospital, when I did that scene, I had a catheter and a PIC line. Next to trying to book the rebirth of ECW in 2006, perhaps the most miserable experience of my life. But there was work to be done, and I wasn’t going to miss work, especially because we had just launched The Vision, and to miss television, then would be abdicating my responsibility to that story.”

What is Paul Heyman grateful for?

“My children, their health and their understanding that I have these dreams.”

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Layla (@mslayel) is a retired professional wrestler best known for her time in WWE. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Los Angeles, CA to discuss why she has returned to wrestling conventions after being away for so long, why she left WWE in 2015, if she is open to one more match, how winning the Diva Search started her WWE journey, being paired with Michelle McCool, the infamous Piggy James storyline, how CM Punk came up with the name Lay-Cool, her and Michelle both winning the Women’s Championship, becoming a mom and more!

How does it feel being back out there again?

“I’m enjoying it. It’s different, and I think because I was gone for so long, people expect me to look like I did in 2015 when I retired. So it’s been a little bit hard, getting used to social media and hearing, ‘she looks different’ or stuff like that.”

Your break was almost 10 years, right? You retired from WWE in 2015. What made you step away from everything?

“If you look back, for me, I started in 2006, so I was there for nine years, and I’ve been traveling. I was never a part-time talent, I was always full-time, and we worked a lot at that time. I just was like, I’m 38, what am I gonna do? My looks, you get to the point, you don’t look the same, and I’m getting tired and worn out from just traveling all the time, stuff like that. Where was there really for me to go? I kind of did everything, and they were coming in with the new girls, younger, fresh. So I just was like, it’s just time to go. Then that’s what I did. I just made up my mind one day, I went in, and I just asked, ‘Can I have my release, please? I just want to go.'”

Had you been thinking about it for a while?

“No, I just literally [decided], honestly. Vince actually signed me to a new contract, and I don’t know, I just woke up and I was just like, it’s just time.”

What was the reaction when you asked to be released?

“I had to wait because I left. I didn’t even stay that day. I was just like, guys, I’m done.” 

Do you remember what city it was?

“I want to say Oklahoma. It was Oklahoma. I mean, I have to look. It was in July 2015 I think it was in Oklahoma. I don’t know. I went to the gym that day, like I do before I get to the arena, and I was just like, I’m just done.”

Did you have a plan for what was next? 

“No. I can’t explain it. It’s just such a hard grind, and I think when you’re with WWE, the thing is always to keep going, keep striving, keep asking for more, keep reaching, keep saying, I’ve still got one more run, I can do this, because you’re always fighting for a spot, and I was just like, what am I fighting for? I literally felt like I was like a hamster on the wheel, and I was just like, yeah, I’m done, it’s fine.”

Was the decision behind I’m gonna step away from wrestling and also step away from the public eye? We didn’t hear from you for almost 10 years, you didn’t go to wrestling events, you weren’t on social media, so what went into that decision?

“Honestly, after being there for nine years, it became my identity. So, for me, it was a decision that Layla, you’re not this person, you’re Layla. So, I really just wanted to come back to be me, instead of being Layla, WWE Diva, that kind of thing, and that’s the problem. Would it have been better if I had had a stage name like most wrestlers do? That might have been a bit better, but I think when you’re going by your own name, sometimes there’s a line, and I think for me that line was crossed around 2012. It got to the point where it was blurred. The line was blurred for me personally, and it was just good to step away from that.”

What made you come back?

“I think I wanted to come back out there and start working again.”

You don’t mean working by having matches?

“Oh God, no [laughs]. I meant just coming out there, working events and stuff like that. I left a lot of money on the table when I walked away. Because I still think that it’s nice to go to wrestling events, and like you were saying, the nostalgia and stuff like that. Since I’ve been gone for so long, it’s nice to go back.”

So, based on what we were just saying, you sound like you would never have another match. 

“No, I’m too old, and I’m out of shape. I can’t say never, because I feel like if there was ever an opportunity for Michelle and I to do something like LayCool or something like that, of course. But not a run or anything. But if there was ever that opportunity, I think that would be so wrong of me not to do that. So to me, that would be the only thing I think I would come back for. But am I trying to have a match or anything like that right now? No. Sorry, no one wants to see it. I don’t want to embarrass myself, I don’t want to tarnish what I’ve had in my past career, kind of thing. So if I never come back, then I’ll just rather leave it the way it was.”

Was there ever an invite for you to be part of the Women’s Royal Rumble or Evolution? 

“Yeah, actually, I got invited to a couple of [things]. I can’t remember exactly which ones, but the last time I think they invited me was in 2021, but I was pregnant.”

So would you want another opportunity somewhere in the future, if it was a one-off thing, an anniversary show or something like that?

“Maybe. Yeah, maybe I think so. If the offer comes in, I probably would say yes.” 

Michelle McCool is now a Hall of Famer. Do you ever think that you might get inducted?

“I don’t think so.”

Maybe as LayCool?

“That would probably be the only way.”

Let’s rewind it back to how you even got here. So you’re part of the Diva Search, but how does this opportunity even get presented to you?

“So it was in 2006, I was a Miami Heat dancer at the time, so I’ve been there since 2004. Todd Grisham, his ex-wife at that time was working for WWE, Cassie, and she reached out to me, and I was like, I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I answered. We emailed a couple times, and then she sent me the audition date again, and I was just like, not gonna do it. I woke up one day, it was raining outside, and I was like, I’m gonna do it, let me get up to go to it. So I emailed her, she answered her email, and they’re like, the audition starts in an hour. Okay, I’m gonna make it. I can’t remember where it was, but it was like an hour’s driving. It’s hurricane season, so of course, stuck in traffic. I didn’t get there till I think two hours after it ended. But they gave me Jane’s number, Jane Liverson, and I’m still really good friends with her, and she waited for me. I was the last person in, and she’s like, okay, put me in the tent, and then with a camera. She’s like, ‘Okay, say your name, say something about you, and what you like, and who you are, and then take off your clothes, bikini, and we’ll take a video.’ So I was like, okay, did it, five minutes, and she’s like, thank you so much. Bye. I was like, that was it. I thought nothing of it.”

I think people might not remember this, but the Diva Search was not received well. You guys go out there and you are getting booed loudly.

“That was Miz’s fault, by the way. Honestly, when I look back now, I had no clue what I was getting into. I’m gonna be really honest with you, I didn’t watch wrestling like that. I thought it was just the stuff that you see on TV. I didn’t know it was a live show out there, and stuff like that. But Miz went out there and he said the wrong number. So that started them off. So, as soon as he did that, and I don’t think they liked Miz, I’m not saying anything against Miz. Miz is amazing, but I’m saying at that time I don’t think he was [liked].”

I think that people think that because we know that wrestling is predetermined, the diva search, that’s got to be predetermined too?

“Honestly, at that time, I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t know. Now that I have been in the business, I understand they don’t want to see the divas. Who cares? They don’t wrestle; they want to watch wrestlers. That’s how I wasn’t sure if the actual Diva Search was pushed on to the fans. But that was just that city we were in. Because there are other times we went to different cities, and they were receptive.”

Were you getting any wrestling training at the time?

“No, nothing.”

So, where did you end up training?

“On the road. My first match was with Kristal Marshall. I didn’t even know how to take a bump. So I had done a battle royal. Then it’s me and Kristal going into a battle with Miz. I went out there, and I forgot what I was doing, and every time I forgot what to do. She didn’t even get to use her finisher, she wanted that finisher so bad. I felt horrible that she had to work with me. Someone in the crowd’s like, “Your timing sucks!’ I was like, what is he talking about? So then after that, I think they were like, okay, we’re not going to put Layla on TV. Thank God that I could dance. So Johnny [Ace] was talking in the back, he wasn’t even referring to me, he was talking to someone about dancers. I went up and I went, ‘Johnny, I can dance, why don’t I do it?’  Because they wanted to do a group with Kelly Kelly, and he’s like, ‘No, Layla, you’re a Diva Search winner, we don’t want you for that.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but Johnny, I can do it. I can do the choreography.’ And I just walked away. Next week it was all kind of booked up, and they put me in extreme expose.”

Who do you thank for training you as a wrestler?

“Fit Finlay, 100%. He trained us all. Fit Finlay trained all the girls; he had patience with us, he fought for us. I think he even fought for me to win the Women’s Championship the first time. I think he literally was like, she can do it. We used to get to live events super early, and then Fit would have diva sessions in there, and he would be like, ‘Nope, you’re wrestling like girls, wrestle like guys.’ He didn’t care. He treated us like the guys, and we would have Fit Finlay boot camp, and I’m telling you right now, thank goodness we had that, because if we didn’t have that. He believed in all of us, he really did, he supported us, and he was also the agent that all the girls would go to to cry and stuff like that, he was the guy. But Fit Finlay, I would say, without a doubt, 100%. I had other training, of course, but 100% Fit.”

Is it true that around that time in WWE you turned down Playboy?

“Yes. Well, actually, it wasn’t just me at first. So, what happened was we were called into the office, and it was Kelly Kelly, Brooke Adams, and myself. I think it was 2007, I think Maria actually did the cover, and they were like, we want to do extreme expose for Playboy, and I was like, no. I’m not too sure what they said, but then because I didn’t want to do extreme expose, they offered Kelly Kelly and myself individually, and I think they’d offered me like $250,000 to do it. I was like, no, I’m not doing it.”

Why’d you say no?

“Honestly, I was really scared, because a lot of people don’t know this, I’m Arab. So my actual family, I’m an immigrant in England, but I’m of Moroccan heritage. So I was concerned that my family, who were Muslim. I was always told don’t do anything like that, you can’t, so I was also very scared of what [they would think]. My brother would have been so mad. So that’s why I said no. I was just like, I think that’s going too far. What I’m doing already is a lot with them and all the modeling stuff. I’m glad I said no, because I really couldn’t see myself going through the shoot. But I’m also sad I said no, because I could have probably retired that year.”

Is it true that CM Punk gave you guys the name LayCool?

“Yeah, he did. He wasn’t even part of the conversation. That’s what’s so funny about it. Because Johnny or somebody, I can’t remember, was like, ‘Guys, you need a name? You’ve been together too long now, it’s getting ridiculous. You need a name.’ Punk was hanging out at the arena, and he just was like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ We had a piece of paper, and we were trying to write something. We’re like, we’re trying to think of a name. And then we were Cool-Lay, it was so stupid. And then he’s like, ‘LayCool?’ Then we’re like, yeah, that’s it. Punk just happened to be there. We were just in the corridor, I don’t know, just happened.”

How’d you guys even get paired up to begin with?

“Mickie was brought to SmackDown. Michelle and Mickie were going to go against each other; they first had Alicia Fox. If you noticed, she was out there doing matches with Michelle. They needed a filler, and they were like, Layla. So they would put me in there to be the filler so that they wouldn’t touch each other, and they’d save it for the pay-per-view. It just started like that. I was never supposed to be in LayCool, because I know that Stephanie McMahon wanted to do like a mean girl faction kind of thing, and I think it was definitely Michelle, and it was gonna be, I think, Alicia Fox, and then for some reason, me and Michelle working together, and just the chemistry, and just trust. She trusted me. She gave me so many opportunities, I don’t know, it just happened.” 

You became co-champions. How was that pitched to you?

“It wasn’t. So the idea that I remember was it was going to be Vickie Guerrero. She used to come out with me and Michelle before. It was pitched that Vickie was going to win the title, just Vickie. So they needed the title to go on somebody else, but my gut was it was Fit Finlay that fought for me. I think it was him, because the day of, about maybe two hours before the show, like, Fit comes up and he’s like, ‘Congratulations, champ.’ I’m like, ‘Congratulations, champ?’ He goes, ‘You’re going to win a title.’ He was known for always ribbing everybody and just telling everybody, playing jokes. I’m thinking, what the hell is he talking about? I didn’t even listen. We went through the whole match, stuff like that. I’m waiting this entire time for them to be like, ‘Ha ha!’ Because he would do that, like he would make jokes on us and stuff like that, and it never happened. It just never happened. Went through the match, and I won the women’s championship. What? Co-women’s Champion? It was the biggest surprise to me. But if you even look at the crowd, it was in Beth Phoenix’s hometown, and there was no reaction. It was crickets. No one expected me to win that. It was perfect.”

Did they already have the plan that they were gonna cut the title in half, like friendship bracelet style? 

“They didn’t know, because remember, they made up their mind that day. They made up their mind a few hours before the show. But Michelle was like, well, why don’t we do co-champions kind of thing? Because then it’s like we can have our friendship, blah blah, blah. Michelle fought for that and I fought for that, and that’s what happened, and nobody knew what was going to happen, and then it was actually Batista. One day we were rehearsing, and he came up and he was like, ‘Hey, I just told Vince, you guys just split the titles like you have with your necklaces.’ That’s how it happened.”

How did you feel about the Piggy James storyline when this is first presented to you?

“When we were told about the first, like, pre-tape, and then the actual segment, I was kind of shocked, to be honest with you. I was surprised, but at the same time, I was also like, oh wow, at least they’re investing in a diva segment. So they’re giving us some time, and they were giving us a storyline that meant a lot, regardless of what the storyline was, they were actually giving the girls a storyline. So I was grateful, but also kind of looking at Mickie, is she okay with this?” 

Nobody believes that Mickie James is overweight.

“No, I know that. You got to remember, I think, especially in that time, in that era, it was like women, we were always made fun of. Our weight was so important to us, and there were certain things that we could get away with in that era that you could ever get away with now. So I think it was a very touchy story to some people, but I’m very glad that it happened, because it was the first time ever that divas got heat. They wanted to beat us up at live events, like literal women wanted to beat us up, like they really believed that we were, you know, and not only that, I think that, like, Mickie did amazing. That storyline, if you look at it, it was great, it was the first time the Divas section, especially on SmackDown, we had something.”

When you cut promos in WWE, you could maybe hear a little bit of a British accent, but I feel like it was like, ah, I can’t quite pinpoint it.

“So funny story about this, my first time ever being in England, standing by the ring, and then Michael Hayes comes out, and he’s like, ‘Hey, Vince didn’t even know you were from England’ I go, ‘What?’ He goes, ‘Yeah. I just told Vince that you’re from England, you should probably be in the segment. He goes, “No, she’s from Miami.”‘ So the whole time I didn’t know that I’ve been there, been there probably a year or something. And even Vince didn’t even know I was from England. Because that’s what I was pushed. I was pushed from Miami and stuff like that, and he probably thought it was a Latin accent, or who knows, right? He didn’t know. That’s why I was never billed from England.”

What do you think was the quickest time you had, curtain to curtain? So entrances, match, and then back.

“90 seconds.”

What do you think is the longest match you had in WWE?

“10 minutes.”

When did you start to feel that things were shifting, that the women were being given more of a chance?

“I knew it was coming because as I was actually leaving, Charlotte had been up there, I had a couple of matches with Charlotte on live events, and then they brought up Becky, they brought up Sasha. Because I was already told it was gonna be like a woman’s evolution coming up, so that’s when I realized it was just before, maybe about a few months before I quit.”

How’d you get paired with Fandango?

“I’m trying to think what happened. I think it was Triple H. Summer had to go do some TV or movie or something, and they were in a production meeting before the show, and someone was like, well, we need someone to dance with Fandango. He’s like Layla can dance, I think, and that was it.”

What is Layla grateful for?

“My daughter, I’m alive, and that I can live the life that I live.”

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Heidenreich (@JonHeidenreich7) is a retired professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in New Orleans, LA to discuss how the viral photo of him working at Walmart made this interview happen, playing professional football before signing with WWE, how poetry became part of his character, being managed by Paul Heyman, his infamous Michael Cole segment, feuding with The Undertaker, winning the Tag Team Championships with Road Warrior Animal as part of the Legion Of Doom, why he was released from WWE, being in the same NFL training camp as Goldberg, and much more!

When that photo emerged of you working in Walmart, there was so much love that poured in for you, and people were so happy to see you doing well. Did you see the reaction to that?

“No, I didn’t really. I didn’t see it when it happened. These kids, I call them kids, kids that I’ve known from working the indies, they started messaging me and calling me about it. ‘Have you seen the internet?’ So I don’t really do that. Then I found out from them, and then the guy who posted it, Wade, he handed me a piece of paper, I think [it was] your contact. Then someone was saying, ‘Man, he’s been saying he wanted to interview you for a while now. He wondered what happened to you, like, where is he at? Is he lost or MIA or something?'”

So, tell me about this day. So, you’re working at Walmart now, and a co-worker snaps a photo with you?

“Yeah, he’s actually on the renovation team that travels around, but he was there for a couple of months. He’s coming back. He’s from Ohio.”

But you are in New Orleans as we record this right now?

“The Big Easy is Heidenreich’s town. I’m part of one of the many people from here. But yeah, I saw he was from Ohio, and asked him if he knew about Ohio Valley Wrestling, and he says yeah. He was a wrestling fan, and I told him some stuff I did, and he left that night, and I think he said he didn’t really believe me that I was saying I did all this stuff, but he looked it up, and then he was like, this dude’s Heidenreich!? I remember you! He said, ‘I got an action figure, you gonna sign it for me?’ I was like, yeah, of course, that’s cool. He’s like, why don’t you tell me? I’m like, well I don’t unless wrestling comes up. Then a bunch of his buddies found out, they were telling him, why didn’t you tell us that he was a wrestler, man? They all have action figures, too. When my coworkers found out, one of the guys, Larry, found out at Walmart, he was shouting at everybody, ‘You know who this guy is? You’re like a legend, man!’ I guess so. They’re always messing with us, ‘That’s our superstar wrestler!’ But they’re cool. A lot of people like wrestling, man.”

What are you doing at Walmart? What’s your job?

“I put out freight at night.”

Were you surprised by the outpouring?

“I love it. Yeah, people were like, I thought, they were bashing me because I’m at a Walmart now. They said no, this dude is cool. I think Snitsky said some good stuff, because he’s a cool dude.”

Did you feel like you were okay with letting wrestling go? If your last appearance was 10 years ago, were you okay with just letting that part of your life go?

“Yes and no. Maybe I wanted to still do it, but it’s like, do it the right way. I think this happened organically with that picture.”

You had very early matches with people like John Cena. You had early matches with people like Randy Orton. Talk to me about working with those guys.

“Me and Randy, we were actually practicing one day, and I went to give him a sunset flip, or he was giving one, and I lost my balance and fell on him. I landed on his face and neck, and I thought I hurt him, man. I was like, I’m done. That’s Randy Orton.  I thought I might have hurt his neck. He turned out to be fine. They called an ambulance, bro, because I thought I landed on his face and his neck, and I was thinking, Oh my god, if I hurt him, I’ll say I’m just gonna quit, because they might kill me.”

You got released. When did they end up bringing you back? 

“I went to Zero One, that’s where me and Nathan Jones, we were the Ultimate Army. That was a trip, man. That’s a big dude. He used to throw me around in the ring, bro, him and Brock Lesnar. When I took moves from them, I felt like a small person. I didn’t feel big because they’re so strong, man. I mean Brock Lesnar gave me a belly to back suplex, and when you pick me up, it was like being on a roller coaster, click, click, click, click, click, click, and I was like, I was at the top, I was like, dude, is he gonna kill me? Because he picked me up like no one ever picked me up. He just held me there, I was like, oh my god, but man, it was perfect.”

You debuted on SmackDown, and it’s Paul Heyman introducing you. That was a huge endorsement!

“Yeah, man, that was huge. He’s managed world champions!”

You’re an early Paul Heyman guy!

“I mean, he’s tremendous, bro. I mean, in the wrestling business, you know. I mean, that’s like a genius mind. Like a Tesla in wrestling. He’s a great guy. So that was huge, man.”

How’d you like working with Teddy Long?

“I love him, man. I mean, he’s like the dad. He’s tremendous, that guy’s got a history, man, you know, he’s been around, and he’s just super nice. I did stuff with him in the indies because he lives in Atlanta, he came down to Alabama with the promotion, and I got to do stuff after. But I mean, that guy’s, he’s been around, man, he managed the Undertaker, Mean Mark Callaway.”

Then it goes to one-on-one with the Undertaker.

“That’s a trip. I mean, Teddy Long was tremendous, man.”

How do you go from being this monster heel to then reading poetry?

“Yeah, that’s crazy. I mean, some people said, I guess when you’re getting over or getting popular as a heel, a lot of times they want to turn you. I think with TV and the way things are now with WWE, I think back in the day, they may have taken a year or two to do that, let you run in every situation. But yeah, they turned me.”

Your theme song was so catchy. Then you started adding the March element to it:

“That was tremendous. I’m pretty sure Paul Heyman went and changed my original music. I think he said we’re getting rid of this, we’re gonna do something. So I owe him a big thank you, because he went and made that happen.”

That’s his voice, right?

“Yeah, it’s mine and his. Vince said I love your name, so maybe with that he could go in there and do that, and say we got to get some better music. I think any repetition that’s just going to get in people’s head. Because my name is a long name, and a lot of people never could pronounce it, but when it’s going “Hei-Den-Reich”, it makes it real simple.”

What was the idea behind the march?

“That was just goofing around? I think I was thinking like the dwarfs. ‘Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work…’ Because I would always do goofy stuff. That’s why I got nicknamed Looney Tunes by The Undertaker and JBL, which I thought was cool. I like Looney Tunes. I say crazy stuff. Michael Cole, and Taz would be like he’s doing his own color commentary in the match, he’s calling his own moves or stuff, he’d be talking to himself. I forget what they do, but I’d be saying something, they’d play with it.”

How does poetry become the gimmick for Heidenreich?

“All right, poetry. I’ve been writing since college. An English teacher let me write a story about Jim Morrison’s poetry, and I got a high grade with it, and that opened my door to, hey, I didn’t think I was good at writing, but I started writing then. I’ve been writing poems and songs and other stuff. I don’t know what it is, but I have notebooks full of crazy stuff, and I think I’m pretty sure I was on a plane flying with Paul [Heyman], who was sitting behind me. I was writing a poem. I don’t know if I wrote it to him or something. I just wrote it. I’m like, I’m gonna slip this back here, like your note in school or something. He read it. He’s like, ‘You write poetry?’ I said, yeah man, all the time. I think I saw the wheels turning in his head. I owe him a lot. I’m pretty sure he said, hey this guy writes poems, something off the wall and bizarre, and they liked them. When I write them normally, I’d ask Vince, he was involved with me a lot. I’m like, do you want to hear it? He goes, ‘I know it’s gonna be good.’ I’m like, that’s cool, man. It made me feel good.”

You’re reciting poetry on the SmackDown fist, and Paul Heyman’s yelling, “You get down from there!”

“This is a story I just remembered. They used to call me Scared of Heights instead of Heidenreich. Scared of heights. Because I was terrified to get up on that thing, number one, because that’s like 60 feet. We practice it, and that lift raises me up, and I got a harness. Because I’m like, I’m not doing it. But when we practice it, the guy who does all the stunt stuff, he went up there with me. I think he was a guy who worked with WWE, but he was a real stunt guy for movies, but he went up there with me. When we pulled to that big fist, it was like right on it, there was no gap. When we went live, we lifted the thing up. It was like six inches. Six inches seemed like 20 feet to me. I was like, dude, man, it’s not all the way against the thing. He goes, you got to go. I said, I’m scared, man. He like shoved me, get out there. But I had a harness, but I was trying not to act scared on that fist. It’s a big fist, but still it’s 60 feet, and if you don’t like heights, because I used to get scared having to do the Legion of Doom finish to stand up on top of the turnbuckle that’s way up there. So I’d always get on it, and I’d go right away before I fell. But anyway, somebody found out I had a fear of heights, and they was like, ‘You’re not Heidenreich, you’re scared of heights.’ The camera dudes would be saying it, I’m like, shut up, man.”

There was a rumor that it was going to be Heidenreich and Snitsky versus Kane and The Undertaker

“I mean, he’s bizarre, and I’m bizarre too. That’s like the Bizarre Brothers.”

Why didn’t that end up happening?

“I don’t know. Some of the things, it’s funny, you’ll ask me about something, you’ll have more info than I actually had. The things you told me, I really don’t know, man. I could speculate, but I mean, that’s not fair, because I’m grabbing the straws, man. No one comes and tells you. It’s not like in football, you have a playbook, and you have a game plan. You’re an offensive lineman, you got your blocks. In wrestling, it’s a lot more like it’s on the fly. I mean, sometimes I heard that the match will be changed while they’re going out there.”

Do you think you could wrestle again?

“No, I don’t think I could do a real match. I could maybe do run-in stuff or something, or manage somebody, that’d be crazy. Heidenreich managing somebody? He’d be mismanaged!”

How’s your health now?

“I mean, I had some heart issues. But my blood pressure’s down and my weight’s down. I’m not doing anything crazy like I used to do a long time ago. So, considering all the sports I did my whole life, I’m in good shape. I mean, they say I need to replace my left knee, because I had to reconstruct it, and I have degenerative arthritis everywhere. Like I told you, the bone spurs in my spine. I don’t think they removed any, they said don’t wrestle anymore. That was from car wrecks, football, wrestling, because I was in sports when I was six years old. Then football is pretty violent, and wrestling is too, so I mean, my health, I’m beat up, but I’m not overweight. I would like to start getting in a regular training deal again. I was riding my bike around for transportation and travel, but it’s too dangerous if you, I crashed twice and broke a bunch of stuff, and that’s not cool. I gave up to two wheel anythings.”

20 years later, how do you feel about this Michael Cole segment?

“It’ll always be disturbing, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, it was brought to me, I don’t remember particulars, but I do remember thinking, man, this is really off the wall. When you’re training to do vignettes and practicing in Louisville, you don’t practice for a vignette like that.” 

What was the pitch for this segment?

“Well, I mean, they said I was gonna abduct him, and bring him to the back, and then put him in a room. Then I think it was like you’re gonna act like you were like watching him, and you’re going one place with it. It’s like you’re going like it, and then you say, I’m gonna give you a poem. But it sounds like I’m gonna give him something other than a poem. I don’t know if it’s innuendos and stuff when you say it, ‘I’ve been watching you, I know what you want, and I’m gonna give it to you.’ But I look back and all the things that have been said about all these years, it’s kind of made me infamous, more than famous. But it’s disturbing still, and it’s weird.”

I understand there’s some innuendo there, but it looks plain as day what that is supposed to be

“Yeah, for sure, man. But I mean, when they bring it to you, I’m not gonna say no. Like when they said you’re gonna be with Legion of Doom, I’m like, all right. Whatever they bring to you, that’s where I was. If they told me to do a backstage thing or do this, and not like killing somebody or something, where you have to go to jail. I would do it, I’m gonna do it the best I can.”

How did Michael Cole feel about that segment?

“I guess he was kind of like, this is weird, and joking around. But he wasn’t like I didn’t like it, off-put or not wanting to do it. I mean, I could tell he was down for whatever. It’s like we’re working together, right? It’s a scene, and we’re building a story. He was whimpering. I mean, even though it was disturbing and weird and bizarre, I would have never come up with that on my own. I think it helped. That thing made me more memorable. People will never forget that.”

Do you have any regrets about that segment?

“No. I think I did the best performance, I guess. I liked it the way it ended. He was about to leave, I said, “You’re going to thank me? It was a poem by Heidenreich. I thought it was cool. I ended up calling them disaster pieces after a while, because I figured they’re so bad instead of masterpieces, but yeah, I like the character Heidenreich. Always in my mind, I thought I would go back. I had an idea to come back. I didn’t even think about telling you this. I never went back, but I wanted to. I just probably just didn’t know how to approach it to do it. If I would have went back, could I say the idea I always thought about?”

Of course:

“I thought they would show from my perspective, somebody watching Vince, almost stalking him, and whatnot, but never show it’s me. Eventually, I abduct him from the show. I take him and I put him in a trunk, and I bring him to a building, and they still don’t know. He’s missing, and then eventually I have him chained in a building with a light or something, low light. Then I walk up, and you see the red gloves, and then I read him a poem. My thing is, you cut me, you took my life from me, you took my world. That was my world, and I was gonna abduct him and make him pay, and I guess try to make him re-sign me or something, but it was gonna be kind of outside, not just getting back to wrestling, being like he robbed me of everything. Because it was a big thing.”

Why did you get released?

“Some of it was my bad decisions at the time. I was showing up late for some shows. I guess it was mostly me probably being late. I would say that it was my bad. I didn’t realize how lucky I was, and the opportunity I had at the time. I mean, my worked my whole life to make it a football, I really didn’t make it to that level. I get in wrestling and get to that level, and here I am. I was doing Legion of Doom, we had the belts, I think we maybe dropped them, but still a top spot, bro. I had an ear infection issue where I couldn’t wrestle, but that wasn’t the reason they sent me home and released me a couple days after that. It was a built up of probably me being stupid and then them probably thinking, man, this guy’s out of hand. Maybe release him and get he either gets himself straight and comes back, which I never really tried to go back. A bunch of times people would tell me you need to go to this house show or show and talk to somebody, and I think my pride was too big, stupid.” 

You talk about being stupid, doing stupid things, you talking about drug use?

“Yeah, some drug use, and basically that would cause me to be late. Sometimes I would miss my flight and have to buy another flight to get there. But I was never messed up at the building where I screwed up in a match, but at home, I may have stayed out at night. The night before I was going to travel, I’d go out and I stay out all night, and then I’d come home, I’d be like trying to get ready and I’d fall asleep or something.”

How long have you been clean now?

“About 10 years, probably at least. Pain pills was a terrible addiction. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I started out taking them. I was hurt. I didn’t want to get into taking them all the time.”

You previously mentioned Legion of Doom. How do you get lined up with Animal and you become a member of Legion of Doom?

“Well, I remember that they came and told me about it, and then we started that progression of me doing the hair, and then I think the spikes or the face paint, I’m not sure how it went on, but I was progressing with Animal. But my first paint job was the butterfly effect, which Animal came up with, which I don’t think they like too much. But the skull thing was actually given to me by Triple H. He got me and asked me to come into the back room. So I go into this locker room and he sits there, it’s bizarre. He’s putting that skull on my face in real time.”

Triple H was painting you?

“It was his idea. But he puts it on me, and he tells me to look at it, it’s cool, that skull face. But then we had to go ask the Undertaker, because he had those things on his tights at the time, or his pants, that was a skull-type deal, and he approved it. He said it’s okay, I like it. I went with that, which I thought that paint job was way better. I got the spikes. But that was surreal, because in college, we were LOD fans, or marks. I guess it’s okay to say mark, I don’t mean anything bad by it. But I had photos of me and the guy I played college ball with at Mardi Gras, we made up our homemade LOD spikes and painted our faces, and it was Mardi Gras day. We went out dressed up like that, and I had pictures, so I brought one to Animal, this is no bullsh*t, man. We were LOD, we wanted to be LOD. But now I’m in LOD, so that was huge.”

What’s the thing that you’re most proud of from your WWE career?

“Survivor Series Undertaker match. The things people said to me, and the way I felt, it was like I couldn’t imagine the compliments that were given by guys. It blew me away, man, and these are guys that have been around a long time.”

What is Heidenreich grateful for?

“My life, my mom and dad, and friends of mine who have helped me.”

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Cathy Kelley (@catherinekelley) is a broadcaster and backstage interviewer with WWE. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Los Angeles, CA to discuss being knocked over during the brawl between Liv Morgan and Stephanie Vaquer, training at the WWE Performance Center and possibly getting physical in WWE, her emotional moment when R-Truth made his return, being backstage when CM Punk made his WWE return, learning from Paul Heyman, being a member of Mensa, her TikToks with Rhea Ripley and AJ Styles, and more!

Is it different being on Raw versus SmackDown? 

“I mean, I think every single time that I switch, it’s just relearning the roster. I think we talked about this last time, it’s just like developing a different relationship with each Superstar, so that stays like a through line, and having to remember what’s happened in the past.”

Is the actual day of work on Raw or SmackDown any different?

“No, it’s the same, other than it being either half an hour longer or shorter. I feel like it’s pretty much the same.”

But Raw films the commercial breaks. So it might be promos that people aren’t seeing here in the US, but they’re playing on Netflix internationally. So are there more interview segments because of that?

“I would say SmackDown has a fair bit. We had five or six this past Friday, so there’s always a lot of work on both shows. But I do love those commercial break segments, because I feel like people can really be themselves. It reminds me more so of that era that we were doing a lot of interviews on digital, where it’s kind of off the cuff, and I love being in that environment where you’re just surrounded by fans. I feel like it brings a different energy to it.”

What is the shortest amount of time you’ve had to prepare for a backstage segment?

“I don’t know that I’ve had a short amount of time. Well, I have had a short amount of time to prepare for things. Back in the day, we used to have this thing called Plan B, which was when you had a set amount of time on USA Network. If, for whatever reason, a match went short, or someone got injured, or something happened, I would have to be sitting in Gorilla ready to do an interview at the last second and fill that time with whoever. So every single week, I would sit there and wait for the potential of that to happen. And I think there was only once or twice that I actually got ear-pierced and ready to go.” 

Money in the Bank, R-Truth returned after being released. That was an emotional moment for you. What was going on there for you?

“He is someone that I feel like brings such a positive morale to work every week, and we had obviously gotten closer because we had done a lot of TikToks together, but he’s just such a positive person, and I feel like he’s that for everyone in the locker room. So, you know, not getting to say goodbye to someone is always tough, and then when he came back, I think that that was just really special for everyone.”

Who are your closest friends in WWE?

“I don’t think anyone will be shocked to hear Kevin Owens is one of my closest. The Brons as well, Bronson Reed, Girly Pop for life.”

What kind of bands is he into when you say Girly Pop?

“Oh, everything. We’ll listen to Sabrina Carpenter, and we’ll also listen to death metal. We send songs to each other on Spotify or artists, and it’s something different every week.”

What’s your friendship slash relationship with Rhea Ripley?

“We’re close, but I feel like she’s been closer recently to IYO SKY.” 

Well, there’s one TikTok where she’s deadlifting with one arm. We know Rhea Ripley is strong, like, stop showing off!

“I don’t want to say I helped in any way, like she would have achieved the success that she has. Now, she is one of the top, if not the top, female superstars in WWE today. But I like to think that I was the one who made all of the other girls do TikToks with Rhea Ripley, just fawn over [her].”

You got knocked over when you’re doing this segment with Liv Morgan and Stephanie Vaquer. Is this gonna turn into something?

“I feel like that is just a workplace hazard, and I am normally pretty good about getting out of the way. Who’s to say if it’ll turn into something?”

Would you ever want to have a match?

“I don’t think I would want to have a match. I’ve expressed in the past that I do want to get more involved in some capacity. I would love to be a manager. I don’t know who for. That’s been something that I’ve said for probably a decade now. I actually valeted Ryan Katz in his last match on the Indies many, many years ago. But that progression is something that I would want.”

I heard you were training at the PC?

“I would say that I’m someone that really values growth, and I love learning everything that I can about this business. So any opportunity I can do that, I’m going to take it. Another example is I sit next to Paul Heyman every single week in Gorilla.”

What do you think is the biggest thing you’ve learned from Paul Heyman?

“There are so many lessons I don’t even know where to start. This isn’t the best thing that I’ve learned from him, but when I was wearing glasses and I had cut my bangs, he’s like, ‘You have to get rid of that, because we can’t see your eyes, and your eyes are where you tell your emotion.’ So there’s just a lot of little things that I think he helps so many people backstage, but I picked up from him.”

What are some of the things you felt like you needed to work on? If we look back at your first year and we look at where you’re at now, what do you think are the things you fine-tuned?

“Probably just confidence. I think that over time you get more comfortable I think my work is always going to be better if it’s someone that I’m friends with. But yeah, I think it’s confidence.”

I interviewed Maxxine Dupri and she brought your name up if there was a Total Divas reboot

“I feel like now is probably the best time to bring it back, because not only do you have some of the OGs there, but more and more people, I think, are hungry for that kind of content. They want to see what it’s like behind the scenes and see what our lives are really like. In the vein of reality shows, Joe Tess actually tried to nominate me to be the bachelorette recently. He’s friends with people at ABC, the producers of the show, because he worked on a similar show on ABC, and then he’s also friends with Jesse, the host, so I think there was a text exchange of sending in my information, which didn’t lead to anything.”

Would you be open to it?

“Again, it would be something that I would consider. Because I feel like even though I do share a lot of my life, I do keep a lot of it private as well. With any reality show, you don’t always get to dictate, unless you become an executive producer on it, you don’t always get to dictate what’s shared and what’s not.”

Do you feel like you have to turn it on when you’re in front of the camera?

“I think it’s just a different side to me. I was recently diagnosed with autism, and I recognize that it changes a lot of the social dynamics that I have. So when I say introverted, I feel like it’s a little bit more than a typical person would be.”

How do you feel like this run in WWE is different from your first one?

“I think I’m able to have a lot more fun this time. I feel so much more confident in my role, and I feel like, because I’ve been doing it so long, the reins are kind of off, like I can come up with questions on my own. I can kind of dictate where things are going for the most part, but it’s just less stressful and a lot more exciting and fun.”

You’ve been there for some of the biggest moments in WWE history. What’s been the biggest moment where you’ve been like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe either they’re doing this, or this person is back. What’s it been for you?

“In recent memory, I remember sitting outside of Gorilla when CM Punk came back, and even though there were rumors about it that day, to actually be in the building in Chicago, which is where I’m from, too. When he came out, I think was really cool.”

Did you see him walk into Gorilla before he walked out?

“You saw a hooded figure walking, and there were a lot of people around him. But when you have something that really surprises everyone, I think that’s the coolest thing.” 

You did an interview with Logan Paul. He was talking about how he was smarter than everybody in the room and then you were like, actually…

“Have you noticed that he’s cut a couple promos talking about how he’s smarter than everyone out there, but he can’t say that he’s the smartest one at WWE.”

Are you saying you’re the smartest one at WWE? 

“I don’t think that I’m the smartest one at WWE. I think the smarter you get, the more that you know, that you don’t know everything. But I got my IQ tested.”

What made you get your IQ tested?

“God, this is like 12 years ago, and it was when I was podcasting. I’d just gotten into wrestling, and you know how some people can be in those comments, and it was just calling me a dumb C word. I decided, because I just love proving people wrong and maybe proving myself right, that I had a really high IQ. So I went and I took the test. It was in some basement of a building in Orange County, there were about five or six other people in there. You take this several-hour-long test, and then a few weeks later, they tell you if you are in or not of Mensa.”

How long do you think you want to do this?

“I think as long as I’m treated well and I’m having fun, I would love to be involved. I don’t know in what capacity. I would love to have a family as well. So I don’t know what that looks like, but, Mean Gene was doing it all the way up until he passed. Yeah, what a legend. I remember him coming to the studio in Stamford and taping shows.”

What is Cathy Kelley grateful for?

“My dog, friends and family, and my health.”

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LA Knight (@RealLAKnight) is a WWE professional wrestler and former United States Champion. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Stamford, CT to discuss winning the United States Championship, brawling with AJ Styles at the WrestleMania 40 media day, what if he joined WWE 10 years ago, how he became the Slim Jim guy, how much longer he intends to wrestle, possible retirement, eliminating Brock Lesnar from the Royal Rumble, and more!

So you’re reactions are getting louder and louder when your music hits, the pops are getting louder and louder. When did it start to get to an inflection point that you noticed?

“In March of 2023 was the first time I noticed, but noticing it continue to pick up and continuing to progress would have been just all through that spring and summer. But the crazy thing is, I think there were a lot of people leaning on the idea that that was going to be a fad. There were a lot of people leaning on the idea that was going to be a flavor of the month, that that was going to be a passing thing, and here we are, 2026, I walk in the ring last night. Now, you could argue, yeah, maybe the reactions aren’t quite as big as they were at that time. I’m gonna tell you why that is in a second, but if you notice last night, I still circle around, I get the thing, and I stand there, and they still chant the name. Now, you could say that’s programming, you could say that’s passion, you could say it’s whatever it is. Bottom line is, it’s still there. However, the reason it’s not as big as it was is because right now I’m just kind of a man without a country, so to speak. I don’t have a set trajectory at this moment. If you look at last year, last summer, when I started, all of a sudden me and Seth were going for the title, and it’s me and The Vision. There it was renewed again. So it’s a matter of just making sure that I’ve got direction, I’ve got somewhere to go, and I’ve got somewhere that people care about, and something that people can sink their teeth into that then takes it up from an 8 up to a 10 and beyond. So I think that’s really just the key to the whole thing, and it’s kind of crazy that it’s kept on this long when I don’t think a lot of people are counting on that being the case.” 

Where would you want this to head? What direction would you want this to head in for the fans to sink their teeth into?

“I’m not a notoriously great planner. I don’t have an exact trajectory, necessarily. I think I just look at it and I go, is it not a crime from an outsider perspective, even from an insider perspective, but I guess a couple of different perspectives looking at this from. But from an outsider perspective, you look at, here’s this force that came in, and I took this thing by storm, and people make comparisons. They say, Steve Austin got real hot, and Daniel Bryan got real hot, and you could even say Oba Femi, whatever. You look at these things, but all these guys, by the time they had gotten hot and started getting the big pops, they had had big victories, big pushes, they had had titles. Even Austin, Austin didn’t really start getting the mega pops until he was already champion, like it started building up, and he was the Intercontinental Champion, he was Tag Team Champion, all that stuff, but it wasn’t like the crazy mega pops that you got in like 98, 99. Daniel Bryan, same thing, he’d already been multiple time Intercontinental Champion, Tag Team Champion. What was I doing? I was middle bottom of the card, getting beat every week. But I had 30 seconds, 60 seconds to talk, and when you look at it from I’m able to take that, and then become the number one merch seller. I’m able to be, you know, all of a sudden now I’m the favorite for Money in the Bank. All of a sudden now I’m the guy that the people are demanding, not because I was pushed in that direction, not because the machine got behind me. At some point, the machine had to get behind me. You can’t deny that at some point. You wanna talk about undeniable? That was me, but at the same time, there’s still some resistance.”

How was it working with Bray Wyatt leading up to that match that you guys had?

“It was good. It was good because it was a challenge. It was very different. It’s weird to work with the supernatural type stuff, because with my character, especially, I don’t want to sell it too much, because it feels so silly, but at the same time, I don’t want to sh*t on what he’s doing, so it’s like, you got to find that balance, it’s a nice little challenge to walk that line, to be like, I’m not afraid of this sh*t. But then he does some sh*t, and you can be like wait, okay, all right, that kind of gets me. You just got to find the right way to walk that line, and he was just like he was cool off the bat, he got me, I got him, and it was just a matter of just again finding the way to walk that line and make those styles work.”

I was at the press day when you and AJ Styles were fighting. You were next to each other:

“I walked into the room and I’m shooting him looks, and he might have said some stuff. He’s doing his interview, I was talking to somebody else. So, whoever I was talking to, while I was doing that, AJ is over here behind me. I’d given looks, and he’d referenced me, and I’d looked over there, and stuff. But at some point AJ tossed a stool in my direction, and at that point all I’m thinking is again the depth of the story we had told up to now. I’m like, there’s no way I wouldn’t react if he throws his stool at me. What am I going to do? I’m going to fight him. So I go over and just start fighting him, and I’m thinking surely security is going to come and break this up real quick, and it just went on and on. We’re down there work-shooting, and he’s knocking me away, because we got to make it look good now, because we’re like in the people. I’m like, where the f*ck is security? What is taking so long? Then finally, like, because we’re both blown up at this point. But yeah, it was just literally going off the cuff. How do I not serve the story that we’ve told this whole time, even to where he’s serving it now, just by throwing the stool. Obviously, I’m sure he wasn’t intending to get to where it got to, but in my head, I’m like, I have gone to his house to fight him. He throws a stool at me from five feet away. What am I going to do? Just shrug it off? No. So I went over there, thinking security is going to take care of it. They didn’t. I mean they did finally, but yeah, it took a minute, and so I hit that, he slammed the sh*t out of me, and he ended up with a bloody nose, so after that we both got a phone call, though, like, what are you guys doing, you can’t do that, and it was like, hey, I’m trying to keep it alive, I’m trying.”

It works so well for the story

“That was the thing, and I think he felt the same way. We weren’t getting like marquee attention for this match or anything going into it, so it was like, how can we up this and try and get more attention on this instead? That wasn’t pre-thought, but I’m saying, even with the things of what if I go to his house and we’re gonna get arrested, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it was just trying to try to ramp that thing up as much as possible, and that was just a happy accident that I think, because then they ended up using it and putting it on TV anyway.” 

What do you think your career looks like if you signed with WWE 10 years ago and became LA Knight?

“Who knows? I might not be here at all. I don’t know, because it’s tough to tell, just because so many of the circumstances were different. Again, I think about the Vince stuff, and I only got a little bit of it, and I was over it pretty quickly. But it was also due to the circumstances and the view on me, because of that number, that 39 number, what a scary number. So, I don’t know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, the circumstances could have been completely different, because of that not being a factor. Who knows? But at the same time, I gotta look at it like this, because there’s so many guys who’ve been doing this for so long, and I’ve been doing it for a long time, but not on this WWE schedule. This WWE schedule, I mean, beats you up. Right now, we’re in the best time for a WWE schedule, except for me in the next couple of weeks. I’ll get to that in a second, but for the most part, it’s not like it was even 7,8,9 years ago, or even just a few years ago, when we had the house shows every single weekend. So, in that regard, it’s great. I’ve gotten here the perfect time, where it’s like I’ve had a 20-year career where I haven’t beaten my body up too much. I’ve never had any major surgeries or injuries, Iron Man baby.”

So, the next few weeks? 

“So, we’ve got Raw coming up in Italy and in France in the next two weeks, that’s all I was on, and there’s tour dates in between. All of a sudden there was an injury, so now I got added to next week. Okay, fine. Then all of a sudden there was an injury, and I got added to Thursday, so now I’m gonna leave here tonight, go home, and I’m gonna repack, and then I’m leaving again tomorrow night to go to Liverpool immediately. So, I’m gonna be gone for like the next three weeks straight, so that’s gonna be great.”

It must have been so frustrating when people just kept bringing up that number. Your age?

“Yeah, I get it, though, because I think a lot of guys who are my age, and even a lot of guys who are younger than me, they’re in rough, rough shape. I’ve taken care of myself very well. I think I worked in a very safe manner, to where again it hasn’t led me to have [injuries]. I’ve broken my nose once, I’ve had a few concussions and stuff, but I’ve never had anything ever, never ever. I’m super reliable, I’ve never been on the shelf for any kind of real legitimate injury. My hope is to get out at some point, eventually, and not have any of those things on me. I’ve got neck and back pain, everybody has.”

I just don’t know why it was made such a point about you, and there’s so many people on the roster whose age began with a four.

“I think it’s just the idea that I was starting brand new, and so a lot of the guys who were there, who were already in their late 30s and 40s, had been established. I think it was just looking at this is going to be this long slow climb, we don’t want to invest. I mean, I 100% get it. If all you’re looking at is a picture and a number, 100% get it, but you got to figure out what’s under that. But if I’m honest, I understand the guy’s too busy to look at what’s under the hood. It’s just, hey, this is what I see, I don’t want to invest in that. I understand it. At the same time, I know me, and if we look at the way things worked out, goddamn, it worked out pretty well for everybody, didn’t it? I mean, sh*t, it didn’t take five years for me to get off the ground. It took, I mean, if we’re really looking at it real, LA Knight didn’t pop up till at least on SmackDown until October or November, I think it was, and then by July, we were full hilt, that was around the time that it was Money in the Bank, and sh*t was taking off at that point in time.”

I’ve always wanted to know the story behind your hand symbol. What is that?

“It’s a secret, and I’ll tell it in a few years. That it’s a very easy-to-decode secret that’s right in front of everybody’s eyes, but at the same time… So I used to come out and do this when I’d hit the buckle, but then I saw I was always thinking like someday I’m going to be in WWE, so I was always working that way, and I didn’t want to do anything that seemed like something somebody else was doing. So then AJ started doing this, and I was like, “Close, can’t do it. And I was like well, what can I do? I can’t just do this, that’s Austin, whatever. I was like, well, what else can I do? And I started thinking like different hand signs and stuff, and I’m looking at sign language, and I’m like, no, that sucks. Then at some point I found something where I was like, oh, I think I kind of like that, and I started kind of doing it a little bit, and I was like, I’m gonna stick with that. I started doing it, and then I started noticing people out there doing it, and I was like, yeah, I think we’re good, I think we’re good with this. Eventually, I’ll tell the story, but it says something there, it says something that links me to my past.”

Do you think about how much longer you want to do this?

“All the time. I’m looking at the clock all the time. The funny thing is, physically I could do this for a long time. I’m really good physically. Mentally, I’m just like, I’m gonna snuggle puppies.”

Would you like to wrestle into your fifties?

“No! f*ck no. Would I like to be able to come in and maybe do an occasional appearance? Yeah, sure, maybe. But I don’t think I’ve been built up to the point where I can do like an Undertaker-type thing or an Austin thing or something like that. So I don’t think that’s in my future either. So it’s pretty much gonna be at some point when I decide to call it I’m gonna disappear in the sunset, and you’ll just never see me again. I’m not even joking, I’m being dead ass serious. If they decide at some point they get crazy enough to go, we’re gonna put him in the Hall of Fame, sure, I’ll come back do that. But I got a feeling that probably ain’t gonna happen either. But maybe that’s my own feeling of just like never being… No matter where I’ve gone, I’ve always felt underappreciated in the wrestling business, but I don’t know.”

You had an incredible moment where you’re in the ring looking at Roman Reigns. There’s that beautiful shot where he’s perfectly in the reflection of your sunglasses

“They have memed the sh*t of that and put everybody’s ass in that and everything else!”

At what point did you realize that this, this was a thing?

“I think I saw it like the next night, they, somebody got that photo. That’s cool! That’s where I was like, all right, well, I can never change these classes now, these are perfect.”

How did you become the Slim Jim guy?

“If I’m honest, I don’t have a single clue. This was back in 2023 in the summer, around like July or August, and they were like, “Hey, so Slim Jim’s interested, and they want to do this thing where it’s going to be four commercials over the next year, plus a handful of appearances, yada yada yada, and they’re going to do sponsored matches. I think that was when they did the Slim Jim Battle Royal, and since I threw everybody else over the top rope, I then became Mr. Slim Jim.”

You threw Brock Lesnar out of the Royal Rumble.

“I did. I’ll tell that story someday, but it feels too new and fresh to me. But I’ll just say things went differently than they were supposed to.“

What is LA Knight grateful for?

“My puppies, and that I can take care of myself and not worry about it.”

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Gary Vaynerchuk is New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, investor, and public speaker. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to discuss how wrestling influenced his videos, where his pro wrestling fandom began, why Bret Hart is a better businessman than you, why he believes Macho Man Randy Savage is underrated as a wrestler, wanting to buy the New York Jets, and more!

I’ve always been a fan, but when I found out that you liked wrestling. It was like that scene from Step Brothers. ‘Did we just become best friends?’

“It’s real. Anytime you have a passion. I mean, if I literally see someone wearing a Jets hat or a hoodie, it happened the other day in the city. It’s scary how the instant connection is there, and if I saw someone wearing a 1980s retro Roddy Roddy Piper T-shirt, I would get fired up too. It’s just the way the world works.”

Where does it go back to for you? When did you start to become a wrestling fan?

“I mean, I’m 50, so I was fully caught up. Hogan beating Sheik in Madison Square Garden, that’s a very early memory. WrestleMania 2 was something I was excited for, knew it was coming. Underneath that, it gets a little blurry of where I sat with WrestleMania 1. I was super aware, like the whole Cyndi Lauper MTV interaction, so I would say, anyone of my age, you know, I was an immigrant. Ironically, a very big father figure to me was my dad’s uncle, but the way my dad and grandma, and like the way our family worked, he was only eight years younger than his uncle, and I’m eight years younger than his son. He passed away, but a very big influence in my life was a gentleman by the name of Misha Shiffrin. Because my dad worked all the time, would go to my games and was a very big part of my childhood. He watched wrestling when we first came to America and thought it was real, and thought it was epic. But I don’t really remember that; that was more through the stories he told me, and my mom told me, but I’m definitely an 84-85, in that era. I remember when Macho Man beat Tito Santana for the Intercontinental title, that was massive for me. I remember when he came to the WWF. I will reference it as WWF quite a bit in here, but I’ll try to be politically correct with E.” 

Who was your guy growing up?

“Macho Man, I very much like the underdog. Macho Man was huge for me. The way they entered him into the WWF was all the managers wanted him, right? Then he said, ‘My manager is Elizabeth,’ and she comes out. I was getting to the age where I’m like, oh, that’s a pretty girl.”

“I grew up a four sport fan, Rangers, Knicks, Yankees, Jets, and I didn’t win my first championship into 94. I was 18, senior high school, when the Rangers won the cup. The reason I was okay with that was Macho Man winning the tournament for the heavyweight title was the biggest thing of my childhood. That was my first championship, so I was huge Macho Man over everyone, even when he was a bad guy. When he beat Tito Santana for the title, that was massive for me. I was like all proud in school, that was my guy. So it was weird. It was a bad guy when he first came, but there was just his charisma. The way they brought him into the WWF, that was an incredible era of how Mr. Perfect, or Razor Ramon, and obviously before that, Macho Man, and everybody, Billy Jack Haynes. I remember Bad News Brown. What Vince had in that era of introducing someone for weeks before they got into the ring, by the time Macho Man wrestled, the first match I ever saw him wrestle, I was already hook, line, and sinker.”

What do you think it is about pro wrestling that makes people such fanatics of it? 

“Oh, it’s storytelling. It’s why people love movies, it’s why people love cartoons, it’s why people love Spider-Man and Superman and Mickey Mouse and The Care Bears. It is the human storytelling. To me, it’s the framework of sports, meaning I think Vince McMahon is much more similar to David Stern and Dana White than people realize. The only difference is, and he’s close to Walt Disney and Jim Henson, like he blended characters and humans in a way that good sports [do]. Steph Curry for my son, he’s a hero, like a little guy, he can do it, Caitlin Clark. Athletes when they’re at the apex, Jordan. They’re superheroes, and wrestlers are superheroes, you know. There’s like maybe the greatest superhero of my life, of my childhood, was Hulk Hogan. He was everyone’s superhero, and so they’re superheroes, their stories, their soap operas, which novels, story arcs are perfect, and you know this, that everybody listening to this podcast, when they’re good, there’s nothing better, and when they’re bad, you’re just waiting for them to get good.”

How much of what you do and the way you speak now is inspired by the wrestling you saw growing up?

“Clearly, you’ve done your homework, because I’ve said this out loud. I really do believe that one of the reasons I popped as a content creator is because early in my career, when I was starting to speak on stages, I was an internet personality. This is very early, I’m talking 2007-2010, they would ask me to cut a promo, like, “Hey, I’m gonna be in Montreal speaking…’ I didn’t even know I was doing it, but every time I would submit them, they’re like, ‘That’s amazing.’ Finally, three years later, might have been Drock, when I first started really filming, he’s like, “You like, he’s like, he would have the embrace, you know, this, we do this now, it’s like, hey, you got to make this thing, you’re gonna be in St. Louis on there, and it would literally be like, this ‘Thursday night at the Civic Center, I’m gonna take you down!’ There was an element of like me doing a promo cut. I know that Macho Man and Richard Pryor are deeply ingrained into how I do public speaking and internet videos, very influential.”

When you were doing a lot of the rant-style videos, those to me felt like a heel promo?

“100%. To me, you don’t even realize it when it’s happening, and then you realize it, and then you’re almost trying to not be a caricature of yourself. But yeah, my early content is incredibly inspired by wrestling content.”

You put out a video titled Why Bret Hart is a better businessman than you. Why is Bret Hart a better businessman than someone?

“If I recall that article, and that moment, the excellence of execution. Execution to me, is everything. So many of you right now that are watching, you’re really creative, you have ideas, and you see other people, ‘Oh I had that idea.’ That’s nice, but you’ve got to actually do it. Everybody watching here, regardless. I know Bret’s popularity, or people’s point of view on Bret these days is kind of a little more mixed, but I’m a huge fan. My sister was a huge fan of Bret Hart. She thought he was super cute in those days. We watched a lot of wrestling. He was unbelievable in the ring. We all know that. There’s no one, no matter if you like Bret or the sh*t he talks about these days, everyone knows exactly what kind of wrestler he was, and I think that’s business too. For what you do for a living, you know wrestling, a lot of people know wrestling, you have the gift of gab, a lot of people have gift of gab. Being disciplined, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday with [Ask CVV], the team set up. It’s all f*cking execution. So I wanted to write that article because I’m always looking for ways to integrate wrestling if I can, and I do think people underestimate that execution is the punchline. All the best ideas in the world have never been executed because the human that came up with it was unable to execute it.”

When we’re talking about execution, what do you think it is that keeps people from doing it? Is it they’re comfortable where they are? Is it fear of the unknown?

“We could sit here for an hour and bring up the other ones. There’s so much to it. The people fear judgment, so it’s easier to stand on the sidelines and say everyone sucks then going on the field and sucking, and having people tell you you suck. There’s their childhood. They just, you know, sometimes people are trained their whole life to be comfortable, and like it’s hard to get uncomfortable, right? Self-awareness. I wish I was a wrestler, but some people don’t have the skill sets, you don’t have the athletic ability or the mobility. There’s just a million things that go into it. I think a lot of it is grounded in insecurity. I think a lot of it’s grounded in a poor perspective. I think a lot of stuff I talk about, whether it’s patience or accountability, is grounded in these things that I think about, but there’s a million different reasons why someone doesn’t get in, but most of them are grounded in excuses, you know, podcasting, you put in the work, there’s a lot of people watching this show right now that actually know more about wrestling than you do.”

You just turned 50 last year. How did that milestone change you, if at all?

“Didn’t change me at all. Meant absolutely nothing. I’d love to make up something for you and your viewers. It was a complete non-event emotionally. I can’t even come up with something small. I don’t love my birthday. It’s really weird. It’s actually the thing that I have not figured out about myself in a world where I love being known and love to be about my stuff and me and this stuff. I get very weird about my birthday. I can’t wait for it to be over. I used to think it was because I was getting older, because I love life so much, and this and that. There’s something that feels very unearned about the attention of your birthday, that is the latest theory I have, which is I don’t feel like I earned anything, so why are we like doing anything about it. I don’t know what it is. It’s always. It’s been going on now for 15 years or so. No, I live my life every day with gratitude, brother.”

I feel like me and you together here is throwing a lot of positivity out there, but I’ve heard you talk about it as practical positivity, and I love that it’s not just positivity for the sake of positivity, toxic positivity.

“You know the toxic avenger? That real f*cking weird guy with the green face and his eyes up here. I’m like, I’ll look like that if that’s who I am. I’m all about toxic positivity. I mean, it is such a ludicrous [thing]. Anyone who weaponizes that word is called toxically cynical. Why can you be toxic positivity, but when you’re a cynical dark person, you’re keeping it real? Yeah, I don’t buy it. I’m fine with it. Throw it at me. The world is dramatically better when you’re optimistic and positive.”

You went all in on social media and YouTube way before anybody saw it really happening. What made you make that decision?

“Back to extreme empathy. I have a very good read on what people are gonna do before they know it. That’s what I’m good at. It’s because I put in the work to pay attention, and it comes natural to me. Some people can sing, some people can throw a baseball, some people can cook. I can understand consumer trends, and then I put in work. It’s not like I just sit there and like I do the reading, I do the research, I pay attention, and it was very obvious to me that YouTube was gonna hit. I just kind of knew, like it wasn’t complicated, even though there was no video platform on the internet. People watched unlimited television. I was like, what’s the f*cking difference? It’s just video. So I’m very good at understanding things that are historically true. Substack, Hannah’s here in the background, like she was early on. People always ask me, Gary, why do you write books? You’re such a digital guy, I’m like, because people read them.”

What’s been your best investment ever?

“Facebook.”

How early were you in on Facebook?

“Early, I mean, probably two years before [it got big]. I mean, not in the angel round, but I invested in oh seven. It was years before it went public. I haven’t sold a share, still to this day.”

Do you still have aspirations to buy the Jets one day?

“Forever, I mean, it’s been there forever.” 

Is that just the pie-in-the-sky goal that seems unachievable, so you’ll just keep shooting at it?

“Later in my life, you know, at the time when I started thinking about it, when I was a young kid, it was silly. I don’t even know where it really came from. I don’t know how I thought it. Then my 20s and 30s, owning a sports team wasn’t what it is today, like the numbers were still achievable-ish. In the last 15 years, 10 years. It’s really changed. It’s become like the most sought after thing.”

Does the owner of the Jets know that you want to buy the Jets?

“Yeah.”

Have you guys talked?

“No, because I’m not in a position to buy it, and I think I wouldn’t embarrass myself to have that conversation. I’ll have it when I really can do it, and the Johnson family has no interest in selling, it seems, which is good for me, because I need way more time to amass the wealth to get there. So that’s where we’re at.”

We’ve talked about a few of your videos that went viral, you’ve had many of them. Do you think that one piece of content has the ability to change someone’s life slash career?

“Of course, that’s what the whole world’s about. You know, there’s seven of us in this room, and there’ll be millions that watch us over the next 50 years. Every one of us have been affected by someone else’s words. “

I’ve heard you say that one sentence from a podcast can change somebody’s life.

“I’m literally looking at the five people behind the camera now, whether it was your grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, brother, sister, best friend, or someone you admire. Every one of you right now, everyone who’s watching can recall something right now that was said that had an impact on them. What did Gandhi or Martin Luther King, what did these people do? It was words, brother, f*cking words matter because you change someone’s perspective. Whether pro or con.”

Who is on your wrestling Mount Rushmore?

“I think the Mount Rushmore of wrestling is Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and I gotta give one to the Attitude Era. Believe it or not, I’m gonna go with The Undertaker. I know Rock and Austin and Bret Hart and Michaels… But I think I don’t think people understand. Andre the Giant carried wrestling through the 70s. Remember it was regional, and when he would go. I just think he’s just all time. I’m devastated when I watch a lot of clips where people do their Mount Rushmore. Andre should be in every one, and Hogan changed everything.”

Who do you think is an underrated wrestler?

“Macho Man Randy Savage. I’ll tell you why, because as a wrestler, I will say right now that if you do not think that Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat Macho Man Randy Savage, WrestleMania III is not a top 2,3,4, match of all time, I have bad news for you, and this is just with love, you do not know what the f*ck wrestling is about. I really believe it.”

What is Gary Vee grateful for?

“The health of my family.”

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Brian Myers (@Myers_Wrestling) is a professional wrestler signed with TNA and previously competed in WWE as Curt Hawkins. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Indianapolis, IN to discuss being a veteran in the TNA locker room, wanting to become the TNA World Champion, his WWE losing streak and why he didn’t want it to end, the origin of the name Curt Hawkins, having his own wrestling school that trained MJF, his short-lived stripper gimmick in WWE, training The Rock for his in-ring return, the best person he has been in the ring with, and more!

At what age did you seek out a wrestling school?

“So I was, I’m still am such a wrestling nerd. I read something, an interview with Bret Hart where he said, don’t backyard wrestle and apply yourself to sports in school until you are of age. So I knew I couldn’t do anything until I was 18. I took that advice to heart. So football, wrestling, baseball, straight through and high school and all throughout, growing up. And then as soon as I turned 18, I just went after it. In New York, where I’m from, you can’t wrestle unless you’re 18. So that kept me grounded a little bit.” 

Now that you’re in your 40s, do you think about how long you want to do this?

“More than ever. Yeah, it’s crazy how much it’s been [on my mind]. I’ll be 41 in a month. Ever since I turned 40, it just feels like, oh man. I always say father time is undefeated, and an injury could stop me. I just want to be the best version of myself, whatever that takes. We talked about Brock earlier, just taking care of yourself and staying healthy. Just because doing this is such a privilege to me. Like I said, when I have my last match, I’m gonna cry like a baby, because I just love it so much. It’s been such a part of my life. I’ve been doing it more than not at this point. So I think about it constantly. But then there’s people who are real motivations to me, like Edge and Christian and Chris Jericho. I see them still doing at a high level, and they’re much older than me. I’m like, okay, sh*t, they’re doing it. Even guys like Frankie Kazarian and Eric Young at work, like they are in the best shape of their lives, still having incredible matches, and they’re a little bit older, and I’m like, okay, like they keep me motivated to stay on the ball.” 

At what point do you feel like you became the veteran, like you are very much the veteran in TNA, like the locker room guy? 

“Yeah, I don’t know. It depends. Sometimes I feel like people don’t even see me that way. They don’t go out of their way to ask me for advice or things like that. Not always, you know. So it depends on how you visualise me. Some people are so young, they see me as the losing streak guy, and they don’t even think my opinion is worth a damn, you know. So it is what it is.” 

I’ve heard you talk about the fact that you didn’t want your losing streak to end. At what point was it gonna end? 

“I was gonna beat Heath Slater on Main Event because we were in Brooklyn, and Vince was just like, oh, it’s Hawkins’ hometown. Let’s give him one. Then the writer came from the meeting to tell me, I was like, No, that’s a terrible idea.”

How many losses did you have at this point?

“It had to be100 something at this point. Because when the article came out, I embraced it and I was like, oh, that’s kind of cool. That’s like, see what comes to this. So I was beating Heath, no offense, it’s gonna be forgotten by tomorrow by everyone. I was like, let’s see where this goes. I’m sure a lot of people in WWE don’t politic to lose. But I was really trying.”

When you were at that point of the losing streak, did you have a vision for where, when this might possibly end? 

“I tried to not even think about it, because I think it would drive me nuts. It was more productive to come into work and be like, what’s your finish? Great. I can’t wait to take it the best I can. That was instead of thinking maybe I’m gonna roll Braun Strowman up today. I didn’t want to drive myself nuts doing that every day.”

You broke the streak at WrestleMania 35. Did you have a WrestleMania moment up to that point?

“I mean, that was another thing, Matt and I were very spoiled that first one. We ran in the main event of WrestleMania 24 and attempted to attack the Undertaker. I think we were 22 years old, it’s a wild way to start, you know, and then you come down. The next year, Matt says it all the time. He’s like, just assuming we’ll probably have a three-way with Edge next year, and we’ll be like who’s breaking up and stuff, and we were like, anonymous lumberjacks or something on a pre-show. So it didn’t really turn out like that.”

How’d you come up with Curt Hawkins?

“With the Majors, they didn’t want Matt to be Matt Brett. He was Brett Matthews. They made him Brett Majors, and I was Brian Majors, and they just didn’t want us to be brothers. Then when we did the reveal with Edge, Vince thought we were real brothers, apparently, and it came up in the meeting, unbeknownst to us. So we debuted with Adam at Armageddon, that was Sunday Night. Raw, we don’t go do because we’re SmackDown talent. This is Tuesday, so we show up Tuesday and they come out of the meeting like, ‘You guys need new names. You need them now. ‘Then there was, of course, the WWE clusterf*ck sh*t. I remember, Johnny goes, ‘No, you’re with Edge now, you need cool names, like razor and slash.’ And we’re like, Oh, okay. So we were really brainstorming, oh sh*t, that’s not what we’re thinking. Then Michael Hayes, we see him later today, goes, ‘That’s not what he said. He wants to just have, real believable names.’ We’re like, okay, that’s completely different, because at one point we were going to be Kedis, and Cobain. we’ll tie it in with Edge. A rated R rock star? Then we went and saw Vince, and we clarified. He said, No. So just regular names. And then Curt Hawkins is from Curt Hennig, one of my favorite wrestlers of all time. So it was a little tribute, and I was a fake Edge. So Taylor Hawkins always looked like Edge to me. I would tell Adam that. He’s a big [Foo Fighters fan].”

When you got released from WWE the first time, did you think there was any path for you to go back?

“Yes, one of the best days of my life. Because I was so young, they weren’t using me for, at that point, almost a year and a half. That’s why I started the school, because I was just miserable. They would not call me for two months, three months at a time, and they’d be like, You’re not coming to Raw. It just wasn’t comfortable. Plus, when you love something and you’re being paid to not participate in it, it’s just not a great feeling. So I was thrilled, I got fired on Thursday, I wrestled Friday, Saturday on these shindies in New Jersey, and I couldn’t have been happier. That said, my goal was to get back, and I did it two years to the date, I want to say it was.”

How did you become the guy that The Rock trusted to train when he came back?

“I think Hunter and Johnny hand-picked me and Joe Hennig for that.”

So this is before Rock came back for Rock Cena one, right?

“He hosted the Mania, and he was around, but then he was gonna do that tag in The Garden, and they said he wanted to train. Johnny Ace called me on a Wednesday, and I’m like, oh, I’m getting fired, this is it. Then they were like, ‘Please hold for Joe Hennig.’ I’m like wtf? It was the weirdest. I actually was on the train going with who would become my wife, like, one of our first dates. So I was all like, what is happening? And then Johnny is like, ‘Yeah, Rock wants to train, and we picked you guys.’ It was an unbelievable experience, because, obviously, Dwayne’s schedule is something else, and we were his personal little crash test dummies. You just never knew. A couple times I flew to Miami in the morning, train with him in Miami, and then flew out of Miami, like my commute was Miami and back in a day.”

Were you training in his house?

“No, they would set up a WWE ring wherever he was filming whatever, in all these different spots. We did New Orleans. We did Miami. One time he couldn’t make it, and me and Joe Hennig had a honeymoon on Bourbon Street. Because they got us there. We’re supposed to be there for like, the weekend. Maybe TV was like a drive. So they were like, just stay. And they paid for this beautiful hotel on Bourbon Street, me and Joe, and we just went out every night. It was unbelievable, but he couldn’t have been cooler, man. He’s one of those people, I was around him, and you’re like this is why this guy’s so successful. You just see it. You just see it in him, the way he treats people, the way he carried himself, the things he cared about. I just saw it. It was really, really cool.”

What have you seen in Matt Cardona’s journey to get back to WWE?

“I mean, the same goal. I was so happy for him. He was so focused on that, that it finally turned a goal into a reality. That’s a cool thing. When the news broke, obviously, I was in the know of what was going on. But once it became a public thing, I put a tweet out that, go find it. It was just everything I wanted to say about this, what he did has never been done before, and it should be studied and appreciated by workers of all ages and shapes and sizes and it’s the real deal. It was a hell of an accomplishment.” 

Do you remember the first time you met MJF when he came to your wrestling school? 

Yeah, I’ll never forget it. It was very early on, probably the first four months of Create A Pro. It’s kind of funny, because it’s a very similar mentality, he committed to something in college football, but he really had his heart set on wrestling. I think it kind of hit a wall with what he was doing and what his parents wanted him to do and what he wanted to do. I was in a very similar situation, because when you tell people you want to be a wrestler, it’s not really that believable. His dad came in with him, and it almost felt like, here he’s your problem now, this is what he wants to do. I was like, let’s go. So pretty early on, we did a promo class where he just murdered this kid, and I was like, okay, and there’s something about this guy.

Do you want to have your wrestling school forever?

“Yeah. I mean, it’s been such a passion project. Pat Buck and I do not get rich off Create A Pro. I mean, we almost make no money. But it’s not this carnie cash grab, it’s this place where we just generate this amazing culture. If you’re a sh*thead or a bad person, we literally tell you, hey, we don’t want your money, you can go. It’s just people who work hard and love professional wrestling and be a good person. That’s all we ask, and that’s how you stay. And it’s been a proven formula. No one’s gotten rich off it, but I’ve made a lot of memories and a lot of friends, and it’s cool. I’m still selfish about because I train there, I think that’s helped me. I need a place to work out and stay in ring shape. So it goes both ways.”

Who’s the best person you’ve ever been in the ring with?

“Oh, man, I hate saying this, because he’s gonna see this, or someone’s gonna tell him I said this, but it’s probably Christian. I just remember being in the ring with him and being like this guy’s a lot better than me. That hasn’t come up, I’m more of a f*ck you. I can be on your level. But back when I wrestled him for the first time, I think in 2010 we had a two-segment match on Superstars, I’m just like, Shit, this guy’s a real deal. I gotta step my game up.”

What is Brian Myers grateful for?

“My wife and 2 kids.”

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Carlito (@Litocolon279) is a professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Indianapolis, IN to discuss his WWE exit and leaving the same time as R-Truth, his time in The Judgment Day and his many one-liners, taking a massive spear from Bron Breakker, if a WWE return might be on the cards, an interesting piece of Carlito merchandise, being asked to sign apples, and more!

Have you ever signed apples?

“Yeah, all the time. I sign fake ones, but a lot of times they’ll bring me a real one. I don’t know why, they’ll be dead, you know, be rotten in a day. But they say they have all kind of plans. They’re gonna put them in a plastic bag or put them in the freezer. Whatever.”

Do they sometimes ask you to bite one side and then you sign on the other side?

“What I’m asked the most is to spit in their face. They go, ‘How much you charge to spit in my face?’ I’m like, why would anybody even want that, number one. Number two, I think that’s a lawsuit. I mean, they could come back and sue me. Please stop asking this request. I don’t do it.”

Did the WWE release come as a surprise? 

“No, because my contract expired.” 

But they could have renewed it?

“They could have renewed it, but I never went to them. They never came to me. So we never spoke or anything. I just was ready for whatever. I kind of shot myself in the foot because I signed the shorter deal and the usual. So I guess I bet against myself.”

Could you have been like, I would prefer some more time. Did you sign for a year?

“I signed for two years. They wanted me for three, and I signed for two because I didn’t think it was gonna go as good as it did. So, as I said, I bet against myself, and I would have got an extra year, and then my contract would expire. But ended up losing a year. But that’s all right.” 

You were part of such a great thing with Judgment Day. It was surprising that just all of a sudden you’re not there

“I still had two weeks left. I just wish they would have written me off somehow. That’s my only, that’s the only thing that I didn’t like. I’m a professional bro, not being in WWE is not the end of the world. So I was like, I’ll gladly come in, and you didn’t want my services, just write me off and I’ll ride off into the sunset.” 

What particular lines were you most proud of?

“I think the one I get a lot is, ‘Looks hard to me,’ or something that, wasn’t my line. That’s one of the few that wasn’t my line. I don’t know who came up with that, one of the writers or something. But yeah, that’s one of the lines I get the most.”

That week where you were already released, then R-Truth gets released. There was a lot of anger from fans. You guys were the main focus of the comedic angles, and for that week, you’re both gone. Were you feeling the love during that time?

“Yeah. That’s going back to why I signed the short deal. I wanted people to care when I was going to leave the company. So I felt that people cared, it was great. People cared when I left. So I didn’t want to be those guys that, towards the end, you don’t see him on TV, and then he gets released or this contract expires, but nobody even notices. So I was glad that people noticed.”

Was there any conversation about bringing you back?

“No, it was no conversation, either way. I never spoke to them, they never spoke to me, just kind of let it run out.”

I feel like there’s so much stuff that you were able to do with them that if you weren’t given that, I don’t know where you would have fit into the show 

“Me neither. Yeah, I don’t know, because I’ve never been Hunter’s favorite. I don’t think he gets Carlito or the character. So it is what it is. But I was gonna make whatever I did work. So Judgment Day came by, and it was fun for me.”

You really saw the evolution of Dominik Mysterio from what he started as to what he’s now become. You were working with him, week in, week out, with the Judgment Day. What did that evolution look like to you?

“He’s a rock star. The way he’s turned into a superstar. I think he’s probably gonna be one of the biggest guys in the business one day. So yeah, it’s great to see where he started, and then now finding himself. They’re really getting into the Dirty Dom character.”

Do you think he’s a future world champion?

“I think he just needs to gain some weight, I think. I think he can be World Champion.”

Bron Breakker broke you in half with that spear!

“Yeah, he’s fast, and it still hurts today [laughs]. But I’m glad everyone had a little viral moment there. I saw the memes, it was funny.

Was it painful?

“Wrestling-wise, painful? Yeah, it’s not great. I mean, I don’t recommend it to everybody, but yeah, I survived.”

Are you getting to the point now, in your career where you’re like, how much longer do I want to do this? 

“Oh yeah, I’m getting there. I still got a little bit left in the tank. Not that I don’t want to do it anymore, just focusing more on the exit plan.”

What’s that look like?

“It looks pretty good, man. The WWE run helped out a lot with that, with the retirement plan. So, yeah, a couple more years, and then I can ride off into the sunset.” 

So what do you think, 5 more years? 10 more?

“No, probably around 5. 5 should be the goal.”

You’re known for spitting the apple. You had a t-shirt with an apple on it that said, Do you spit or swallow?

“Yes, I can’t believe Stephanie approved that shirt, because even for back then, that was still [risque].”

Whose idea was it for that? 

“I think it was mine. I remember pitching it to Stephanie, and then her coming back, like a week or two later. Oh, yeah, we approved it.”

What was supposed to happen with the Raquel love storyline that you had?

“Another thing, just like I was not the main focus of the Judgment Day. They were always Dom and Liv, so it’s these ideas they threw apart. But then there would be no follow-up. So Raquel and I would do little things to keep it going. So it’s kind of up to us. That was another thing, because it was another thing I could work off. Because going back to what I said, it’s probably this guy that doesn’t get the girl, so this was kind of the way I could be goofed by he to make it more comedic. So that was, yeah, those are just little things that we would do. But the origin that they said one week, and then after that, they didn’t bring it up anymore.”

Was this leading to you guys would kiss on camera, or something like that?

“I don’t know about that. Like I said, it was kind of just her and I just keeping the thing going. I remember, I don’t know if it was on Twitter or something, when this whole thing with Raquel started, somebody posted, ‘Isn’t Carlito like super old?'”

Do you feel like you had to be a pro wrestler?

“It’s funny, kind of, I guess so, because all my jobs were related. So being a wrestler was just the last evolution. But looking back, though, I’d do it again. I just think about having a nine-to-five. I mean, I’m just glad that nowadays, still, I’ve never had a nine to five. So I’m kind of glad the wrestling thing worked out.”

I’ve always wanted to ask you about this match you had. It’s you and Kurt Angle versus Hulk, Hogan and Shawn Michaels. How did this end up coming together?

“I think it was building towards Michaels and Hogan. I think he turned on Hogan after that match? So, just something to set up him turning on Hogan. I don’t know. I remember I just got beat up by Hulk the whole match. But it was cool. I got to take the leg drop. I got to see all the stuff.”

What is Carlito grateful for?

“Wrestling, health and my family.”

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