Jesse Ventura (@GovJVentua) is a retired professional wrestler, announcer, WWE Hall of Famer and former Governor of Minnesota. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Minneapolis, MN to talk about his career in politics and how he became the Governor of Minnesota, his professional wrestling career both in the ring and as a commentator, his renewed relationship with WWE, how he got his role in “Predator” with Arnold Schwarzenegger, his career bodyguarding The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones, his issues with Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon, why he owes everything to Cyndi Lauper and more! Plus, Karrion Kross and Will Sasso each do their Jesse Ventura impressions for the man himself!

Quote I’m thinking about: “Be curious, not judgmental.” — Walt Whitman

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On how crazy the wrestling scene was when he was breaking in:

“I don’t know if it was truly that crazy. I know I had initially contacted Verne Gagne and I received a letter back from him. I listed my whole resume, what I had done, and he told me that at the time, he wasn’t running a camp. But if he did run another one, he would invite me. Well, I was at college with my college buddies and we were going to the matches then, it was when I got influenced by Superstar Billy Graham, and without Billy Graham, there would be no Jesse Ventura. I say that unequivocally. Without Superstar there would not be me. So we were just looking and I saw a little ad in the newspaper, pro wrestling school, Seventh Street gym, which was down on Seventh and Hennepin right in the heart of downtown Minneapolis down in the basement. If that’s what you’re referring to, which I assume you are, it was kind of the Mecca for do I say a few unsavory characters. In fact, my wife at the time, who was my girlfriend, she didn’t even like going down there. She might have not walked into that gym because she said she’d look around at these guys there and go Who are these people? And then of course I met Eddie Sharkey, and Eddie’s a bit of, you know, Eddie earned a living, God he’s still alive, so I don’t dare defame him. But let’s just say you could buy things from Eddie on discount. I guess that’s the best way that I could word it is that Eddie had a way that he could sell to you like vitamins and protein and all of that stuff. And he could beat the prices in the stores by about 50%.”

On where people know Jesse Ventura from the most:

“Wrestling. I think that because that’s where I got my initial stardom. And then everything else fell into place after I had my falling out with the WWE, or WWF at the time, and I had a short stint with WCW till Hogan arrived. And then I got the axe, I got backstabbed good by Eric Bischoff.”

On his relationship with WWE in the present day:

“My relationship with them now has much improved. We are on the verge right now. I can say this, contracts have been written, contracts have been agreed upon. And all it requires is two signatures, one from them, and one from me. And I will be back with the legends [deal].”

Do you have a timeframe on this?

“Fairly quickly, because time is money.”

On Vince McMahon not being there anymore being the main factor for his return:

“Yeah, very much so. I think that they’re very much more since they merged with the ultimate fighting [UFC] and they’re under that one roof now, they’re very much more mainstream corporate that you can deal with better because they’re more open. It isn’t having to tie into the old days of wrestling, for lack of better term, slavery. Because, you know, in the old days of wrestling, you truly were slaves. I don’t know, I got a great compliment I heard the other day. Barry Bloom, my former agent, the one I introduced to Vince, I was the first wrestler that made Vince deal with an agent. And I heard Barry was on a podcast and said that all these contracts these guys are getting today, they owe Jesse Ventura a thank you. Because if it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t be getting them.”

On his relationship with Vince before Vince left:

“I’ve always admired Vince, I was at the point in wrestling I was going to quit. We’re talking about 1983. I had saved up enough money. I had opened up a weightlifting gym here, Ventura’s gym. It was supporting me and it gave me what you need in wrestling at that time. And I’ll be very blunt, this is a podcast, it’s ‘F You’ money. To where you can say F you and walk away. Well, the gym did that for me. It gave me a leverage. At the time, if they were mistreating me, fine, I’ll go run my gym. And we were getting by, my wife and children, the gym was supporting us. So I was at the end of my straw. So when I made the final jump from the AWA to the WWF at the time, I did it fully knowledgeable, this would be it. I simply said, Vince, I want you to guarantee me six years, and he did because I ended up 84 to 90 right on the button almost. Six years before he fired me.”

On why he didn’t come back more:

“Vince and I were not totally adversarial. It’s just that he couldn’t have me around. Because I’m the proverbial stallion that’s outside of the corral. You know, he has to have everyone in the corral. That’s why I was fired. I owned the rights to Jesse “The Body” Ventura. I have them registered with the United States government and Vince wanted them. I said, No, Jesse Ventura belongs to me. You want them you deal with me. And he couldn’t do that because he owned everybody. That’s why I called it slavery. Felt like Prince a little bit.”

On thanks to Cyndi Lauper:

“I will always have a place in my heart for Cyndi Lauper. Because when I was struck down the night before I was supposed to wrestle Hogan for the world title in LA. I was going on a three-match program with him. I would have made untold amount of money, more than I’d ever seen. The night before I get pulmonary emblem, blood clots in my lungs. I’m seven days in intensive care in a San Diego hospital. It was so bad my wife had to fly out. The doctor told her you better fly out here, he may not make it. Well, guess what I faced then? What do you do now? You can come back to Minnesota and you can go up to General Mills and say what? Hire me, I’m an old pro wrestler. What do you do? So I was faced with what will confront every athlete at some point in their time. What do you do when it’s over? Now subsequently, I did get back in the ring. I wrestled a little bit more. But it was during that time that Cyndi Lauper was doing the rock and wrestling stuff and was red hot with it. She was doing a concert here in Minneapolis. I called Dave Wolf, I think that was his name, Cyndi’s manager. I called up Cindy and Dave and asked, because what I had done in facing down that my career could be over. I had two little children. The gym was still viable, but what was I going to do? And somebody said to me, you’re a great talker why don’t you become a sports broadcaster? So I had a friend at Channel 11. Here. In fact, I just ran into him at the hospital. He’s 86 years old now Tom Rather. I thanked him. I said, Tom, you helped me with my career and I owe you a debt of thanks forever. I talked to Tom about my situation. He talked to the head guy at Channel 11. They gave me a producer, cameraman man, Emmy Award winning named John Hijack. And the cat of the station says okay, go do something for me. So Cyndi Lauper was coming to town to do a concert. So I called her up and we decided that she would dye my hair multiple colors and we do it on film. So here I am sitting in the chair with Cyndi Lauper by the hairdresser. And that night she unveiled me to the crowd brought me up on stage, showed off my new multicolored hairdo, cuz she was into the punk scene, that was sort of thing. Rock and roll had drifted that way. That was a new extension of rock and roll is what Cyndi Lauper and Girls Just Want to Have Fun. A huge album. Mega hit had like four number-one hits on that album. So I will always have a place in my heart for Cyndi Lauper, she didn’t have to do that.”

On if he would want to run for President:

“If I had ballot access and in 50, yeah. See, I have an objection to one of these candidates. And I object to him, and I can say him so you know who it is now. I can object to him, because he is in the wrestling Hall of Fame and I’ve almost resigned from it on two or three occasions because of that.”

On the angle that was too big for WWE:

“I came to Vince McMahon. I’ll reveal this to you. I flew out to Connecticut. I sat in Vince’s office with him and Linda, and I proposed the biggest angle the WWF/WWE could have ever done. And it was too big for Vince.” 

What was it? 

“Vince told me that he would back me on anything political that I wanted to do. So I went out to him and I said, Vince, we can do an angle right now. You can come out with the WWE and say we’re going to have our own nominee for president, the WWE party, the World Wrestling Party. Meanwhile, Vince has people in every state, he can send those people, get ballot access, and do what’s required to get on the ballot in all 50 states. He could do that for me. I said, then you work the angle Vince where everybody thinks it’s going to be you. You’re going to be the nominee. But we do something where I come in and say bullsh*t, I’m a governor. I’m the natural WWE candidate for president, then you do a schmoz where Vince and I get two wrestlers to represent us. Whoever wins gets the nomination. My guy beats Vince’s guy. I then become the nominee of the World Wrestling Federation for President and I have ballot access in all 50 states because Vince could have done it.” 

Why didn’t it happen?

“Well, here’s the part that pissed me off and where Vince and I big time separated. I flew home. He didn’t even bother to call me to turn me down. I thought that was the most disrespectful thing. First and foremost, when I flew out there, he made me wait an hour. I’m the former Governor. I’m out of office now. Then I shoot him this angle. If he did just called me and said, Jesse, it’s too crazy. It’s too hokey. I don’t think we can do it. I would have said fine. I gave it a try. But he didn’t even call me back. That was so disrespectful to me as Governor Jesse Ventura, as Jesse Ventura the man and as Jesse Ventura who made Vince a ton of money.”

On a return to commentary in the present day:

“I don’t think I could. I don’t think I could today because I don’t like the stuff. You know what else I don’t like today? There ain’t no Mean Gene. What do you have today? Oh, they both come walking down these ramps, they stand in the ring and yell and scream at each other and then start cutting meat and beat the sh*t out of each other. It’s so predictable.”

On being a bodyguard for The Rolling Stones:

“My best story of them is that when I became Governor, I had just become Governor sworn in in January, The Stones were here in February. The first declaration I made as Governor of the state of Minnesota, I declared it Rolling Stones Day in Minnesota. They were so honored. I went over that night and Mick Jagger says, No one’s ever done this for us. I said, Well, nobody’s ever been a bodyguard for you. But my favorite was Keith Richards. Because to me, Keith is The Stones. Mick’s great, he’s the frontman, but the Rolling Stones is Keith. And I’ll never forget that Keith Richards walked up to me. Here’s all disarrayed; he’s got this stuff hanging, and you know, it’s typical how he looks on stage. Keith walks up to me and he looks at me and he smiles. He goes, so you used the bodyguard us back in 78 and 81, huh? And I said, yep. And he goes, and now you’re the Governor. And I went yep, and Keith looked at me in that cockney British accent and he goes, f*cking great. I’ll never forget that. I thought if I got the blessing of Keith Richards, I’m home free.”

On advice for up-and-coming wrestlers:

“Do not rely on that sport. Do not rely on that lifestyle. Educate yourself, get a degree have something because it’s going to end and it’s going to end probably sooner than you want it to.”

On if he would bury the hatchet with Hulk Hogan:

“No.” 

Would you have a conversation?

“I don’t know, he betrayed me.”

On the betrayal:

“But this was just prior to WrestleMania 2. We were all in a dressing room and there was nobody from the office. I waited and I got up on a chair. I told everybody now is our time to unionize. I said all the publicity is gone out on WrestleMania, if we refuse to wrestle unless union negotiators are brought in, it’s federal law, they have to be brought in. It’s the law. Then I said if we can get the Charlotte guys to join us, we can fight. We can freeze them, freeze Vince, and force them to do collective bargaining and we can finally get a union. I gave my impassioned speech. The next day I go home, my phone rings. It’s Vince. [He says] ‘What the? Union?’ I said, Vince, ‘I’m not talking about just fighting you.’ This was 1980s, I said ‘Right now I pay $5,000 a year for health care for my family. If we had a union, I might only have to pay $1250, because there’s strength in numbers.’ I said, ‘What about all the guys I’ve seen that give 30 years to this business and in the end, they ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of? If we had a union, maybe they could retire with $500 a month.’ You know what did it for me? I was in Las Vegas, and I got on an elevator. And you know who got on the elevator with me? A great big offensive guard from the Oakland Raiders by the name of Gene Upshaw. Do you know who Gene Upshaw was? Head of the NFL Players Association. I got on that elevator and I said, ‘Hi, Gene. Jesse, nice to meet you.’ Gene’s finger went up in the air and he goes, ‘You boys need a union.’ And I said, I know. Gene Upshaw sparked me and said you boys need a union. I said I know we do. So I stood up, I gave my impassioned thing to unionize. Vince called me on the carpet the next day. I didn’t care, I was going to do Predator. Then when I came back to Vince, I told Vince ‘You don’t have to worry about me speaking out on union anymore.’ He goes, ‘Really? Why not?’ I said ‘I got mine, Screen Actors Guild. I now get health benefits retirement right now with the little sh*t that I did in Hollywood.’ I’m retired on over $50,000 a year from SAG. I get over $50,000 a year right now. I’m collecting it. It’s my retirement. So when I came back to Vince, I said ‘You don’t need to worry about me if these dummies don’t want to protect themselves, screw them.’ I tried. I said I got my SAG card and I’m on retirement right now. I started at age 70. Started collecting and I made it up to where I make over $50,000 a year in SAG retirement. Then I have AFTRA retirement too. Which is the broadcaster’s. And you know, I could never figure this one out. But then it came to me. Since wrestling’s on TV every week, why weren’t they required to join AFTRA? You want to know why? Health care. You think AFTRA wants to bring in 1,000 wrestlers into their healthcare system? It would bankrupt them? That’s solely that can be the only reason. Because they’re on TV every week on television. Why aren’t they required to join AFTRA?

But getting back to the Hogan thing. What ended up happening was this and that’s why I know he did it. Because when I sued the WWF over royalties for videotape, I used to say to Vince all the time, Vince, ‘How come everything I do in Hollywood I get royalties and everything I do for you, I get nothing? Why is that? Why are you different than Hollywood? Could it be a union? Could that be the difference?’ So getting to what had happened was when I sued the WWF, we had to take Vince’s deposition. So me and my lawyer flew to Connecticut. Now, I can’t say nothing, because you sit in a deposition, I got to stay silent. But I told my attorney the whole story. I said, if you can find out who ratted me, who was the rat? Who was the stooge? Who is the office stooge that stooged me to the office? So we sat down deposing Vince, and it got halfway through it and a lawyer can ask anything. And my attorney says to Vince, Mr. McMahon, he said, ‘Has there ever been a union in wrestling?’ And Vince goes, No. [He asked] Has anyone ever tried to form one? And Vince paused a moment. He said, Yeah, I think Jesse Ventura spouted his mouth off about it one time years ago. My attorney said, really? How did you know? Did you hear Mr. Ventura talk about unionizing? And Vince said no, my attorney said well, then how did you know? With no hesitation, Vince answered ‘Hulk Hogan told me.’ Now he’s under sworn deposition here. He’s under sworn deposition to tell the truth. There was no hesitation Hulk Hogan told me. Vince also admitted it to Larry King, because Larry King brought it up. Is it true that Hulk Hogan is the one that ratted Jesse Ventura when he tried to unionize wrestling? And Vince said, yeah.”

On why the conversation with Hogan won’t happen anytime soon:

“When you have a guy who’s as narcissistic as Donald Trump, it ain’t gonna happen until I hear an apology from him. [From Hulk Hogan?] Yeah, He’s the narcissist like Hogan. You know, birds of a feather flock together. I heard he was at the Republican Convention. I already heard about that, Hogan was there. Somebody wrote here, they’d have done better with Doink the Clown.”

What is Jesse Ventura grateful for:

“My wife, my children and to still be alive.”

Scott D’Amore (@ScottDAmore) is a retired professional wrestler and onscreen authority figure. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Detroit to talk about his time at TNA and his exit from the promotion, how he found out that he would be leaving, turning the brand around following previous fan backlash, making things right with Kazuchika Okada, Jordynne Grace and Joe Hendry appearing on WWE TV, his upcoming work with Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling, the first time he saw Petey Williams execute the Canadian Destroyer and more.

Quote I’m thinking about: “…if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Excerpt from “The Man In The Arena” – Theodore Roosevelt

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On his TV presence being meaningful:

“That was our hope, right? I think Jimmy Jacobs was a big one spearheading it. Look, I enjoy banter with talent, we could have some fun. My thing was, if we’re going to do it, I didn’t want to be Jack Tunney and I didn’t want to be like Vince McMahon. So I wanted to be more tongue in cheek, I wanted to have fun with it. The whole thing, if you go and you look at the things I did, I’m really a jerk. In a lot of ways the character throughout, especially through the first few years, near the end was more hey, here’s an announcement, we’re going to do this, rah rah, especially as we start heading into the TNA stuff. But when I went on TV for impact, it really was like, Hey, we got to get this out. Cool. But then I was like, Oh, I can just stick it to people. And if you watch it, really the only thing that’s consistent is whether I’m talking to a babyface or a heel, I’m probably sticking it to them. It’s the old, oh, I leave, but I come back to say ‘Oh, and by the way…’ So our thing was if you come to me for something, it’s almost like the saying well Be careful when you make a deal with the devil, because I’m going to give you what you want, but I’m going to give it to you in the least advantageous way for you. I sit there and look at the stuff we did with Heath, I’m literally just stopping this guy. Why? Why would anybody dig their heels in this deep on this guy wanting to work for you? Here’s a guy who has star power, who’s been in WWE, who’s literally showing up and trying to sneak into the building. He wants to do anything, he wants a job. And I’m like, Nope, can’t have it, sorry. But to tell stories, you have to take some liberties. We just thought that was a fun one, and it led to the whole thing with Heath trying to get a job and his campaign. And has anyone ever used cameos in a more entertaining way than we did? I never thought I would be listening to a Flava Flav promo on a wrestling show with him heeling him to do something.”

On not liking the mundane things in wrestling:

“One of them’s a contract signing. And I’m like, Guys, I hate contract signings, so then they would have to talk me into doing them right. Because, again, I just never wanted to do the mundane stuff of being an authority figure. I really didn’t want to be on TV that much because I wanted to focus on the behind-the-scenes. But I also have an ego like everybody else, and I enjoy the fun of doing it. But it was really more I tried to be like, Guys, you figure out where we need me, and then we’ll debate on how strongly [I’m needed]. I had such a good team there through the years. Whether it was originally when Don Callis was there, and Abyss and Sonjay Dutt, and then those guys move on. Tommy Dreamer and Jimmy Jacobs, who I’ve known since he was 15 years old probably, just so smart and so good. Then Robert Evans, who I hadn’t known at all, but when Sonjay left. I’m in that room at one point, and I’ve got Jimmy Jacobs, who I’ve known since he was 14-15, watched him literally grow up from a child to an adult and, you know, and it’s such an amazing wrestling mind. I’ve got Sonjay Dutt, who we joke, I hired him still when he was a teenager. I’ve got those two guys have known forever. Then I’d have the Dons or the Tommys or the Abysses I’ve known forever. Then bringing in Robert Evans was like, Oh, this is weird. I’m sitting in a room with someone I don’t know. And he was such a great addition. And he brought a little something different to it, which I always thought was great. So I’m very grateful for the team that I was able to work with while I was there, and that’s just on the creative side. There’s, so many. I could eat up this whole interview talking about the young, unsung heroes behind the scenes that do so much and did so much to make that company go.”

On his exit from TNA:

“The funny thing is, obviously not the choice of how I wanted things to play out. Took me by [surprise a bit]. I can’t say I was shocked when it actually happened, because I could see the process playing out where we weren’t quite on the same page on things. And as I said on Busted Open, I found out two days before Hard to Kill.”

On still going on on TV during Hard To Kill:

“I mean, first of all, Len Asper could have not told me that night. But I knew by that night, I already knew. It was like, okay, I told him you and me are having a conversation, and we had an honest conversation. I said, Look, I disagree with it, I don’t like it, but it’s your decision to make. And I said, this is what I’ll do. I’ll get on that plane tonight and go to Las Vegas. I will make sure that we have two amazing kick ass shows in Las Vegas, lockdown with the team. I’ll make sure that we go into Orlando and we get you out four TVs so that you’re in a position, because you’re going to have a lot to deal with. And this way, at least, you’re going to have five weeks in the can from when I walk out that door at the end of Orlando, and that was my goal, right? Just going to finish up those shows in Orlando, walk out there and then just either walk off into the sunset or like the old monster movie, like where Godzilla just slowly goes back into the water and disappears, lonely and depressed. It’s going to be one of those things.”

And which one was it? 

“A combination of both. Look, it was certainly melancholy, and the hardest part for me was telling people. Part of me wanted to tell everybody, which isn’t possible, and part of my conversations with Anthem was there’s some people I have to tell that deserve to hear this from me. So I took a small group of people there, and that last day in Orlando, I kind of went around and told a handful and said, you can’t say anything, this is what’s happening. Then I left there, I went back to my hotel room, a couple of people came by and this was the hardest part. I would tell people and they cry, and when they cry, I cry. I got to my room and almost like, okay, like, here we are. Then a talent reached out and said, Hey, there’s a couple who want to come see me. And I was like, Sure. I opened the door, they tear up. I was like, Okay, I can’t do this, just being around people, I’ve got a lot to process, and I didn’t process it, this is how I’m built, there’s something to do. So when we had that call on that Thursday night before, Hard to Kill okay, this sucks, not happy, but this is the mission, and you have to complete it. And I was almost like if I’m going to go out, if this is going to be the last thing that anybody ever sees, it’s going to be one of the best things they ever see. Handling this rebranding was very important to me. I fought for this rebranding. There were a lot of people like, I would have rebranded at TNA day one, except I was told, coming in, we can’t rebrand. And we had a conversation. When you look at the history, TNA to Impact, TNA to GFW to Impact… and it’s like, Hey guys, let’s change the name. It wouldn’t work. But how can I nicely say I put my heart and soul into the Impact brand, but only because, to me, it was still TNA.”

On not taking it personally:

“I mean, I don’t know if I did the greatest job at not taking it personally. I compartmentalized it. There was a lot of anger, and there’s a lot of hurt. I tried to offset by saying, look, there was nobody sitting there at a corporate level at Anthem who was going, Hey, let’s do something bad to Scott D’Amore. They were making decisions that they thought were right, and I can agree with them or disagree with them on that, but that doesn’t change.”

On the open letter from talent requesting to bring him back:

“Yeah, and I appreciated it, it was touching. I also knew when there’s people saying, hey, like, the talent’s gonna walk out. Guys, I’ve been here, that’s, it’s not happening like everybody’s upset, and they’re gonna be upset for a bit, and I said, and they’re scared.” 

On offering to buy TNA:

“I presented it to them. I actually sent it to them the day that the Jericho Cruise was leaving. I know because I wanted to get it out before going on that cruise, because then I don’t know how [the Wi-Fi was]. I was on the first Jericho cruise, and Wi-Fi was really rough on the first one. And people said, no, no, it’s better, but I don’t want to be trying to do business on the Jericho Cruise. So got the offer out then and then waited for the process to play out for them to say yes, no, or come back and negotiate. And ultimately, it wasn’t something that they were looking at, we weren’t going to come to a deal.”

On announcing TNA is back:

“By the time we announced the TNA announcement, that’s at Bound for Glory. I’m jazzed about what we’re doing, but I also know on the corporate side, like we’re we’ve got a couple of things where I’m not overly thrilled. The funny thing was, there was no promo. And the most ironic thing is, of all people, the person who said, somebody needs to say something here was Lance Storm. He was the producer of the segment. And that was just kind of like, Hey, we’re going to air this video, and then we’re going to come up and the talent’s going to be in the ring. Then Lance is like, I think somebody needs to say something. We talked about it for a little bit, and it was Lance, myself, Lou D’Angeli was there, and there was one other person. Lance is like, I think it should be you. I looked and Lou kind of like, and I was like, Okay. I said, I’ll say something, and then we did that. That was impromptu. I mean, I had no idea what I was going to say, I was so concerned about so much time and effort went into that reveal video, crafting that, and keeping it a secret, and the whole thing that it was like, let’s get through that. Then it’s just lights come up, the crowd’s going to cheer and chant TNA. Okay, sure, I’ll thank the people, or whatever. So I might have been a little jazzed up.”

On there being negative feelings to TNA at one point:

“I think that era [Hogan and Bsichoff] was part of it, and then the era that came after it. Then there was a period where people weren’t getting paid and the whole thing. Look, whatever led to it, there was a lot of people on camera and behind it that were very bitter and didn’t have kind feelings towards TNA or Impact. So one of the things we had to do was go out there and change that perception, and we worked really hard on it. It was changing the media perception, because you can’t change the perspective. We sat there one time and looked at it, 9 out of 10 articles about something we did, something we thought was decent, 9 out of 10 articles were negative. And we’re like, Okay, well, how do we fix this? It got to the point where, literally, I sat down one-on-one with some journalists, and said, okay, are you just never going to give us a chance? I get it. This company has mistreated you, lied to you or betrayed your trust in whatever sense. If your position is that you’re just never going to give us a chance on anything, even if we do everything right, you’re still going to find a way to write it with a negative spin then just say that’s what you’re going to do. Don’t pretend you’re a journalist, all I’m asking is give us a chance. I’m not even guaranteeing you we won’t screw up, you might end up hating us, but you have to give us a chance, or don’t be a reporter. If we do something bad, say it, no problem. But maybe, just maybe give us credit, even begrudgingly, for something we do.” 

On previous eras of TNA where fans said they wished more people watched it:

“You saying we suck isn’t going to help it. Truthfully I think, and look, we did a whole media run, mainly in the UK, right after we took over, and we literally talked about it. We knew it was going to be a long process, we talked about it one fan at a time. And then we came out of that media tour, and I turned to Don and Ed, and I go, this isn’t even just one fan at a time, we’ve gotta individually turn media to get them to just give us [a chance]. I honest to God don’t know what happened in those years to but there was some people who report wrestling, who they just say, Hey, Scott, I like you, I hate Impact, or they call it TNA, I hate TNA. Okay, so can we change that? To go from that to that Bound for Glory with Will Ospreay there, and those great shows in Chicago and that TNA announcement, and getting that out there, and then being able to build in a period of time where we weren’t really running a lot of shows. You don’t build to a major premium live event by not running shows. But we managed to do it. We built enough about the return of TNA to get it there. And then I thought we delivered at Hard to Kill.” 

On Kazuchika Okada:

“I thought we delivered at Snake Eyes. Getting Okada there to me, it’s kind of, I mean, ironic and kind of cute, in a sense that getting Okada there was the last thing on my list of things about changing the narrative about TNA Impact. Right away before it was even public I flew to Japan, we met with New Japan officials about trying to mend that relationship, because that relationship that was built when I was there booking. It was Mike Tenay, Jeremy Borash, that team and myself. First it was All Japan. We switched to New Japan. We had that continued on for years. Even the Global Force thing, I’ve had a great relationship there for years. And it’s like to be told, Scott, we like you, you’re a friend, but we hate TNA, and we can’t do business. We’re in Japan. We talked to them, and it took a lot, we have to be able to do something. Ring of Honor had its [issues], and probably rightfully so, for some of the things TNA had done to Ring of Honor over the years. Ring of Honor wanted nothing to do with it. We met with Joe Coff and Delirious, and said, Hey, we’re here now, and we want this to be different, and that wasn’t different. And the New Japan one, it took a while, right? I think you start looking at it, I think we get into just pre-COVID when we start seeing some cracks. We had to show New Japan we’re different. I think as we started doing that then okay, now the New Japan people say, Oh, well, New Japan hates them. Okay, well, now New Japan doesn’t hate them. So now the product’s good, can’t say the product’s not good. The shows are doing decently. Well, New Japan’s okay with him, but Okada hates him. He’ll never wrestle for him. Geez. So then it’s like, okay, we’ve gotta have Okada. To me, to have Okada there as a statement, TNA is back, and here on our first weekend, here’s the one guy who everybody said no matter what you do, this guy will never [come back], and God bless him too, the whole thing. Just kissing the TNA logo and everything else. He had a lot of fun with it, and I appreciated it. To me, that was like, okay, we’re not where I want to be in the sense that I don’t like that I’m two weeks away from walking out the door, but I’ve checked off everything on my list. Got Okada here, TNA is back, and there’s buzz. People bought the pay-per-view, some people say a record number, which is mind-blowing. Will and Josh had that unbelievable match. And again, that promo, was impromptu. Those guys, you know, had an amazing match, but went three minutes short.”

On why he was let go from TNA:

“We saw things differently as far as how we wanted to proceed. So I think partially, they just wanted their guys in charge. And I mean, I had a good seven years with those guys, but I’m not an Anthem guy. I don’t sit in that Toronto office. I have my thoughts, and you could say it’s my ego. I just don’t think it was the right move, and I don’t begrudge them. They’re doing their thing. They’re still going, and they’re going to run that company. I always say that everything is bigger than one person, even me. If I’m gone tomorrow, things will still go on.”

On the return of Maple Leaf Wrestling:

“Maple Leaf wrestling is just so uniquely Canadian and was so cool. I’m of the age where I saw the very tail end of it. To me, Maple Leaf wrestling growing up was WWF wrestling. Because they took over in 84 I’m 10 years old. Did I see Maple Leaf wrestling pre-WWF? A little.”

On future plans for Maple Leaf Wrestling:

“We’ve got the two shows in October, which I think is going to be a great kickoff, and then I think it’s what happens in 2025. We come out of there from October, we do a couple things later in the year. We’ll have an announcement, I think by October of some things for next year. But what we’re looking to do, Maple Leaf Wrestling was unique in the sense that, and it’s very much in line with 2024 because if you go back and look at the history of Maple Leaf wrestling, pre-WWF, WWE, it was like neutral ground. Even back when the territories played nice, they all had their own alliances. Toronto, Maple Leaf Gardens is one of the few places you might see Nick Bockwinkel or Verne Gagne defend the AWA title, and the same card that you see Harley Race or Terry Funk or Lou Thesz defend the NWA World Title, then you might even have Bruno or Bob Backlund come in as the WWWF World Champion. They all wrestled at Maple Leaf Gardens. If you looked at arenas that you wanted to wrestle in back in the 50s, 60s, 70s and into the 80s, there’s Madison Square Gardens, but after that I don’t know if there’s a place that was more sought after to wrestle in than Maple Leaf Gardens. It’s where Bruno Sammartino went when he had his problems and couldn’t wrestle in New York. It’s where Sweet Daddy Siki set up his home base. When the racial intolerance of him having the nerve to be married to a white woman started ruining his career in some places. He came to Toronto and he’s like wait, I can walk down the street with my wife and the person I work for isn’t mad at me because I had the nerve to marry somebody who has a different tone of skin? I think we can celebrate that. I want to tell some of those stories, because I think there’s some amazing stories of cultural significance for Canadians and connect with people in general. I always say, we talked about my father immigrating here, my uncle immigrated here at the same time. My uncle would say, we didn’t have a TV, but if we were somewhere where you could watch a TV, he goes, ‘We didn’t understand anything. We couldn’t understand a talk show, or we couldn’t watch a TV drama or something and know what was going on, we just didn’t grasp English. But you turn on wrestling and maybe we don’t get the nuance of the things. But I see this guy, he’s good. This guy, he’s bad. I know the BS, but my doctors say don’t get upset. But you know what I watch, and you know they do the thing with a two guy versus the two guy, and these are two guy, keep a cheat behind the referee.’ And I’m going, Oh, this is why your doctor told you you can’t watch this. But his whole thing was that’s why you look at it and you could understand it. Then the other thing about wrestling is if you’re an Italian immigrant, you’ve got Bruno or Dominic Denucci or Tony Parisi. If you’re an immigrant of Latino or Hispanic descent, maybe you’ve got Pedro Morales, or Tito Santana, whoever you’ve got. If you’re African American, then you’ve got Thunderbolt Patterson. You’ve got Sweet Daddy Siki, you got Tiger Jeet Singh, you have all of these things. Has wrestling historically done representation right all the time? Well, clearly, absolutely not. But it was a place where you could look and say hey, there’s something I see myself in and something I can connect with.”

On the big stars coming to Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling:

“Well we’ve got Kushida there from New Japan, and from TNA. We just announced that Takeshita is going to be there. The guy’s just lighting it up in the G1, he’s maybe the hottest wrestler in the world arguably when it comes to match quality right now, and having him come there gives us that AEW representation. We’ve got Kevin Knight, who’s an amazing young talent from New Japan. We just announced earlier this week that ELP, who just had that five star with Takeshita in the G1, he’s going to be there. So I think it’s really cool. We’ve got a few people from New Japan. We got a few people from TNA, we’ll have multiple people from AEW. Then we’ve got the best of the best Canadians like Trevor Lee, who had some time in Impact, went on to Cameron Grimes in WWE, we’ve got an amazing group of talent together. So, I think that the matches that night are going to be as good as any pay-per-view. I said it over and over again when I was with TNA, with Impact, for these pay-per-views we don’t take it lightly. I never take it lightly. I would say that people have to reach in their pocket and pay to watch this in a world where you can get so much on your TV, on your tablet, on your cell phone for free. When people invest in you with money and also their time. Because time’s the most valuable commodity we have. So if you’re going to sit out and say not only I’m going to both pay to watch this and I’m going to block out my entire evening to spend with your product we want to deliver and make sure that people get their money’s worth. So I think people see this card come together and say, Okay, this is a card that I want to see. This is two nights of wrestling that I want to be part of. And I think we have one of the very best, indisputably the best combat sports cross genre announcer, because Mauro Ranallo has agreed to be the voice of Maple Leaf Pro.”

On Mauro Ronallo:

“I mean, he’s the man. And Mauro has got a passion for wrestling. I met Mauro probably close to 25 years ago in Stampede Wrestling. I was coming in as a heel to feud with Sabu. And he was the 20-21year old kid who was doing the play-by-play with Bad News Brown, and we connected then over the years. He loves wrestling. He’s the best. You turned on Showtime for any big boxing fight, or you turned on to watch a lot of the big MMA fights with pride and everything, Mauro is that voice.”

On Jordynne Grace appearing in the WWE Royal Rumble:

“I reached out to somebody at WWE. I talked to Ed Nordholm, Chief Corporate Officer at Anthem, and said I was thinking this. I was talking to a friend and I think the timing’s right to reach out. So I reached out to a friend of mine there and said, Hey, this is what I’m thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they’re like, I think it all makes sense. We talked for a little bit and they said, how are you going to handle it? I said, Well if you’re willing, I would like you to be the person to take it forward and see if there’s any interest. I kind of laid out, not a formal proposal. Talked about a little bit, shot something, this is worth having a conversation. I got a text from Triple H, and we set up, had a chat, kind of just said, Hey, it’s a whole new world out there. Let’s explore things. I think if you look at what WWE and the direction it’s been going with with Paul and Nick at the helm. I think you see a lot of changes. I think you see a lot of business being done differently. You would not see this TNA collaboration that I’m proud to have been part of starting go the way it has, the way you’ve seen it. You wouldn’t see AJ Styles over in NOAH wrestling, Marafuji or any of this stuff. It’s just such an obvious [thing] that with the changing of the guard, there’s been a changing of philosophies on how things should be. So that’s really just how it started, then it went from there and it was very much a hey man, we’re open. It’s a different, different time.”

On the rise of Joe Hendry:

“I’m honored to be part of that and I can look at it and smile. Look, here’s Joe Hendry. Joe grabbed me one day and he goes Scott, Did I ever tell you why I chose to come to Impact? And I’m thinking, damn it, he probably did and I don’t remember. I was like, I don’t think so. And he told me a story. First, he told me a story about he was someplace else and his music was playing, it’s like, okay, here I am and it was a big moment. His music has a spot where he comes out and somebody pushed him and said, Go! They pushed him out before it was the moment. He’s kind of like, these guys don’t get me. Then he goes in that moment as I went to the ring I thought of an interview you did in the UK years ago, I think it was like 2018 19, long before he ended up coming, because he ended up going to Ring of Honor. He goes, you did an interview and they asked you a question about future World Champions, you mentioned Moose, Josh Alexander and Joe Hendry. I was like, oh, so glad I did that. He goes, I heard that, and I was like there’s a guy who gets me. He didn’t come then, but then when he became free again, he’s like, okay, maybe there’s more money for me somewhere else, but right now, I want to go somewhere where there’s people that that get me, and let me be clear, it’s not like I was the only one. But he told me that’s the type of stuff that that really makes me feel good. The fact that he gambled on coming to us at Impact, to TNA, because he trusted us that we would handle him right. I think we have and he’s obviously delivered. Those type of things make me happy. Having reached out to Jordynne when she was on the Indies and just be like there’s something there, let’s bring her in. She’s a completely different talent back then from what she is now. But there was always something there that was special. Ethan Page is the NXT Champion and he’s rocking it, he’s somebody else when we talk about Maple Leaf Pro and why it needs to exist, you look at Ethan Page. Ethan Page and Josh Alexander both had to go around and try to sneak into the country to work on shows with different companies, and ended up having various problems with the border. I think my first conversation with Ethan Page was when he called me up. He said, Hey, I got your number from so and so. I hope you don’t mind, but I got this thing at the border. We talked a little bit, and I sent him a few pieces of paper. But ultimately, people just as happens, especially in wrestling. Oh yeah, come do the shows, and then we’ll get you [a visa] just keep working, the visa never comes, right? Yeah, it’s coming second Tuesday of the week, as my father used to say. But, yeah, it took us saying, hey, we can get you a visa, come in work here. We’ll get you that visa and the platform. And that’s needed still today.

On the differences between the NXT partnership with TNA and the AEW partnership:

“You look at where Impact was at the time, and this is what frustrates me about social media, as great as it is in some ways, no matter what somebody says, somebody has to make it toxic. Can’t it just be good that the NXT relationship [exists]? Why are you comparing? Well first of all, there’s pros and cons to each side. So the NXT thing is obviously super cool that the TNA talent is being incorporated into the NXT broadcast, which is amazing. The flip side of the preferences of the AEW relationship. Well, one we were not in great shape, like the TNA company is so much stronger now in 2024 than Impact was in 2020, at that point we needed a boost. We never got a chance to put Kenny Omega in front of a crowd. We would have been selling a lot of tickets at that point with Kenny Omega.”

What is Scott D’Amore grateful for?

“Family and friends, 30 plus years in the toughest sport in the entire world and getting to be a part of so many people’s stories.”

Ronda Rousey (@RondaRousey) is a professional wrestler and former UFC Bantamweight Champion. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to talk about her graphic novel “Expecting the Unexpected“, how Paul Heyman inspired the idea, expecting her second child with husband Travis Brown, whether she still loves professional wrestling, if she would ever return to WWE, her thoughts on Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, why there is no love lost between her and Vince McMahon, fans not liking her previous comments, the controversial finish to WrestleMania 35, if a match against Becky Lynch was ever going to happen, her UFC legacy, the first time she met Dana White and more.

Check out the Kickstarter for Ronda Rousey’s graphic novel “Expecting The Unexpected” here: http://kck.st/4c4SQlX

Quote I’m thinking about: “You are not stressed because you are doing too much. You are stressed because you are doing too little of what makes you feel most alive.”

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On doing the side quests in life:

“Well, I’m at the point where I defeated all the big bosses, and I’m going back to the game to complete all the side quests because I’m a completionist. I’m at the point where I just want to go fishing forever. This isn’t really part of the whole thing, but I want to get the Hyrule Bass, the really gold one. There was an awesome fish in Zelda that took forever to get. I’m at that point, yeah, I’m going back through the game and going and doing the things that I really enjoy that aren’t necessarily, huge achievements and completing the game. I didn’t write a graphic novel because I thought it would impress the whole world. I wrote it because it was my way to deal with I think anxiety of that big event or whatever it is coming up. I just kind of have my own social anxiety which I call post social anxiety, right? I’m in the moment, I’m fine, but then afterwards I’m like, oh my God, didn’t say this right and didn’t do that. I have a tendency to ruminate over things, just in general, I fixate on stuff and I can’t get off which is why I can look at a punching bag and hit the same punch for five hours straight trying to get it right without getting distracted. But it’s also why I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and be like, Oh my God, remember when you tweeted that thing years ago and you’re just the worst person ever and there’s nothing you could ever do about it? You just think about it. So I found creative writing as a way to take those self-destructive thought loops I couldn’t get out of, and purposefully focused my mind onto something creative.”

On where the idea for Expecting the Unexpected came from:

“It came from Paul Heyman. It was right before the go-home for the all-women’s main event [at WrestleMania 35]. It was like seven o’clock, and Vince ripped up the whole f*cking show. It wasn’t the one where we had the cop cars and everything like that. I think there was maybe one in between, that was the go home, and one before, I don’t know, it was really close. We were just waiting around backstage being like what are we even doing? It’s seven o’clock. The doors are open. We don’t even know what the hell we’re doing, which was a common occurrence, unfortunately. And Paul Heyman, we got into a talk about movies and stuff like that. He was like, What kind of movie do you want to star in? And I realized I was just so passively waiting for someone to hand me my dream project. I had such a high opinion of myself and that, like, Oh, I’m a better martial artist than Bruce Lee and a better actor than Jet Li. Why isn’t anyone throwing opportunities at my feet? I’m super hot and young, come on. Why isn’t this happening? It wasn’t happening, and I realized that I was being an idiot, being passive, and I needed to stop being so full of myself and do something about it. So when Paul asked me that question, I was like, Well, what is one role that no one could play better than me? I know I’m not Meryl Streep, I don’t have a huge range. Sylvester Stallone gave me a lot of great advice, one of which was an example that no one f*cking wrote Rocky for him. He went and did that, and he told me that there’s a difference between actors and stars. Actors can go out there and play anyone, and stars go out there and play themselves, and you need to figure out how to go out there and play yourself. He was like every single role Al Pacino is in, he’s Al Pacino the cop, Al Pacino the criminal, he’s always Al Pacino. So I was like, I didn’t really think about it. I wrote a log line of a wanted assassin with the unwanted pregnancy, has to figure out how to give life instead of taking it, and I left it at that. I didn’t think about it. Then WrestleMania came, shattered my knuckle, had to go straight into surgery, went from surgery, didn’t even go to bed, straight onto a plane to fly to New York to go on Colbert, because I was voicing Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat 11 to promote that. Then finally got to be in bed for five hours before getting back on the plane. I’m laying in bed, I’m like, Oh, I have a great idea for when she finds out she’s pregnant. I was actually trying to go to sleep, no, no, no, go to sleep. You know when you get an idea in your head while you’re going to sleep you keep repeating your head so you remember it in the morning. Then you’re just keeping yourself awake and I was like, God damn it, you haven’t slept for how long? I was there with my hand propped up like in Rookie of the Year, where the kid is like this, because of the circulation. I’m like, you know what? Just type it. Just get it out, and you’ll go to sleep. So I started typing on my thumbs on my phone, and five hours later, it was time for the car to get there. I didn’t sleep I was just typing with my thumbs, and then a two-hour car ride to the airport, typing with my thumbs, and by the time we were flying over Arizona or Nevada, was when I hit the end. I had no idea I had a story like that in me to tell, and it was also god-awful and not formatted. I was like, I need help, maybe a writer or someone can help me with this. I hit up my agent, and he was like, in his way he was like, I don’t know what you want me to do with 60 pages of block text. Okay, I can learn. I can do this myself. I can figure out how to do it. And that started like an obsession for years, learning about screenwriting and how to structure a script and how to format it, and all these different things. All my free time kind of went into it, and it became my secret hobby, because it’s so cliche in LA to say that you’re working on your screenplay. I was like, I just didn’t want to ever be that guy to tell anybody so I’m working on my screenplay, or can you read my screenplay? So it was my secret shame for a long time.” 

On the screenplay looking like it would be a great graphic novel:

“That’s exactly what happened. I got it to as far as I could get it and I’m like, no one’s gonna take a chance on me being a lead. I’ve never, proven myself as a lead, and no one’s gonna take a chance on me being a writer. Some fighter wrestling check? No, I’m gonna think you can actually write anything. But I started getting much more into graphic novels as I was getting more free time, not training non-stop. And yeah, then it kind of hit me, oh my God, this would be a really cool graphic novel. It kind of came in a roundabout way, which I’m not even gonna go through that story. So a friend of mine started hitting up publishers and Axel Alonso, who used to be the Marvel Editor in Chief, he read it, and he was like, Dude, this is freaking amazing. I can’t even believe that you actually wrote it. Let’s make it into a graphic novel. Then I continued to pursue screenwriting. I started interning at WME, the story department.”

On still loving pro wrestling:

“I love pro wrestling. My experience in my last run wasn’t the best, it was the death throes of the Vince McMahon era and they just made it so needlessly stressful. I just wish I could just show up to the venue and already know what the match is and have it memorized.”

On the Triple H era:

“I’ve heard it’s a lot better. But yeah, that wasn’t my experience before. My experience before was like if you showed up to Saturday Night Live and no one had written the show yet, like you hadn’t been filming it and practicing it all week. It was like, you just showed up and you had to negotiate what the script was going to be until the very last second. Even if we killed it and had such a great time while we were out there, it was just the needless anxiety of getting to the finish line just made it so not fun. So unfortunately, it’s kind of put a gross kind of a film on the incredible experience. I hear from everybody that’s so much better now, and I’m happy for them. But it’s also, I got babies, I can’t be taking them on the road. I did it for a little bit with one, I can’t do that with two. It was hard on, my husband for us not all to be there all the time. I just don’t think I can ask them to sacrifice that anymore.”

On anxiety from what Vince might say about her match:

“No, no. I didn’t give a sh*t about that. I didn’t really give a f*ck what Vince thought, to be honest. I just wanted to have a great match. Sometimes I felt like instead of like enabling us to have a great match, we were fighting against him in order to have a great match. No once it was done and all that, like once I was in there and like in the moment and lost in it, there’s no better feeling than when you’re in it and you believe the story and you’re out there with your friends and you’re having a blast. It was like, we had to march through, what were the marshes called in Lord of the Rings? The Dead Marshes. I was just going through the swamps of sadness, just trying to be able to walk into the arena. Then once the music hit, I was like, f*ck you, we’re gonna have a great time. Then we come back, and then I come back to the curtain. I’m like, f*ck you. I’m going to my baby. I don’t want to hear sh*t unless you actually have a plan for next week, which you don’t. You don’t have a f*cking plan. I’m trying to get any information all week long, and then no one’s gonna tell me sh*t until I get to the arena, and I’m still not gonna hear anything for hours.”

On her SummerSlam match against Shayna Baszler:

“I think if we did the match at Bloodsport or something, people would have loved it. But I think the crowd, it wasn’t for them at all. It was all MMA easter eggs and all of these moments in MMA history that we’re big geeks for that, we were recreating and throwing homage to in the match and it was not inviting any audience participation or anything like that. But it was kind of like, I don’t know if you read my book, but it was a nice little f*ck you on the way out. You’re gonna sit here and watch this match that we wanted to do from the very beginning. I don’t care what you think, go get some f*cking popcorn. But yeah, we loved it. We had a great time. And from the very, very beginning, I always wanted to be able to wrestle with Shayna and be able to put her over and leave. Which they never would have let us do unless I threatened to leave right at the new year when they told me that I wouldn’t be able to fight Becky at WrestleMania, which was what I came back to do. And I was like, Fine, I’m gonna tag with Shayna, and she’s in turn on me, and then I’m gonna leave, or I’m gonna f*cking leave right now. That was the only reason we were able to do it, because they wouldn’t let us do any Four Horsewoman stuff. They wouldn’t let me and Shayna do anything together, because Vince was convinced that no one knew that me and Shayna were actually friends.”

Why the Becky match never happened at WrestleMania:

“Because Vince is an 80-year-old asshole.”

So there’s no love lost?

“No, Vince McMahon, John Laurinaitis, Bruce Prichard they can all suck a dick.”

But all good with Triple H and Stephanie McMahon? 

“They are fantastic, love them.”

On the necklace that Stephanie McMahon gifted to her:

“I was talking to her about [kids]. I was just excited about having a baby and we just started trying. Actually, no, we already had two miscarriages, and I was just going to start doing IVF. She took the necklace off of her neck, this necklace and it was a locket with pictures of her girls in it. She was like, this has my babies in it. I want you to put your babies in it. So I never took her babies out. I put my baby on top and I’m gonna have to add some more pictures. I got another locket too that had my boys in it and stuff. But she specifically said babies go in this locket. I love her so much. I miss her actually. I love this for us that we have, frolicked into the sunset and have peaced out or doing our mom thing.”

On being done with wrestling:

“Full time yeah. I might come back and have some fun here and there. But I can’t be leaving home and being on the road like that.”

On having a great debut match at WrestleMania 34:

“It is crazy what you can do when you have time to prepare and resources to work with. It’s great to see that they do that with people like Logan Paul and Bad Bunny. But I think I made the mistake of I wanted to really learn how to wrestle, be able to do a match on a fly or learn a match within 30 minutes before.”

On Triple H making her look like a star:

“Triple H, Kurt Angle, Shawn Michaels, helping us out. Michael Hayes, Sara Amato, I mean, everybody that saw it would like, give their two cents in and be like, you give this facial here, you do this, do that. You pulled the hair out from between your fingers, you know. It was the product of a lot of different people and time and practice and precision and things like that. When it got to the day of the event, it was just like, Oh my God I’m so excited, I know exactly this match. And I always wanted to recreate that feeling but it was like, never allowed, ever again. Then it just got to be less and less time and less and less support and less and less help. I really think that they have the ability to be a powerhouse like SNL to create these stars. They just got to put time and production and resources. If they put the machine behind these people, they would be doing so much more than they are now. This is with the minimal of time and preparation and most of the time you see people go out there and they’ve rehearsed a couple of spots, but they haven’t ever done that match before.”

On there being pride in calling it in the ring:

“You know what? Let people that want to do it that way, do it that way. But I saw plenty of people come up from NXT that they would doing this match throughout the week, and then they would have their match on the weekend and be able to do it, and they come up to the main roster and they’re like, yeah, it’s not like that anymore. I think a lot of people would prefer to be able to have some kind of time and preparation. That’s when you see a lot of needless injuries happen, is because of little miscommunications or miscues, because these guys talked about doing this in a hallway. They never practiced it before, and that’s why people are getting spiked on their heads way more often than they should.”

On calling wrestling fake in a social media post:

“The second that we cut we all burst out laughing. The second that I cut, laughing our asses off, which I loved blurring that line of what’s kayfabe and what’s not, what’s real, what’s not, and what’s making what’s happening behind the scenes supposedly candidly being part of the show. That was me trying on the sidelines to push a story and put time into it that the company wasn’t. So many people are trying to be the cool guy heel. They’re like I want to be the heel, but I want everyone to actually like me for it. I’m like, No, man. I want people to feel like I am an existential threat to what they love and to get them lost into it, have a passionate feeling about it, have people that disagree and think that it’s all work, and have it be a big disagreement. Because if everybody agrees about you, the discussion is over. If you make yourself a topic of discussion, you need to be hard to pin down. So, because I didn’t feel like I was getting that support from the company to tell that story, I felt like I had to take it into my own hands and blur that line with those videos. It’s so funny, because when people can’t tell when you’re in character and when you’re not, I feel like that’s where the real art is. When you’re really making people participate in a performance, when they don’t know where it is. Because I think people want to know, oh, this person’s in character, this person this person’s not, this person’s going as whatever their stage name is, and now they’re Fred, where I’m always Ronda Rousey.” 

On fans potentially disliking Ronda Rousey the person:

“Well, here’s the thing, before they had an opinion about me, I didn’t give a sh*t about anything they thought about anything. Why should I suddenly care now that they have an opinion about me? The point is I’m here to entertain you. Roddy Piper, his job was to make people feel amazing about him getting beat. I never wanted to be a face. They always would force me to be a face and I was always wanting to be the heel. Because I don’t like trying to placate for cheers, I love to get the reaction and the people like it great, I am pretty freaking amazing. But yeah, trying to pander for cheers and stuff like that. It was never for me.”

On the WrestleMania 35 finish:

“I didn’t think my shoulders were flat on the ground, so I was trying to scoot to get my shoulders flat because it’s so f*cking loud I can’t hear anything. But that’s the difference between a match that got thrown together the night before and the debut match, which is a match that had been put together over weeks with tons of support and practice and opinions and everything like that. And that was why we put a whole year into promoting and building this match, and then it’s just thrown together at the last second. We were still figuring it out when we were at the venue, and that’s what a lack of practice and rehearsal does.”

On the finish possibly playing into another match:

“I wanted to use that. I wanted to use that as, okay, this is how we lead into the next one. We bring it up on the Tron and say, you never got me, this is bullsh*t. The referees are all in your pocket. And put that into the next, you know, the singles between me and Becky that everybody wanted that got taken away.” 

So it wasn’t intentional?

“No, no, no. I didn’t think my shoulders were flush. I was trying to flatten out. But I think that we could have used it and kept it going, but they never let us.”

What is Ronda Rousey grateful for?

“My family, my friends and my past.”

Beth Phoenix (@TheBethPhoenix) is a professional wrestler and WWE Hall of Famer. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Asheville, NC to discuss how winning a coloring contest ignited her passion for WWE, the inspiration behind The Glamazon character, breaking her jaw in her first singles match, entering the Men’s Royal Rumble and eliminating The Great Khali, getting hit with an RKO by Randy Orton and a con-chair-to by Rhea Ripley, Adam Copeland’s recent cage dive at AEW Double or Nothing, not currently being signed to WWE, if there could be one more match and more!

Sponsors:
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On being in great shape:

“So my secret weapon is I have gotten heavily into hot yoga. I love yoga for the mental aspect, the emotional aspect, it’s been just this wonderful journey for me. Also, it’s very physical, it requires so much strength. Initially, when I walked in there, I was concerned. I like being fit and strong and I was like, Is this gonna help me maintain? So yoga really, really opened a door up with a new style of fitness and I like where it’s been taking my physique. The craziest thing with yoga is there’s so much planking, tons and tons and tons of planking, which even with a yoga mat can get tough on your elbows. So with Adam and Jay creating this Pure Plank and starting this new brand, this is something that I’ve leaned on quite a bit, and I use in my yoga practice too here at home, it’s a way to make things more challenging and also really correct your form, which was what I struggled with a lot. I like to call it the wrestler’s back, which I’m sure a lot of us in the business understand what that means, just from years of abuse and taking bumps, takes a toll. So it’s really helped me with my posture and being able to build my core strength, which just, even in daily life and mobility as we get older, it’s a huge, huge thing. So I love Pure Plank, it’s part of my routine and it’s really helped me a lot with my yoga routine, too.”

On Adam Copeland’s cage dive:

“I barely talked to Adam that day and I assumed, you know, any sort of gimmick match like that there’s a lot of inner workings going on. So I didn’t assume I would talk to him with any length of detail before the match. We happened to have my family with us and my family was like, Oh, we want to watch Adam’s match. This might not be the one to show the kids because I knew there was a level of violence and barbed wire and all those things. I just didn’t want to traumatise them any more than we do with watching wrestling. But there was a brief opportunity. I think it aired at 11:30 at night or whatever, I had it on my little cell phone and I was watching it while the kids were asleep kind of in bed quietly. When he began climbing up to the top of the cage, which I wasn’t aware was going to happen, I had kind of pit in my stomach and dread which I do with all high-risk things. I’m his wife, wife first wrestler second. So everything was set up to go well, I could see everybody was in their place and it was just one of those things, unpredictable. Sometimes things happen in wrestling and no matter how well-trained we are, how well we try to minimize risk and minimize injury, crap happens. So when he landed, I was pretty sure something was up just from the way he landed. I was like, I don’t think that’s kind of how he wanted it to go. Then the rest of the match I could see he was a little heavy-footed on that left foot so I was like, oh, something’s up. We always text after the match and he texted me and said, I think I tweaked my ankle and I was like, okay, and I just kind of was like, we’ll see what happens. He had to go to the hospital to get looked at so I got more information. Then we were wrapping our minds around, okay, it’s tough news to get that MRI or that X-ray back and show, okay, I’m injured. I’m not just hurt and I can’t work through it, I’m injured. So like I said, it was a bit life-changing in that way, especially having an injury this late in the game in his career. What does that recovery look like? It’s entirely different. We’re finding this out, all brand new one step at a time. Because we’ve never wrestled at these ages before. So when things come up, this is a learning curve. So yeah, I had a lot of mixed emotions watching that live. It was a tough thing to see.” 

On life after wrestling:

“There’s only two things in life I ever wanted to be, and that was a pro wrestler and a mom. At this age, I’m 43 years old, I’ve been able to do both. I feel like with my whole heart and soul. When I was full-time wrestling, that was my life. That was everything to me, and nothing else mattered but my success in that and checking all my boxes. Then when I had my children, nothing mattered more to me than being a good mom and that meant putting wrestling on the back burner at times. I went back for a long run as a commentator for a couple years. I came back for a couple runs here and there with WWE and it was so fulfilling and so awesome, but it put a strain, especially when Adam started wrestling full-time, it put quite a strain on our kids. That was where I was like I gotta shuffle the deck here a little bit and reprioritize where I’m spending my time. Because the kids right now need me, they’re at a real age that’s very demanding. So I am so happy in life after wrestling. Although you know, I’ve heard we’re a little bit like Hotel California you can check out but you can never leave, so once a wrestler always a wrestler. I love my career. I love my presence and the brand and my representation in wrestling, I loved it. I love everything about it, I’m still a fan. I still watch it as a fan. And I still have heated conversations with Adam about our opinions on stories and this and that, which is it’s a blessing and a curse to be married to a wrestler.” 

On seeing what Adam is doing and wanting to go back:

“Always. That never leaves. I’ll be transparent about that. That at this age has been really tough for me to like, step back and step away because I truly get lit up when I see it. As much as I love all the things in my life, my job my family excluded, like nothing lights me up career-wise like wrestling. I’ve tried a variety of different things too, what’s the next chapter, what does this look like? I find wonderful things but nothing’s like performing in front of 1000s of people, being able to pull those emotional strings and connecting with people in today’s world where I feel like connection has a buffer right now of technology. Wrestling is a very primal connection with the audience and community and it still brings that. If you go to a local indie show, and you get your box of popcorn and you’re sitting with others, I guarantee at some point you’re going to hoot and holler and yell and scream, and you’re going to lose yourself in the story, just because it’s built in our emotional makeup.”

On one more match:

“I don’t know. It’s really hard to say you’re retired, when I left in 2012 that was the word I threw around a lot. I’m retired, I’m retired. Because I wanted to have a family and I knew for myself that wasn’t going to be in congruence to perform and to have kids, I needed to devote myself to the kids at that time. I give the age-old cliche answer that everybody hates, never say never. But it really just depends on the opportunities and what suits our family, that’s really it. We weigh out everything, Adam’s opportunities too. I remember when Percy Jackson came on the table, and he was full-time in WWE, and it was really, really hard to take that on. But we weighed out everything, we sat as a family, and we made that decision. We’re like, this is huge, this is like the biggest acting opportunity that’s come our way and you need to go do this, this is massive. We talked about saying no to that and we talk about everything that comes our way, as a family and does that serve us now? How does that affect the kids? How does it affect our marriage? That matters too.”

On if she is still signed to WWE:

“I am not. I am currently a free agent, I have a great relationship with WWE. I treasured my time there. I feel like there’s more, there’s other opportunities that have presented themselves. I feel the motivation right now to kind of explore and explore what else is out there and explore myself. But my relationship with WWE hasn’t changed. I have so many friends there and I appreciate and enjoy the product as I always have. I love NXT I have a special place in my heart for NXT, of course, and just the system, and seeing young people come up and go through that excitement of developing themselves for the big time. I love WWE, I always will.”

On what inspired her to become a wrestler:

“It was the wild and crazy dream that I had from the time I was little. But I think it was WrestleMania 10 seeing Bret versus Owen where I was like, I was just so stunned by the performance and the emotional aspect. It felt so real to me, these characters weren’t just characters to me. They literally are brothers and whatever magic they created in the ring together was a lightbulb moment for me that I gotta figure out how to do this. I don’t know anyone in the business. I live in a tiny little town, Elmira, New York, I have no access to anything. I’ve never been even out of my town, how am I going to do this? There’s no manual written on it. I had no contacts, but I just had to figure out little by little how that was done, it was a lightbulb.”

On breaking her jaw on her singles debut:

“It’s pretty much worst-case scenario, and I felt my whole world crumble all around me. I go in the ambulance and they did the X-ray, and they’re like, Oh my God, your jaw is shattered, you need surgery. I went to UPMC and Pittsburgh, where this was Monday night on Raw, and they couldn’t get me into surgery until Wednesday afternoon. So I had to sit in a hospital bed for essentially two full days just thinking about how my life is. I’ve ruined everything, I’ve sacrificed everything at that time, I really hadn’t had a chance to start making any money. I put my family second, everything my whole life, I had put all my eggs in the basket of wrestling and it blew up right in front of me. This was my moment. I’m standing beside Trish Stratus, I’m working with Mickie James and everything crashed. Two people called me in the hospital that I really, really remember so, so much. One was Stephanie McMahon to check on me and just extend her remorse for what happened and give me a pep talk that you can do this, you can come back from this. And the other was Howard Finkel, and Howard was so sweet. He recounted how he remembered me coming in as an extra and how this was my dream. He goes, I remember you wanting to do this for the last three years driving all over the place as an extra. He goes, Don’t give up, It feels terrible now [but] don’t give up. In that really dark moment for me, like I am so grateful that I got those two phone calls. Particularly Howard, who it was a very special call.”

On if there would be another opportunity:

“I had doubts. But I guess in my heart of hearts, I was like, I gotta figure this out. There was a crazy thing that happened to me. I thought initially, oh I’m on Raw, I’m officially on Raw. Once I get the clearance, because they told me [I’d be out for] about two months with the broken jaw. Once I got the clearance, I’m right back where I started and I thought it was gonna be plugged right back in and be off to the races. Well, those two months came and went, I got cleared and I’m back in the developmental system, I wasn’t plugged back in. The machine had moved on and they didn’t have room for me, and maybe they look at me like [I am] injury prone now. So I guess month after month started rolling and I was like, oh my God, I gotta get myself back over. The work, all the prior work I had done was kind of erased and now I’ve got to get myself back over. So that’s where I went back to the drawing board and I was like, I need to create a character. I can’t just be Beth Phoenix, blonde girl, I have to create something that they don’t have right now, and that’s where The Glamazon came from. So I was like, I’m going to start working, and I’m going to start presenting myself like I feel inside, like the person that I know I am, rather than trying to jam a square peg into a round hole of being, the next Stratus, which nobody can be the next Trish. Trish is Trish.”

And that’s what made you stand out:

“Well, and that’s what I learned too was I had to look at the landscape and be like, what do they not have? Well, they don’t have a powerhouse right now. I can do that stuff. I felt excited because that was stuff I was doing on the independents. But when I came to OVW, I felt like I really need to pull back on that because I needed to look and I needed to present myself more on brand of being like this, beautiful Diva and emphasize that, not my strength.”

On how Victoria felt about the jaw-breaking incident:

“She felt horrible, and it was not her fault. It was literally that I had my mouth slightly open. It was my fault. When you take a hit to the face you’re supposed to clench your jaw so that it doesn’t happen. I was standing there probably because it was my first match and I was stunned and just pure ignorance I had my mouth slightly open and boom. And yeah, she felt terrible. She still feels terrible about it and she shouldn’t, I love her to death. She’s maybe one of the kindest women in the business.”

On being in the Men’s Royal Rumble:

“So that was a private conversation between myself and Dean Malenko. He pulled me aside and at that time he was putting together the Men’s Royal Rumble. And again, Chyna was a huge influence of mine. Glamazon was pretty much Chyna 2.0. And that’s what I was modeling it after. I felt like we needed a new, strong woman in the group. So, to be able to be the successor to her in that particular moment was just mind-blowing because it was very sentimental to me and special to me because of her. But also it was this incredible gift that I kept so guarded because Dean had told me this about five or six weeks out. So I was given this secret and Dean said, Look, we pitch this, everybody likes it, it’s dependent on you keeping the secret. So if it had leaked before, they basically weren’t going to do it. I did not even tell my parents, I told no one, I did not tell Natty and I tell Natty everything. I was carrying around this golden goose. It was such a sigh of relief when I walked up to Gorilla and I got to, like, look around be like, okay, they know now. When they were on number five, or whatever and I was number six before they hit the music. But it was one of the most outstanding moments of my life to be able to be a part of that page in history, opening more doors for the women. And it was so much fun. It was so much fun. I’ve never experienced a crowd reaction like that.” 

On eliminating Khali:

“Oh, yeah, they definitely set me up for success and put me in there with Khali. That moment of getting to stand toe to toe with him and be fearless, whereas inside I was just like, it was an out-of-body experience. That’s the only way I can ever describe that moment. It was just so intensely emotional that I felt like I was floating. It was a moment that I knew in wrestling, it’s a fleeting part of the history book we have. We’re only there so long. It moves on fast, and the next generations that come bring so much more to the table than we did. But I knew in that little moment I was like no matter what, nobody can take this special, special moment for me. It’s what I wanted to do here, I wanted to have these moments, I wanted to be a successor from the stars that I looked up to, and to me in that moment, I did it. If it all ended the following day, I would have been okay with that.”

On being paired with Santino:

“So I’ve kind of had my run as The Glamazon, the big dragon to be slayed. Then the dragon was slayed, I was beaten. And after the dragon gets beat the first time, you got to reinvent a little bit. I found myself in catering a lot and I found myself not really being used on television. I was like oh my God, they’re moving on from me, I’m done, my character is done, what now? So my thought was like, Okay, what have I not done? I was like I could be a valet or a manager, but that kind of doesn’t make sense for this like big, tough character I’ve created and Santino was just on the cusp of finding some comedic beats. He was no longer the Boris Alexiev tough guy. He was kind of doing the unibrow and finding some comedic beats. I had seen the Eddie Murphy movie Norbit, it’s vintage. The whole premise is this big mean girlfriend and this kind of wimpy, almost abused boyfriend. So I wrote up a one-page pitch, and I walked into Vince’s office and I said, Vince, I have this idea. I didn’t even tell Santino. So I was just kind of hoping and praying that he’d be okay with it. I handed him the paper and I said Vince, if you could just take a look at this, I made sure I was concise. The next week, Vince came up and found me, he goes, we’re going with your idea and it starts tonight. I was like, oh my god, it was that easy! It wasn’t that easy, it was a lot of stars aligning. But I found a place on the show that was independent of what was going on with the women’s title because really, that was the only spot for the girls to be on every week, or a valet. If I wasn’t the contender and I wasn’t the champ, what could I be doing? And so Santino and I kind of started building this little alliance and relationship and it ended up going off the rails. It was super special. I think I was very good at being the straight man and he was very good at just doing everything he could in his power to make me crack. Other than my wonderful time I got to spend with Natty as my tag partner and the Royal Rumbles, my time with Santino was by far my favorite memories from WWE.”

On teaming with Adam to take on The Judgement Day:

“Oh my gosh, it was just such a simple story, the “I Quit” match. There’s a crazy story behind the I Quit match, honestly. Of course, Percy Jackson filming was booked, it was butted right up to the pay-per-view, the “I Quit” match. That was in Philadelphia on Pay-Per-View. And so Adam had to fly all the way from Vancouver to Philadelphia overnight, basically not sleep, and then have a 40-minute match with Finn Balor which was an “I Quit” match, which is not always the easiest type of a match. So we were sitting and talking about that and he’s like, I don’t know, maybe I can’t do Percy Jackson. We were looking at it again, like weighing all the options. How do we do this? And I was like, you can use me if you want, it may be using myself as a part of this story in this moment could help alleviate some of the stress on how to book this finish. So the I Quit match was crazy. I flew his gear, everything that he needed for the match, I flew it from Asheville to Philadelphia and met him at 11 o’clock in the morning pay-per-view day after he had been filming Percy Jackson for like two weeks and charter flight straight to Philadelphia. Basically, he laid down in the hotel for about 30 minutes and then we had to go to the building and then put the spool thing together. There’s a lot of moving parts in this match, you had everybody, all of Judgment Day was out there. It was just chaos and fun and crazy. But I was super excited because I’d watched Rhea come up. I was just super excited, even if that was all we did. I just wanted the opportunity to kind of get in there with her and get to be face-to-face.”

On getting hit with the con-chair-to:

“Again, they had never done that to a woman before. So we were like, are they gonna let us do this? It’s a violent, violent thing to see and it’s a violent thing to see a woman doing it to another woman. So there was just so much Shakespeare in that, in the ending of that match that it was just beautifully orchestrated, and everybody played their role perfectly. But there was something, there’s a couple of funny hitches. I was so nervous, I’m out of practice, and they’re all on their game, because they get so many reps, and they’re just doing wonderfully. Then my job was, of course, involving handcuffs, which anytime you have a prop, like the handcuffs can go wrong in so many ways. They don’t latch or they break or the key goes missing. So getting the key from Rhea was a portion of this finish, and then I had to unchain Adam from the handcuffs because he was handcuffed to the ropes. Well, of course, I’m so nervous. I grabbed the handcuffs and I’m trying to open the wrong handcuff for him that’s on the rope. And he’s just like, What are you doing? He’s like, grab the other handcuff on my wrist, free me, free me, free me. And I’m like, oh, yeah, I’m so sorry. It was chaos, but in the end, it was just so much fun. I remember coming to the back and we all just kind of were like reveling in the crowd reactions. The story we told is what we wanted to tell like that, that played out as beautifully and as perfectly as it could. And it was really fun. It was great bad guy work, great good guy work.”

On bleeding in the Women’s Royal Rumble:

“So when I had retired from wrestling the ring posts didn’t have those big digital LED wraps on them, they were a smaller post. So I had never been in the new rings with all the cool technology and all the upgrades. And I was in this was really early after I came in, I had a little interaction with everybody. And then we kind of settled in and I was working with Bianca a little bit. I was sitting on the top turnbuckle and Bianca and I were going back and forth or whatever. Then she gave me a punch to the face and I whipped my head back like that and the back of my head hit the LED post, which was a little bit wider than what I was used to. I feel like I just from not getting in the new ring and being rusty. I went, Whoa, hit my head right on the edge of that and I thought, Oh, that hurt. Bianca to her credit was like, are you okay? Are you okay? I’m like, I’m fine. Then I’m working with somebody else in the Rumble just doing my thing. I looked down to pick somebody up and I was like, it was Charlotte actually. I was like, Charlotte, you’re bleeding. And she was just like, No, it’s you, dude. And I’m like, what? Because it was all in the back and I didn’t see it. Then I looked down and I saw the blood dripping and I’m like, oh my God, I think I’m bleeding. I don’t even know from where. And then I touched the back of my head. And I was like, Oh, no. So I was in the Rumble a good long while and a part of the whole story. So I was talking to the doctors there and like, are you okay? Are you dizzy or anything? I’m like, Nope, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I was like, Please, can I stay? I was afraid they were going to pull me because of the injury. But they they let me stay. And so yeah, so I just stuck it out. And it made for this badass warrior looking performance that was just me misjudging the ring post, but it turned out it turned out great. Luckily, it was just a few staples in the back of the head. Everybody was so worried and here’s the crazy part. So, again, I was not even sure I should do the Royal Rumble because it was Adams’s return like I was there for his support, not to have my own performance. And then I get my head split open and he’s watching from the back about to have his return after nine years. And then he’s worried about me and I’m like, I’m so I’m sorry, I didn’t I just didn’t want to add stress to the day. I’m so sorry. But that’s the risks we take every time we get in the ring, you can’t predict things to go smoothly. Fortunately, our children weren’t there because I feel like that would have been [upsetting], and our littlest was like two or three. I would not want to want her to see that.”

What is Beth Phoenix grateful for:

“My family, my health and time.”

Chad Gable (@WWEGable) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Minneapolis, MN to discuss his transition from amateur wrestling at the Olympics to becoming a professional wrestler, the comparisons to “Perc Angle” in TNA, if he was ever in conversation to be Kurt Angle’s son, the origin of the “Shoosh!” and “Thank You” catchphrases, being the focus of the Wyatt Sicks debut, why there has never been a bad Chad Gable match, the first time he met Otis and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “Embarrassment is the cost of entry. If you aren’t willing to look like a foolish beginner, you’ll never look like a graceful master.” – Ed Latimore

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On being in phenomenal shape:

“It’s just become a passion of mine and it’s not even like a vanity thing or anything. But training and just physical well-being, because of what it does for me, and mentally, what I find helps. The more you dive into everything, and I know you’ve experienced some of this and the deeper you get into just taking care of different elements of your life, the physical part of it is kind of the foundation that bleeds into everything. Because the better you take care of yourself physically. Obviously, you feel better, but that transforms your mind, man. It takes care of everything else in your life. So when you place that at the forefront, at least that’s what I found, it’s crazy what it does to your world.”

On how he looks compared to ten years ago:

“I don’t know about shredded, but somebody posted a picture of me 10 years ago at a NXT show or something compared to now. And just the difference of like, I don’t know, just you can tell I’m doing it right now compared to then. I am just a larger, I think a bigger, more appropriate version for what I’m doing. The effort that I’m putting in is paying off compared to then because then it was just like, so much effort and so much. I just wanted it so bad and I was applying so much time and effort into the gym and I just didn’t look any different. It feels good to know that trusting somebody that knows what they’re doing to guide you really works and I think that’s what it takes. It’s handing over the reins once in a while. Even if you think you know better.”

On being “killed” by the Wyatt Sicks:

“Yeah, that was that was quite a night. Out of everything I’ve done over the past couple of years, the response to that was so out of this world insane. People thought [I was dead], I can’t tell you the amount of people that thought something actually happened to me. I went to church that Sunday and ran into a little kid who was watching. I was kind of hiding my head from him and he was like making his way around me to get a look at my head. And he’s like ‘Where did it [the wound] go?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I mean, I fixed it bud, I went to the hospital and stuff, it was bad.’ And he’s like ‘What did they do to you?’ I’m like, ‘You’ll have to tune in tomorrow night.’ They were into it, it was really interesting.”

On if the Chad Gable character might have been killed:

“I mean, you saw him definitely rattled like he’s never been before, which was cool. What the storyline has done is it came at this awesome time when I had just done the turn. I had become this abusive coaching character, which people got a whole new look which I thought did wonders for me. Then all of a sudden at the same congruently the Wyatts came in and forced me to be vulnerable. So we get Chad Gable, who’s this abusive over the top, shows no vulnerability, and now he’s forced to. So you’re getting these two dynamic stories at the same time. I benefit from this and not a lot of people get to dip their hands in so many different stories at one time. It’s almost like every time I show up for TV each week it’s like well, what are we doing for this story? What are we doing for this one? And this one, and this one… My toes are in so many things right now and I mean, how grateful, that’s such a great place to be.”

On the Wyatt Sicks pitch:

“It was going to be that I was going to be the lone guy kind of laid out. Initially, we didn’t really know to what degree. But when we got it ready to go, we’ll say we were blown away, like, holy crap, what exactly happened to me here? We’re not sure and we just ran with it. There was no plan, we kind of saw how it worked out. And it worked out, I think, to our advantage better than we expected. Because the response to that from an audience standpoint was just out of this world. I think it just helped the whole intro of the family and their aura and they’ve been doing so great with that. You can tell the audience they’re just taken aback by them. Every single week, the vibe in the crowd, you’ll see it tomorrow night when you’re there, maybe you have already. But it’s something else when you’re out there in the arena, and they show up man.”

On working in Bo Dallas’ first program in 5 years:

“That’s special for a number of reasons. Bo, he’s so excited about this, and he should be, but I feel his energy and his anxiety, the good anxiety, he has his pacing back and forth before watching him. And it’s similar to watch, eerie in a way, but also so comforting because Windham was very similar and I had the very good fortune to work with Widham when I first got called up to SmackDown. We were on a European tour, my first ever, and he was with Randy at the time. We were over there, me and Jason Jordan as American Alpha, we’re doing some other match, I don’t even know what it was. But then they watched us work the first night and requested to work with us like the rest of the tour. So the whole card got flipped around. So for 9 or 10 days straight over there in the UK and in Europe, we worked with Randy and Bray every night, and it was awesome. They just had nothing but the nicest stuff to say about us afterwards. They dropped the tag team titles to us about a month later, which to me was just like a nod to us as you guys are great. But I learned a lot from Bray in that time and just gained the utmost respect for him. Because he’s one of those guys that when he speaks his mind or gives you feedback you listen. Nothing he says feels like he’s just saying it. Hey, kid, here’s a piece of advice. It’s like he’s looking at you, and offering you his real piece of mind. And something I found about myself that I’ve kind of discovered over the past few years, and this happens with Randy too, or I find with people that I hold in very high regard. I don’t always have like these, I’m not texting him all the time. I don’t have those types of relationships where I’m constantly staying in touch every day and I’m talking to them. But when they say something to me, I store it somewhere in here, and it means so much to me. Bray was one of those people and Randy’s one of those people. So now, like you said, to your point, to be selected as the first guy to have to work with Bray or to work with Bo as he carries on Bray’s legacy. To me, I get to play a small part in carrying on the legacy, which is so special. So when he gave me Windham’s old finisher the other night. I wanted to make it look good, put some stank on it and make it look a little extra special to go that was for you my friend and now also for Bo as he carries it on. So I think all of us that are playing a part in this right now are in a very special position and a very delicate one to carry it on and do it in the right way. So it’s balanced like a golden egg, take care of it. It’s a cool, cool thing.”

On there not being a bad Chad Gable match:

“That’s a feather in my cap then, because I took pride for a long time when any match I got on TV could only be like 90 seconds or two minutes at times. But also some people might write that off and be like, well, it’s just a two-minute match, let’s just go do it. It’s like no, man, I have two minutes tonight, let’s see just how good we can make two minutes. I had a good run there doing that for a while, it’s kind of like almost, there’s an art to it. It’s kind of artistic to be like, Well, you got a four-minute match with Finn Balor. I think I had one of those a while [ago], he’s one of my closest friends and one of my favorite people in the world. We could have very well went out and had a little four-minute forgettable thing, but it’s like, let’s just tear it down for four minutes. I did it with Big E too for a while, five-minute matches and stuff. There’s like a clever little art to it and it’s fun and you’re painting a little bit. I find joy in that. So thank you for saying that.”

On the “Perc Angle” comparisons:

“I mean, what an honor. First of all, it’s so funny when that stuff started coming out because I’m like, oh, here we go, now we’re cooking. Like the week after it came out. For those that didn’t see we come back from a tour overseas. I can’t remember where but, we went to one of my favorite coffee shops called Perk. And I was like, Oh my gosh, did the stars align on this one? I walked into the coffee, they got the big sign and I’m like, Nikki [Otis], do the picture of me with this stuff. It just lined up so perfect. And people just latched on to it. And then like the coffee place sent me a big box, all this Perk merch. I got Perk shirts and bags of Perk Coffee and stickers all over my house. And it just worked out really well. But all that to say like Kurt is the man dude, he’s been so cool. throughout everything we’ve done with him. I got to wrestle him, which was insane.”

On the biggest thing he had to unlearn when transitioning from amateur to pro wrestler:

“Stone face all the time, no emotion. Coming into NXT, when I first came in, that was certainly the hardest thing was letting yourself be vulnerable and that applies to life too. But letting yourself be vulnerable in wrestling, I think is a big part of it and something that I had a lot of trouble with. Obviously, in amateur wrestling, you don’t go out there and show emotion to your opponent or show them how you’re feeling. But at NXT I got down there and I’ll never forget my first Tuesday when I got thrust in front of presentation skills class, basically promo class with Dusty Rhodes in front of like 80 of my now peers, who are just these larger than life personalities, every one of them and they were experienced in doing this, and I get called up in front of everybody and with the camera and red lights on. And they’re like, Give us something. Well, what do you mean? They’re like, show us character, anything? I hope nobody pulls up any of my old stuff that I did there. Because I mean, talk about anxiety and stress in front of that many people trying to make an impression but having no clue what you’re doing. It was the worst, but you’re either forced to sink or swim at that point, it’s like, get over it. And thankfully, I did think pretty quickly. But I was surrounded by great people, there’s so many people down in NXT that had no reason to help me and be welcoming, but they were. And to my benefit, I have a lot of people to thank from down there.”

On the chaos theory:

“So, I mean, Doug Williams, the OG of chaos theory, was one of my main influences when I was around that age, 14 or whatever, and tape trading. And I like I said, me and my friend Kurt Pope in the backyard. I tried it out. I was very young and a lot smaller than but then I wish I could remember the first time I tried it in NXT. I was like well I used to do that when I was 14, I can probably still pull it off now. I did it and no one else was doing it at the time and no one in the company even. Saw I was like, claim it, put my mark on it. I’ll keep it but it’s a unique movement. It’s one of those things that I always struggled with because when they tell you to pick your finisher, not that’s necessarily a finisher, my finish but it’s a pretty spectacular move and you but if you’re going to do a move like that, that’s gonna be signature they always say like you make sure you can do it on everybody and it’s, it’s like, oh, that one I don’t know about that. But I pulled it off on Braun Strowman. So like, who else is there that I’m gonna need to do it on? He’s a big dude. It’s pretty it’s pretty gnarly dude. It just speaks to, not my athletic ability, but that of the people I’m working with. I mean, everybody’s necks aren’t in great condition. And that’s you’re going straight over your neck on that move every single time. But when we talk about performance and what we do, there’s a lot of that that goes into that move. And it’s, it’s a difficult one.”

On hopefully winning a singles championship soon:

“I hope so. I feel like I also am disappointed in the fact that I didn’t grab one during that whole run [against Sami Zayn]. Because I also don’t want to give the fans the impression that like, well he’s great, but he’s also just the guy that can’t win the big one, where I know I am and I know I can. But what this is doing is I think for me building that first one to mean almost as much as maybe it’s ever meant for anybody. I’ve come so close so many times, the Gunther stuff, what it did for my career, what Gunther did for my career can’t be overstated. I have him to thank for so much the way he elevated me. Then moving on to the stuff with Sami, from a storytelling perspective alongside the in-ring perspective, we got so much accomplished in such a short amount of time. I feel like for both of us that it left just the right amount on the table for me as a singles guy to be like he did so much there, he got so much done, but he didn’t win the championship. So we’ve got one piece of the puzzle left to fill in, and I’m almost happy it didn’t happen then, because of what we got done there. It didn’t need it. I didn’t need it. But now I do and so now it’s still on the table.”

On Shorty G:

“I’ve often said, probably to nobody’s surprise, that was a pretty low point. But again, and I don’t want to get too repetitive but I was asking for opportunities on a weekly basis at that point. I was going into offices and being like, Look, I need to work, I need to do anything. Because I really wasn’t doing anything. So I was given the Shorty G character persona. The last thing I’m going to do, my personality, the last thing I’m going to do is scoff at it and not give it whatever I can. Whatever effort I can is going to go into that because I’ve asked for it. I asked for anything, an opportunity and I was given it. So I did the most I could with it. I think what it showed was that I am willing to contribute in whatever manner, if it’s down here, or up here, I’m willing to contribute whatever I can and whatever is asked of me. Once you’ve proven that, that you’re going to do that and you’re not going to put on a booboo face and sit around and sulk around because you’re not happy with it. Then look at this guy, let’s give him some more. Okay, he showed us his grit, he showed us that he’s here for the long run. And I think that worked to my benefit hopefully.”

On Maxxine Dupri:

“How unique of a situation to where she’s really learning to wrestle week by week in front of a live TV audience. Because at the time she wasn’t even doing live events, all she was doing was coming to TV and learning there to work, and then go into the Performance Center in Orlando. But we got to a point where we knew she was going to start having some singles matches. And to her credit, she asked me to get in the ring with her at shows before TV and stuff, which of course I did. So we would work on, I kept telling her let’s do the basics, because we’re at a level and with our company I think what’s most appreciated and to me, at least what stands out the most with new people is when they do the basic things really, really well. Not some flashy new flip or something or new move that looks cool, that doesn’t impress me. Someone doing the old-school stuff really well and snug and they were taught properly, that impresses me.”

On ‘Shoosh’ becoming a catchphrase:

“Shoosh I stole from Pauly Shore’s movie Encino Man. The bully, the high school jock bully, just said shoosh like 100 times in the movie and it was so funny. Like it was so annoyingly funny. I’ll never forget the first time I did it. We had this one night and I think COVID had kind of interrupted the plans because a bunch of people got sick, had to stay home, all this stuff. It was Detroit, if I remember right, and me and Otis were thrust into this promo seg to open the show. I don’t know where it was, they’re like, Well, you guys can walk and talk and do a promo tonight. I’m like I can say what? They’re like whatever. I was like we were waiting for this. So I pulled out all these Pauly Shore references and these Always Sunny references, absurd stuff that I just liked. It was the first time I ever just did stuff that I liked because I had the chance. And lo and behold, the stuff I liked is what resonated with people and it was like this light bulb. The crazy thing is you get people that will tell you this, and it happens in all avenues of life. You get advice from people but it never really clicks until you just do it for once. It was like all this stuff I like resonated with the people and stuck and who would have thought it’d be something as stupid as saying thank you and shoosh.”

On ‘A Thank You’ also becoming a catchphrase:

“I think that was by accident as well. That was stolen from I think Always Sunny if I’m pulling my right reference, because Charlie on one of the episodes of Always Sunny, he says thank you like three times in a row. But like the last time he said it, he kind of drifts off because I think he had huffed something. And I always heard that last time you said it and I was like, That’s really funny. And then it was when I got my master’s degree, and I was being this obnoxious, schmuck, so to thank people I said it like that. And then I just heard the people’s response and I was like, Oh, that one’s gonna stay, that’s gonna stick.”

On possibly being Kurt Angle’s son instead of Jason Jordan:

“There was never any talk of any of that until it happened. We found out about that whole thing the day before, or two days before. We got called in, they told us the deal and up until that point, we thought we were just hunky dory tag team for the long run. But that night, they sent Jason to wherever TV was, and they sent me to Birmingham, Alabama. I just sat in my hotel room and watched Monday Night Raw as they announced. And I said, What? Okay. And that was it. And that’s how I found out it.”

On Chad Gable being the son making more sense:

“You would think so [laughs]. Yeah, I don’t know. I think Jason, I mean, what a talent first of all, but he was such a strapping young lad, and probably in the company’s eyes at that point in time, out of the two of us. I mean, dude, besides his unfortunate injury, he was going to be a superstar. He was often running with the stuff he was doing with Seth Rollins. And I know he got a lot of crap when he first started with the stuff with Kurt and the character he had taken on. But people didn’t realize that was how you were supposed to feel about that character. He was playing it perfectly and everyone was very critical of a lot of the traits that the character was doing and I’m like, you’re doing it right, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. Right before his injury, he was peaking and he was getting all these awesome singles matches, he had wrestled Cena and he was wrestling all these guys just killing it, dude. What an unfortunate end. But thankfully, he’s taken on a producer position. I mean, every time he tells me that he’s got my segment or my matches, I’m like, oh baby, music to my ears.”

What is Chad Gable grateful for?

“Family, that I have rediscovered God and Jesus and extending my relationship with WWE.”

Adam Pearce (@ScrapDaddyAP) is a professional wrestler and the General Manager of WWE Raw. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Toronto to discuss how he got the job in WWE, why his first run with the company didn’t work out, if there are ever any plans to have a match against SmackDown General Manager Nick Aldis, being a 5-time NWA World Champion, his 2 matches in WWE, getting hit with 2 F5s from Brock Lesnar, becoming Postman Pearce in Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse, his many arguments with Chelsea Green and more.

Visit Adam Pearce’s new website: http://itisofficial.org

Quote I’m thinking about: “Love somebody today.”

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On fans realising he used to be a wrestler:

“I think it depends on what people you’re talking to. Are we speaking specifically of WWE fans? Yeah. I would say the majority of them are they give you a look almost like Scooby Doo. Yeah for almost 20 years.” 

On if he could still go in the ring:

“100%. Right now. How much do you pay me? I don’t want to either. I appreciate that though. I’ve been done for 10 years. December 21 of this year will be 10 years to the day I had my last pro match. Well, now I have to back up. If you rewind, five years or so I guess you could say that I hold the singles victory over Shinsuke Nakamura, which was in the main event of a SmackDown. And the last tag match I had if I’m thinking about that was as partners with Braun Strowman for the World Tag Team title against Hurt Business, where I got beat.” 

On a possible match between himself and Nick Aldis:

“Yeah, there’s something there. There’s a lot of air and opportunity between Mr. Aldis and I but here’s the thing like, you have to want that. Man, don’t think he wants that. No, that’d be fun. I think neither one of us neither Nick and I are ever going to angle for a position in the spotlight like that. I think we’re both content very happy and very honored to have the positions we have currently in WWE. There’s only one general manager for the show. So it’s highly important. It has been the pinnacle of my professional career, performing career. And I hope that continues into the future. But as I’ve said, 100 times, privately, publicly, I ain’t afraid to get my hands dirty either. So if the situation calls for it, I’m sure Nick would be down for it and I think there’s a whole litany of NWA fans who have played that what if game? Because I think our names are always connected when people talk about that, especially in the “modern era.” I think it’d be fun for a lot of different groups of wrestling fans.”

On his backstage role:

“I am a producer of Raw currently, previous to that Raw and SmackDown. I have been the director of live events, which means I have written and booked the territory brother, so to speak. I did that for a long period of time, which was a lot of fun. I was hired to be a coach and a trainer way back when almost a decade, just about a decade now. So I spent the first 10 months at the Performance Center teaching, which was awesome in and of itself.” 

On getting the job in WWE:

“I call it time served and the reason I say that is because you spend a lot of time in a vocation, you’re going to run into everybody, you’re going to run the gamut of the experiences and the people you run into and that you meet. I see this quote all the time and I used it today when I tweeted something about Rhea Ripley and always be kind to the people you see on the way up because it’s the same faces you’ll see on the way down and I saw a lot of faces over 20 years. Thankfully, I guess I had a good enough track record with the work that I had done independently. I was a freelance professional that entire duration save for the five years I was under contract Ring of Honor two of which I ran the company. And that’s where I got a taste of writing TV for the first time, booking a house show schedule and working contractually with talents to keep them in the fold and losing talents to other places, not to mention taking bumps. I got a phone call from a gentleman who I highly respect and I won’t name his name because I don’t know how he would feel about that. But he posed the question to me. This was in 2012. He said, Hey, man, if I told you that I think I could get you a job that you could have for the next 25 years but it meant you’d never put your boots on again, what would you say? And I said When do I start?”

On Adam Pearce the wrestler:

“Oh, Adam Pearce the wrestler, the Scrap Daddy. There’s only one scrap iron that appears five times as NWA world heavyweight champion. I was dead set every night I put my boots on into drawing negativity, at all costs, at any cost. Everything I did was geared towards receiving a negative reaction from the paying customer.”

On why his first stint in WWE didn’t work out:

“So this was 98-99 and I was young and up and coming. This is not pre-internet, because the internet existed, but it didn’t exist nearly at the capacity or the way the world works with it or around it or because of it now. But I had some buzz and I had talks with WWF at that time and WCW at the same time and little conversations even with ECW and WCW’s, I don’t want to say offers, but what I thought they could offer seem to be more appealing to me at that period of my life. And I turned on their offer too, so here we are, turned down New Japan sorry. I said no, a lot of times to a lot of people and I’m that guy.”

On his WarGames yell and trying to live up to William Regal:

“No. I would preach this to students when I was training people to wrestle. If you throw a lot of chops in your match, what does the crowd do? When the crowd Woo’s, who are they thinking about right now? Not you brother. So the last thing I wanted to do was to say WarGames like regal. So I actually went to him. And I said, any thoughts on what you think this should sound like coming from me? And aside from him saying it didn’t sound anything like me. He also said, you know, I only said that like four times. And somehow they think I’ve been doing this for 30 years. He said, Just do it like you do it. So did and it was fun.” 

On receiving 2 F5s from Brock Lesnar:

“That was amazing. [My pants] split on the first one, which was hilarious. I remember saying to Brock. I said, Hey, how do you grab for the F5, I know it’s a firemans carry. And so he showed me how he’s gonna grab me and I said, Don’t worry, I’ll get light for you. And he goes, You don’t have to. And I said, I know I don’t have to, but I will. Brother, I got you. What a pro. What a freak athlete. [Did you know they’d split the first time?] No, I didn’t know they split until I got in the back and everyone was laughing at the fact that I split my pants. And I was like, why don’t you take two fives and see what happens?”

Was it supposed to be two?

“He listened to the crowd because they started chanting one more time. Yes. One more time. One more time. One more time. And I’m laying there and they kind of look up. And again, professionalism, we made eye contact or when the eye contact was sustained for longer than two or three seconds. I knew that one more time was gonna happen, which is cool.”

On Chelsea Green:

“Always an experience working with Chelsea and easy to play off. When she would do her thing and to this day when she does it’s almost like you don’t have to say anything. I always try to think about what would my face say to this person without a word coming out of my mouth. What do my eyes say? I’m pretty good facially and there’s a tip for younger wrestlers too, sell everything with this. Your eyes Your face. I always thought let Chelsea be Chelsea and I just have to kind of react without saying anything.”

On working with Bray Wyatt and Postman Pearce:

“He was great. I wish we could have done more obviously. I think everybody that worked with Windham would tell you that. Postman Pearce appeared once just once. But I thought, what a creative way in this world of sports, entertainment and pro wrestling, how do you again with the WWE official or the GM being the informational conduit? What does that conduit look like to the supernatural Wyatt Family to Bray, to The Fiend heaven forbid. What would that look like? And when they when they when the postman idea. When I read that I was like, This is hilarious. It’s going to be funny. And what was awesome about doing the Playhouse with him is whether or not you were working specifically or strictly off a script or a lot of creative leeway. He had all the leeway to make it as out there or as Bray Wyatt as he wanted it to be. And I remember saying hey, man, like, of course we have the point we have to get across but like just kind of want to be in awe of this place and look around and I wanted to say what the f*ck. I go through the door and I go what the? And then he starts talking but like, it was fun. I still have the costume.”

On firing and swearing at Bobby Lashley:

“I don’t know that I’m giving anything away that I shouldn’t when I say this, I was supposed to say it without saying it. They wanted it to come across like it was being muted or beeped for TV. They asked me do you think you could say motherf*cker without saying the f*cker part? I went I am a professional profanity slinger Of course I can. I did, and there was no need for anyone to hit the button at the network.” 

What is Adam Pearce grateful for?

“My health, my family and that we are in Toronto.”

Nigel McGuiness (@McGuinnessNigel) is a professional wrestler and commentator currently signed to AEW. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to discuss how likely one more match will be, his in-ring careers in ROH and TNA, being renamed Desmond Wolfe, the offer that got rescinded from WWE and what could have been, being in attendance at SummerSlam 1992 in Wembley Stadium, his thoughts on Bryan Danielson and more! Plus, Nigel wows Chris with some amazing magic tricks! 

Quote I’m thinking about: “We are what we repeatedly do, therefore, excellence is not an act, but a habit” – Will Durant

Sponsors: PURE PLANK: The future of core fitness! Use the code CVV to save 10% on Pure Plank which was designed by Adam Copeland & Christian: https://gopureplank.com/

PRIZEPICKS: Download the app today and use code INSIGHT for a first deposit match up to $100!

BONCHARGE: Use the code CVV to save 15% off your infrared sauna blanket at https://boncharge.com/cvv

BLUECHEW: Use the code CVV to get your first month of BlueChew for FREE at http://bluechew.com

ROCKET MONEY: Join Rocket Money today and experience financial freedom: https://rocketmoney.com/cvv

PLUNGE: Get $150 off your Plunge with the coupon code CVV150 at http://plunge.com

On trying to lose his accent:

“I even took classes to try to get rid of it. Yeah, I took a class to try to get an American accent because, you know, there was a time when I was looking about getting into acting and stuff. And there are a lot of great British actors who do incredible American accents.”

On how much prep there is for AEW Collision:

“For me, quite a lot. The week prior, I’m usually on social media a fair bit looking for little hot-button topics, things like that, things that are relevant. And then, the day of, I’ll get in there early and as soon as we got the list of what the matches are I’ll put them all together. It is a sort of very stringent routine that I go through every time to know the stories that I’m telling, the little bullet points as well. Then just little funny things as I said that I can sort of bring into the conversation. So that will usually take me most of the day as of late I’ve been getting in the ring as well and rolling around so between all of that it’s a hectic rush till 8 o’clock when we shoot.”

On if he is working towards a return match:

“I was open to the suggestion, open to the idea. When I originally signed with AEW, I took a flight cross country with Tony and he said, I’ve got to swear you to secrecy, I’m telling you something you can’t tell another soul. We’re doing Wembley Stadium and I was like, Oh, my God. Then just the idea occurred to me. Could you, should you, because Wembley Stadium 1992. That was an epiphany for me. That was a moment. I went there with my friend and I sat back 50 rows back, and I just remember having this strange sensation, I talk about it during my magic show how I just have this weird feeling, this belief that somehow I knew I was going to be a professional wrestler. I think maybe you’ve had a similar idea yourself, but it stuck with me, certainly. So to go back to that venue and wrestle would just be off the charts. But the only thing that really made sense was Bryan, and he broke his arm because he’s got osteoporosis.”

On what would have happened if Bryan Danielson had not broken his arm:

“I don’t know. I mean, there’s so much of it is out of my control, really is whether he wants to wrestle me. I always thought it was kind of funny. Someone asked him about that time if he’d ever wrestle me again and he said if I ever wrestled, Nigel, I’d break his neck. Then three weeks later he breaks his arm, which I thought was karma. I’ve always thought as well. Sometimes, you get couples and the girl is always jealous and blaming the guy for cheating. You’re cheating on me. You are thinking of cheating. I mean, it always turns out, she was thinking of it. So I think maybe when Bryan said, if I wrestle him I’ll break his neck, he probably remembers those lariats and thinks, doesn’t want that. Go back and watch that match at Liverpool where we had that incredible match. There was a time after he ran my head into the ring post. I rolled back in blood pouring looked him in the face and perhaps the only time I’ve ever seen true fear in his eyes. So yeah, I think he was having a flashback, PTSD from that. So I make jokes about it, don’t think he’s ever going to wrestle me to be perfectly honest.”

On a match with Bryan Danielson in Wembley being the terms for an in-ring comeback:

“It certainly feels like that. You know what I mean? It certainly feels like that. All roads to me, I think certainly aimed towards him. Because there’s so much talent in AEW, so many young guys who deserve those spots. I’m very inspired by Christian Cage, obviously, and Adam Copeland as much as I’d hate to admit it. These guys can show that they haven’t lost a step. They can still go and all the knowledge that they have, they can convey and pass on to the next generation by being in the ring with them as well. I’ve been like, wow. Getting back in the ring I felt like, wow, it is so strange realisation when you figure out that the only thing stopping you being a wrestler is you. Now, having said that I’ve certainly got no desire to step away from the announcing booth. I don’t want to become a full-time wrestler. I don’t really want to wrestle anymore, to be honest with you. Other than beating Bryan, obviously, because that’s our story. There’s our history.” 

On ending his career on his terms:

“That’s definitely a possibility. I mean, you mentioned before we started filming that you watched the documentary, it was rather an ignominious end to my career. I was very grateful to all the independent promoters who booked me on my final retirement tour. But I certainly never imagined that my last match would be in a small volunteer fire department in West Virginia. But yeah, you just don’t get to choose it sometimes.”

On WWE commentary:

“I’ve always said actually, if this is what I know about doing commentary, this is what I learned in WWE about it. And that all goes down to Michael Cole and filtered down through Tom Phillips, both of them are so incredible in taking their time in explaining WWE’s view of commentary and how to do it and setting me up for success rather than failure. And Michael Cole, when he started there, people weren’t quite so kind and understanding to him. Not even the fans, even the people behind the scenes, it was a very different atmosphere backstage when he started. Sometimes people pay that forward, I had to endure this, I had to pay my dues. He could have been very mean and [said] you got to be good, or else you’re gonna be [fired]. But he didn’t want that, he wanted it to be a success. That’s why in my opinion he is such a valuable asset to that company.”

On when he was cleared to wrestle:

“I mean, ostensibly once I cleared Hep B, then I was clear to wrestle. [People don’t even understand that you can clear the virus] Hepatitis is very confusing because there are four, maybe even five different variants of hepatitis. And I think because they’re all called hepatitis, they’re all similar, but they’re not. They’re only called hepatitis because they affect your liver, your hepatic function. So you have got Hep A which you get from eating bad food, which makes you very sick, very quickly. And then you get rid of it, pretty much. You’ve got Hep B, which is what I had, which is generally you get rid of it yourself within a few months. 10% of people don’t get rid of it, which is what happened to me. And then Hep C, which generally speaking was considered lifelong but now I believe there’s medication and get rid of it as well. Then there’s hep D as well, which I am not too familiar with. But Hep B, which I had, I didn’t clear it. So because of that, I had to take some medication and it took about a year for me to finally clear the virus. And then once you get rid of the virus, you have the antibodies to the virus, so the majority of people in the 90% of people who get Hep B, never know they have it. Because you only really have symptoms for it for a short period of time. And then you can get rid of it. And then you do a blood test and you will find the antibodies to it. And once we’ve got rid of it, you can’t pass it on anymore, because there’s no more virus. So that’s what happened to me.”

On AEW allowing blading:

“Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely difficult and it is sometimes a crisis of conscience for me. Oftentimes, I don’t know if it’s going to happen and sometimes it happens by accident. So it’s certainly something I’ve thought of, and I feel very comfortable in the sense that I don’t feel I will ever be forced to do commentary in a match I didn’t feel comfortable doing so. It’s something that I think that maybe I will address moving forward. I’m not sure. Again, it’s hard for me to say because pre getting it myself, I would have said it’s no big deal. In the time since nobody else has tested positive so it’s hard for me to say just because of me, one example.” 

On the WWE offer being rescinded: 

“I was on the beach in Florida, actually, when I got the phone call from the doctor. So Bryan and I were both signed at the same time, we both had a contract and it wasn’t a developmental contract, it was an on-the-road contract. We both went to the physical at the same time and I passed and we had a few little niggling things that he managed to resolve. The doctor said to me in passing afterwards, you ever had any injuries? And I’d been wrestling for 10 years, who hadn’t? So I’d had an arm injury, which previously an orthopaedic surgeon who was highly recommended had looked at it and said it’s partially torn, will scar in place, and it’s no more likely to get re-injured than if it never been hurt in the first place. Even wrote me a letter saying that. So he said, well send me the MRI, I just want to take a look at it. So I sent an MRI. He said, You need surgery, I said, my guy said I didn’t need surgery. And so long, and the short of it is he said I can’t recommend that we hire you. And so what was I going to do at that point?” 

Did you have options? 

“So I mean, my options were to get surgery. So first of all, I didn’t have a lot of money. Second of all, I didn’t believe I really needed surgery. I’d already wrestled on this for a year and a half since having the original injury and was perfectly okay. And third of all, just because I’ve had the surgery doesn’t mean that they’re going to hire me because I couldn’t get that kind of assurance. They may not ever hire me again, and there was an offer on the table from TNA. I remember my last match in New York with Bryan and I remember getting a phone call from someone at TNA saying if it doesn’t work out with WWE, give us a shout. So sure enough after I got that phone call, I gave him a call and I was totally honest. I said, this is what they’ve said, this is what I believe. So they said, Okay, we’ll sign you up. I mean, it was for pennies on the dollar compared to what I would have made but I really truly believed in myself and my ability I was gonna go TNA, prove them wrong, have some great matches and before the hepatitis that was largely what happened.” 

On the Bryan Danielson eating Brie line:

“I wish I could take credit for that one, Christopher. But unfortunately, no. [Who gets the credit?] The beauty of social media I think someone must have posted it on Twitter about a year or so ago. Something like that. Well, that sounds like a fun line. I wasn’t sure whether I could use it because I’ve had a lot of lines that I always run everything by Bobby Crews before the show because he’s a good sort of barometer of whether this is politically correct enough or not. That one got through the Crews-ometer [So you were talking about cheese right?] Talking about cheese. There were some upset people in France but can’t please everyone.” 

What is Nigel McGuinness grateful for?

“My daughter, my girlfriend, my health and my job.”

Sharmell (@realsharmell) is a WWE Hall of Famer. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at Reality Of Wrestling In Texas City, TX to discuss her careers in WCW, WWE and TNA, how she met her husband Booker T, the controversial storyline with Kurt Angle, being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, her infamous TNA match against Jenna Morasca, working with James Brown and more.

Quote I’m thinking about: Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you! – Dr. Suess

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On Reality of Wrestling:

“Well, we really wanted to give our students the chance to feel like they’re in the big leagues. And so this is practice for them to get to that level. That’s why we wanted to pull out all the stops, make it as big and you know, all the smoke and mirrors as we possibly could have that. So that was the goal and we’re well on our way, we still have a few more things we want to do. But yeah, shaping up pretty well.”

On having stars from NXT appear:

“Absolutely. So it’s great for the fans, obviously, because they get to see the superstars that they watch on television, they get to see them up close and personal. Then it’s great for our students because they get to work somebody who’s there at the next level. So it’s a good rub for them.”

On previously working with James Brown:

“Oh, goodness. Yeah. So I toured with James Brown for three and a half years. Amazing experience, I wouldn’t trade that for the world. But we were on the tour bus one day heading probably from New York to LA something like that. But the guys on the tour bus were watching wrestling. They were watching Monday night Nitro. And all of a sudden, I saw these dancers on the screen, the Nitro girls, and I was like, wait a minute, who are they? I want to be one. So that’s how I transitioned from James Brown to the Nitro girls. I found out about them and auditioned and got a spot.” 

On what James Brown was like behind the scenes:

“So he treated all of the dancers like we were his grandchildren, because he had grandchildren our age, and it really was a family environment. I appreciate that more than he will ever know. Professionalism I already had, but I learned it to the nth degree from him. He was very serious about his craft. We always joked and said we did two shows a night because Soundcheck was a full-blown show. And then we had the show and he was always on top of it. He could hear every little thing. So if you were, you know, not on the right note, or if the dancers missed a step, he saw everything it seemed like from behind his head. But then offstage, treated us like family cared about us. So it was just such an amazing experience.”

On becoming a Nitro girl:

“Well, again, I heard the Nitro girls were looking for one more dancer. The dance world again was small, they had a closed audition, you had to be invited to audition. I simply said, I’m going to get this job, I claimed it before I even stepped in there. And I just gave it my all and it is funny because I was getting ready to go on tour with James again for another two or three months stretch. The day before we were getting ready to leave, I had already auditioned for the Nitro Girls, but it had been about a month. And so I called Kimberly Paige who was the head nitro girl at the time. And I said listen, I am still very, very interested in this job. But I have to go on tour tomorrow with James Brown because that’s, you know, my job right now. She said Hang on, let me call you right back. In about five minutes she called me back and said, If you could just please stay at home, we’re gonna go ahead and hire you.” 

On possibly thinking about becoming  a wrestler:

“I did [think about it], but of course, dance was still my first love. So it wasn’t until, and as you know, WCW kind of kept changing leadership for a while right towards the end. So I don’t remember who was in charge at the time that they decided dance has no place in wrestling and if you want to keep your job, you have to go to the Power Plant and learn how to wrestle. Well of course, at that point, I was hooked. And what they say is true, this is not ballet. So wrestling was not dance. But you know, I gave it my all I just enjoy being a valet much more.”

On the end of WCW:

I never thought it would go under. I mean, yes, we all heard the whispers. And maybe it’s just because I didn’t want it to go under, because that was home, that was family. But really right up until the very, very end. Like I said, we heard those rumours it was going under but then we kept changing management. So I kind of just thought it would keep going like that until something stuck.

On Queen Sharmell:

“Booker was doing the King of the Ring at that point We were married when he was doing King Booker, and he just wasn’t wanting to be away from home so much. I don’t know he talked to powers that being was he was like, Well, what about bringing on Sharmell Queen Sharmell and all of that. I mean, I was already there. They brought me back before the Queen gimmick, but just when he was going to do the king, he just said, What about the queen?” 

On that Kurt Angle storyline:

“Kurt was stalking me. Because I was so new at that time. I don’t even know. It’s just like, you know, they were like, Okay, here’s what you’re doing. Okay. I don’t know who came up with any of that. But I thought it was brilliant. Everybody’s real touchy right now in this day and age. But it didn’t bother me. I thought it was great. It was interesting, but I don’t know if you could get away with that. In this day and age. Everybody’s like, no, we can’t do that. It wouldn’t fly, but because I knew it was acting, you know what I mean? Now, there are some serious situations out there that are like that and I don’t condone that at all, but when it was acting it was okay for me, that’s just me.” 

On her pro wrestling legacy:

“I’m really proud of my legacy and pro wrestling because I think prior to me, you didn’t really see someone who looked like me being a queen. And even though I was crazy, and you know, hitting people with chairs and shoes and that sort of thing. But at least I carried myself in a regal fashion. [why the shoes?] You know, that’s pretty much all I had at the time. So you use what you have. But just to have somebody who looks like me be in that position. I hope that I’m looked at as a trailblazer.” 

On backlash from the Hall of Fame induction:

“I felt like I deserved it but you know, I made the mistake of looking at the internet trolls. Some people were saying some not so kind things and I eventually turned it off. But I know that starting out as a Nitro Girl and then being a valet for several people in a backstage interviewer and then, little bit of wrestling and then Queen Sharmell and then doing this to train the next generation of sports entertainers. I mean, I know I’ve put my time in.”

On the infamous match against Jenna Morasca:

“Well, it was a match that in my opinion just really shouldn’t have happened because neither of us, especially Jenna, she had never had a match before. [She trained] for like, a couple of days, not even a week, and that’s not on her. But you can’t train for a couple days and be a wrestler. It just doesn’t happen like that. So just, you know, kind of was unfortunate, because I was by no means a ring general and then she had only been in the ring a couple of times. I’m not sure what it was all about but we did our best.”

On her scariest in-ring moment:

“The scariest moment I ever had in the ring was my first match. Because again, like I said, it almost was like, one day we were Nitro Girls and the next day, we were at the power plant. My first match happened very quickly and it was against Tammy. Tammy, I believe was just again, was so many years ago, she may have just been coming from WWF over to WCW. Her and Chris came over to WCW. So I didn’t really know her, because she was just getting there. And so I’m already green as green can be and I’m wrestling somebody I don’t know. I didn’t know what to expect and that was my scariest moment in the ring because I felt like I was a deer in headlights. I don’t think I’ve even watched that match. But just the unknown was really scary for me.”

On her favourite Booker T moment:

“I know he’s my husband, but I really am a fan and I’m equally a fan of his entertainment. So the grocery store with Steve Austin, all that stuff was Steve Austin, you know, the bingo game, the nuns, like, Oh, my goodness. And then the stuff with Goldust. It’s just hilarious. Right? So yeah, I’m equally a fan of his entertainment as well as his wrestling.”

What is Sharmell grateful for?

“That God loves me, that Booker chose me and this wonderful life.”

Goldberg (@Goldberg) is a professional wrestler and WWE Hall of Famer. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in San Antonio, TX to discuss his legendary in-ring career which saw him find success in WCW and WWE, how things could have been different if he did not get injured in the NFL, if one more match will happen and if it could happen in WWE, getting concussed in his match against The Undertaker, Bray Wyatt (The Fiend) and Roman Reigns, how close he got to making an appearance in AEW, having a “Big meaty men slapping meat” match with Big E, who took the best spear ever and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

Sponsors:
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PRIZEPICKS: Download the app today and use code INSIGHT for a first deposit match up to $100!

TIMELINE NUTRITION: Save 10% off your first order of Mitopure at http://timeline.com/INSIGHT

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BLUECHEW: Use the code CVV to get your first month of BlueChew for FREE at http://bluechew.com

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PLUNGE: Get $150 off your Plunge with the coupon code CVV150 at http://plunge.com

On being retired:

“When you have been a wrestler at some point in your life, I don’t think you’re retired until you’re dead. But I mean, I don’t know, I was kind of forced into retirement a little bit. I don’t like to think that I’m retired in any respect, whether it’s from working or wrestling or anything else. I’ve kind of been hiding out here on the ranch for the past four or five years, investing 100% of my time, effort and emotion into our son Gage and trying to prepare him for his journey off to college because it’s such a transitional time in a kid’s life. And yeah, I’ve kind of been on the shelf, like, the example I can give people is when Wanda cooks dinner and it’s steak night, we have six steaks to eat, she gets one, I get one and Gage gets whatever’s left, which is like four of them, right? So and then, while I’m eating my one, and if he’s eaten those four, and he looks hungry, then I’ll cut mine in half and give it to him. So I’ve lost probably 30 pounds in five years. I haven’t been able to come in the gym too much because he’s always up here with his buddies and they’re doing their thing, but that’s what this is for. [They don’t want to work out with Bill Goldberg?] Hell no. I’m way in their rearview mirror man, my kid is so much stronger to me. Now the day I knew I was going to be emasculated by my son. Forever forthcoming is the day that he got on my neck machine and could actually do more weight than I could. And he’s 18.” 

On Gage having the Goldberg name:

“It’s a blessing and it’s a curse. It gives you opportunity, but the added pressure sometimes is insurmountable.”

On what would have happened if he didn’t get injured in the NFL:

“It would look the same, because I probably would have done the same thing, I probably would have gotten cut, because I wasn’t good enough to stay there. I mean, it is what it is. Who knows? I famously, I hearken back onto my speech at the WWE Hall of Fame and people asked me what I wanted to be, what I wanted my life to stand for. I always wanted to be somebody that the kids could look up to. And I always thought that the best way to accomplish that was being in the NFL and being in the NFL Hall of Fame. Well, as I was being inducted in the WWE Hall of Fame, I realized that that was not true. That by being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame that was probably bigger than any NFL induction ever could have been, because I think I reached more people.” 

On what made him try wrestling:

“My accountant called me and he said you might want to get off your ass because you didn’t make millions in the NFL and you need a job. And you look at your potential list of things that immediately you can do and I didn’t want to do any of them. I just didn’t. And I wasn’t finished with my physical prowess, not my prowess but my physical way of earning a living through physicality, whatever it may be, and I wanted to be able to apply what I had worked so hard for my entire life, which was playing football. And if there was something I could apply it to then great and oh, let’s try to find something that will that will satiate your violent tendencies and keep you out of jail at the same time. So I mean, it served a lot of purposes it put money in my pocket, it gave me a job and it was therapy in a way.”

On possibly not being ready when he debuted:

“I mean, 100% I wasn’t ready, but I was put in, I was a piece of a puzzle. In a world where you can dictate what people see, why not roll the dice when you can control the narrative to a point? So I get it, I completely understand it and I probably should have performed a little bit better. I don’t know, I think I did pretty good. I don’t know. I mean, let me let me look on the past 20 years where people comment on stuff, I guess I haven’t done sh*t. But truly looking back on it, I did pretty damn good for the situation that I was in because I wasn’t a lifer. I wasn’t a guy who aspired to be a professional wrestler, so I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know anything about the business. I learned quite quickly how cutthroat it can be. But I didn’t really know and I tried to consume as much knowledge as humanly possible, in a short period of time and try to put forth the best package.” 

On the Bret Hart animosity:

“I really don’t care anymore about Bret, I could care less. You know Louis, right? All I can tell you is this. Louis and I know and [Brian] Knobbs knows, through Legends of Wrestling that shortly thereafter all that sh*t that happened. I talked Louis into giving Bret Hart a job at Legends of Wrestling. He must forget about stuff like that. He must forget about the conversations we had back then.” 

On talking to Bret Hart since the accident:

“We’ve talked a couple of times. As of late because of the things coming out of his mouth, I don’t really know that I would be talking to him if I saw him. But hey, man, I’m 57 years old. I don’t need to prove anything to Bret Hart or to any other human being. The fact is, it was a mistake. I was extremely green in the business and anybody who knows me knows that if I didn’t intend to hurt him, then it was an accident. If I intended to hurt him, then I’d be the first one to tell him and you and everyone else. But man, I was green dude. I mean, it was a screw-up in the match and it’s live on national television. There’s two people that have to dance and you can only do so much and I mean, things went awry. It is what it is.” 

On If the promise of one more match in WWE will happen:

“Well no, not from Vince. No, if that match was still on the table, it would have been done, I would have thought. But hey, man, I was thinking about it this morning in the shower, right? And I thought, Man, I had one of the best wrestling careers ever and don’t think for one second that I don’t understand that and I don’t appreciate it. And so to sit here and cry over a person not keeping his word in a business, that’s as cutthroat as humanly possible and he gets cast out. What do I think’s gonna happen? So come on, man. I mean, I’m a big boy, it is what it is. If I really wanted that to happen, I could go do it myself. I could go to India and do it. I could go to Israel and do it. I could go to Japan and do it. I could do it here in the States. The fact is though, the past six years, I’ve poured every ounce of my soul into my son, and I haven’t even used this weight room barely. But now he’s out the door. I got to fill my time with a bunch of stuff. So I’m working on my cars and I’m training again, I’m going to get stem cells, bio accelerator down in Columbia. I’ve got this new TV show going I’m going to roadkill nights in Detroit August the 10th. I’m actually living again.”

On his relationship with Triple H:

I haven’t talked to Triple H in a long time. It was extremely rocky in the beginning. But I think I think we’re at a good place. Man. I have nothing but respect for him, man. He’s turned an interesting situation into a very successful situation and very profitable and I’m proud of it man. Good job.”

On if he is happy with the Roman Reigns match being his last one:

“No, it sucks. I had f*cking COVID three weeks before I was asked to do it. It was horrible. No, it was a favor. You know, it was my job. I’m not gonna say no, I’ve never said no, really. And I was asked to wrestle twice a year. They were caught between a rock and a hard place and I was their answer. I feel like I did him a favor and that’s why I thought that the favor would be reciprocated. But it is what it is. I’ll never forget the phone call I got when I was in bed. I couldn’t even breathe and I felt like ass. I couldn’t even get up. [Vince says] You can make Saudi in three weeks? Sure I’ll be there You promise me a match after that. [Vince said] Sure. I should have done better. That’s my fault.”

On The Undertaker match in Saudi Arabia:

“I knocked myself out before walking to the frickin ring. You know, when I came back, intensity is something very hard to replicate and I had forgotten my sequence to the ring. I’d forgotten my preparation. It had been so long, and I had put it away, I had put it in a dark place in my mind. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to get ready for matches anymore. I was just detached. And well, I remember then that I gotta headbutt the door. And I headbutted the door right when they played my music to wrestle Taker, which was the most unbelievable opportunity ever. And I knocked myself out. I was walking to the ring man I was on. I was on that street.”

Do you remember anything from that match?

“I remember the referee asking me if I could go on and me saying yes. And then him turning away and then me saying no. And then me saying yes and then me saying no, I remember that. Then he [Undertaker] shot me to the turnbuckle and I like to make it if I’m going to be hurt, I like to make it look as real as possible. Sometimes actually making it real. And I unintentionally headbutted the frickin post. And yeah, it knocked me for another one. So I had two concussions leading up to me dropping him on his head. And then the nice little payback was the tombstone straight up and down on my head. And thank God for that neck machine right there or I wouldn’t be talking to you. But I deserved it, 100%.” 

On why talks with Tony Khan never went any further:

“I just think we have a different perspective on it. I don’t know. I mean, it’s hard for me to really pass judgment on their production because I don’t watch it. I see clips of it and it’s hard to give a rational breakdown of how they are if I don’t really watch it, so I don’t really know. He reminds me a Dixie Carter, but a male version. I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing. But he reminds me of that scenario. And it’s just a different feel, it’s just different.”

Were you ever close on making a deal?

“I don’t think I was ever close to making a deal with him. I think it was much more a realistic transition when Sting was involved. I reached out to Sting because I wanted to be a part. I thought he and I could do a farewell thing at some point together. But it wasn’t about me. It was about Sting and I could never overshadow anything that he does. But I don’t want to convolute the waters. It would have been a nice crescendo but it wasn’t about me.”

On what happened when WCW closed down:

“I didn’t know except for the fact that I knew I wasn’t going to work for 50 cents on the dollar. So I’m gonna sit at home and let it play out. I had no idea. I really didn’t. I knew that I had always wanted to go to Japan. Always. And that gave me the opportunity. That was a dream come true.”

On interrupting The Rock in his WWE debut:

“It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun and big kudos to him for having you know, the foresight that it would be something that would go over like that, he’s very unselfish. And at the end of the day, it’s a dance man. We all need to we all need everyone involved to be a part of it because it’s a well-oiled machine. You can’t I always tell people that I couldn’t have had the streak if it wasn’t for 176 guys to make me look good. Right? I mean, the match in Colorado Springs with the flock. And they threw themselves around like it was nobody’s business. They made me look like Godzilla and it was awesome. But that’s their job, that’s what they do.”

On a possible match with Big E:

“I’ll give it to him tomorrow. We can leave that part out [big meaty men slapping meat] of it. Right when he says it to me Goldberg’s gonna have to drop him. But yeah, I don’t do comedy. Like, I never really meshed well with that. It’s like, you know, the Indiana Jones and the guy coming in and flashing his sword and you just pull a gun out and shoot him. It’s just that’s me. Less is more.” 

What is Goldberg grateful for:

“My wife, my son and my health.”

Scorpio Sky (@ScorpioSky) is a professional wrestler currently signed to AEW. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood to talk about his absence from TV and how he is ready to return to the ring, being a 2-time TNT Champion, his custom LA Lakers title, being a part of Sting’s first live match in AEW, handing Chris Jericho his first loss in AEW, throwing Darby Allin down a flight of stairs, his time in WWE as part of the anger management segments with Daniel Bryan and Kane as “Harold”, whether there were ever any plans to do more in WWE and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “Who you are becoming is more important than you who have you been” – Hal Elrod

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On his lengthy absence:

“That’s been the question. I guess I’ve been in and out over the last couple of years. Some of it has been due to injury, some of it due to bad luck. One thing I will say is there’s a narrative out that I’m just this injury-prone guy, like he’s gone for a long time and he comes back and he gets hurt again. That’s actually not the case. So I’m actually glad I want to be able to address that. I did get hurt about two years ago but I was okay, and within like a couple of weeks. But the problem is when you fall out of the rotation, we have so much talent, that it’s hard to get back in the rotation. I always compare it to a Ferris Wheel. Right? You’re up at the top at one point. But you’re gonna go down and you’d kind of have to wait your turn to get back up there and that’s a little bit of what happens. So I have had a couple of injuries over the last few years but for the most part, I’ve been healthy for 80%.”

On what has been going on during his time away:

“I think it’s just like I was saying, it’s really tough to get back into the rotation. Because we have so much talent, there’s always talent coming in that it’s almost out of sight, out of mind, in a way, best way I can describe it. I’m eager to get back into the ring though and flex my muscles a little bit, I’m in really good shape I’m working out with Cesar and I’m excited. And not only in AEW, I want to get back on the indy scene, because I haven’t done the indies in a number of years. And so that would be a really fun thing for me to kind of go back to my roots and see who’s out there, see who are the hot names, and go and have some bangers with them.”

On the injury:

“I hurt my knee two years ago when I had the TNT title, somewhere along that I don’t even remember what match it was. But somewhere in there, I think was one of our multi-man matches when we were working against Sammy [Guevara]. I just, I don’t even remember what the exact diagnosis was, but it was It wasn’t anything too crazy. All I needed was about five or six weeks, I got some PRP and I was good to go after that. But it was just right after that happened is when Brawl Out happened. Everything kind of turned upside down after that. So I kind of moved to the back burner and there was a lot of things that needed to get worked out not involving me and I understood that.”

On being ready to return:

“I’m ready. I think we’re just waiting for the right opportunity, for the right situation. Again, there are a lot of guys in the company and people coming in all the time. And obviously our relationship with other companies like New Japan, that provides us extra talent. And so it’s just a little tough sometimes to work your way back into the rotation. It’s not unlike, say basketball or something, right? Like you get injured, you might lose your spot as a starter and maybe somebody else comes in and they kill it in that spot. So you come back and it’s like, hey, like, we’re winning without you. So you got to figure out a way to get yourself back on the floor.”

On career progression:

“I’ve come so far since then, when we had that first conversation, we were just getting started. I was learning, I knew how to be a television wrestler but I’ve learned so much more since, and I’m still learning and I think I’m very far from hitting my ceiling. I’m getting so much better at this even without being in the ring, just by watching, just by observing, just by thinking back to things I’ve done and how I could have done this better and that sort of thing. I’m improving mentally, even without being in the ring physically. So I think I can do this for a number of more years, 5-10 more years if I want to. The sky’s the limit, for lack of a better term. I’d like to get in there with the top guys, and there’s a lot of guys really all over the world that I would like to wrestle. I see guys on our show. I see guys on WWE, and I’m like, dang, that guy would be a really fun guy to wrestle. Some of these matches, obviously, will never happen, most likely, I’m probably never gonna wrestle John Cena. That was just the name [I’m] throwing out there. But there’s a lot of talent and I get motivated when I see these guys, and I want to hang with them. You can kind of see like, I’m really good, I think at bringing the best out of guys. So I’ll see some guys and I’m just like, let me get my hands on him. I can really just, you know, bring this thing out of him, and that would be so much fun to do. So again, we’re reaching back to, I gotta get back in the ring. That’s the ultimate goal is getting back in the ring first, and then everything else will take care of itself.”

On winning the TNT Championship a second time:

“I think that we didn’t capitalize on that the way we should have. That was kind of the thing with Sammy and I, he was the babyface, I was the heel and then they started turning during and we didn’t lean right into that. At the time I was thinking like, I need to probably go babyface here, listen to the audience. But that wasn’t really the plan. So it was a little bit of a push and pull type of situation where we probably should have just listened to the audience and said, okay, this is where we’re gonna go. That’s how we could have capitalized on that moment. But yeah, that was absolutely a moment. The funny thing about that too, is it ended up making it better, but there was a mess up because Sammy got a little bit rocked in that match. So when we watched the match, he falls off the ladder onto the barbed wire ladders. That was supposed to be the finish. But like a spot or two to before that he was going to do a springboard up on the ladder. And I was gonna knock him off. But we skipped it because he was kind of rocked. So we’re like, okay, let’s get home or whatever. So I knock him off the ladder. He hits the barbed wire. I start climbing. I look and I see him getting up. I’m like, is he getting up? What’s he doing? He’s supposed to stay down. He springboards jumped on the ladder. He’s like, what’s next? You’re supposed to stay down. He goes, Oh, sorry. I was like, It’s okay. Just go back down! But it made it better, because the crowd after I knocked him down the second time. They were like, Oh, we know he’s winning this time. So you feel them build build, build and then I finally grabbed the belt. That’s when you had that big explosion. So I’m glad he did it. I got I’m not happy you got rocked. But I’m glad that mistake took place.”

On being in Sting’s first live match in AEW:

“That’s one of my favorite matches ever. I have two matches that are my favorite matches I’ve ever had and that’s one of them. The cool thing about that was, in the beginning, Sting told us ‘When I signed here it was only to do cinematic matches. I was never supposed to do an in-ring match.’ He’s like, but I trust you guys. And so that was like, Okay, we can’t mess this up. So we, we just did the best we could to obviously protect him. But he’s a maniac and wants to do crazy things as well. he’s like diving off the stage, he’s like suplex me on the stage. It was just like are you sure? okay. He’s a nut. He was in great shape. We had to talk him into not wearing a shirt. He wanted to wear his shirt. We’re like bro you’re in great shape.”

On putting together the match:

“We actually went to his house probably a week prior because we just wanted him to be very comfortable. So Ethan and I on our day off, we were like, we’ll go to your house, and we’ll talk about it. So we went and he has a ring and everything. We went and we just kind of went over a few things, just to get the feel of it. We came up with the finish and the come back and it all came together so easily, honestly. Because it’s like, again, you have a guy who’s over and Darby, too. I mean, I don’t want to sell him short, Darby is incredibly over as well. So whatever they do is going to work and the story was there. So we could go in there and even if the match itself wasn’t incredible, the story was there. That’s what I liked so much about it was a very clean, laid out story that was simple and easy for fans to follow. They followed it and they bought in. And so going out and doing the match was just easy at that point.”

On throwing Darby Allin down a flight of stairs:

“The thing that people always bring up though, and I did this on purpose, just because I like to just throw a little comedy into everything. So he attacked us and we’re like fighting, at one point, there’s this clip and I’m just running holding a trash can. And I run like what feels like 20 feet. And I’m just like ah! Because it’s so goofy, like, I’m just reading and holding this trash can, people always brought that up to me. They’re just like, that was so ridiculous. Like, I know I had to do something. But yeah, we throw them down those stairs and Darby talk about another maniac, man, he just took it. And that was, he could have got seriously hurt doing that.”

On being Chris Jericho’s first AEW loss:

“Sure did, back in 2019 on the early Dynamite days yeah, he was like undefeated at the time. He’s a world champion and then I pandemic and then we did the whole face-to-face interview thing and then I wrestled him for the title. He ended up going off with Moxley after that, which was a good little transition.”

On Chris Jericho:

“I always tell people like Chris Jericho legitimized AEW in the early days. Because people looked at us and they knew there was talent and they’re like, Okay, Young Bucks, FCU, Kenny Omega yada, yada. But when Chris Jericho signs on, that’s when like, the television networks are like, Oh, okay, they’ve got a guy. I always think it’s similar to when Hulk Hogan went to WCW in the mid-90s. It’s just like, it puts that stamp, okay, we’re we’ve arrived. For him to come in, and take young talent like myself, like Jungle Boy, Darby, I just described myself as a younger talent [lauhgs]. But also, he’s worked with so many guys, and made us all good in some way, shape, or form, whether he won the match or not. He put us up there with him and he doesn’t have to do that. But that just shows he’s a giving guy and that helped me a lot in the very early stages of AEW.”

On any talks of returning to WWE in 2012:

“So there was there was the situation I talked to you about last time, but then there was also another situation where I’d worked in 2012. I’d worked a couple of shows for TNA and then I was called to go do a tryout. They did like this LA tryout and I think it’s the one that Adam Pearce and Bayley got signed at. I was there and a few other guys but I had done TNA right before that, and at the time, there was like a lawsuit or something going on between two companies. So the moment I showed up, there was one of the producers that pulls me aside and he said, Hey, you just did TNA. I don’t know how this slipped through the cracks, but we can’t have you here. They had canceled LA Knight I think two days prior, he was also supposed to be at that tryout. So they told him not to come too, because of that same thing. So after that I didn’t even really try to be honest with you, I just kind of went my own route of like, alright, well, let’s see what I can do it on the Indies and that sort of thing. So I just kind of worked my way towards an opposite direction. I kind of had the thinking of like, well, if nothing’s going to happen there, I’m just gonna make my myself a star without them and I just kind of went the hard route.” 

On the anger management segments with Kane and Daniel Bryan:

“I’ve never watched those, I’ve still never seen it. Yeah, it was funny, that was a lot of fun to do, though. At the time, I had no idea it was going to be a thing. I didn’t know people would still talk about it now. I was like, okay. I didn’t even want to be Harold actually, like I showed up and they had like these name tags. My thinking was just I’m not gonna get hired off of this. So let me just eat some catering and sit in the corner and collect my check. So I grabbed a nametag and I wrote Kobi on it. I was like, I’ll be Kobi and I just sat in the corner. Then they’re like, no, no, no, you’re Harold. Oh, shoot. Okay, I have lines, but a lot of it was improv too. I think there was a line where I put my hand on Kane’s thigh. And that one, I just did it, it wasn’t planned. I think the line was something like, Thank you for sharing Kane, it was just one of those things I had fun with and I didn’t expect anything of it. I didn’t even watch it. I was just hanging out at home one day and I noticed my twitter at the time had blown up. I was like, Oh, I guess they aired that tonight. So it’s funny. That was the same weekend of the tryout that I just told you about. so I went to the tryout like two days later, and I was like, hey, you know, I just filmed some stuff, a few days ago. [They said] I don’t know, that has nothing to do with me.”

On any talks of having a match:

“No but there was talk of bringing me back though at one point. They called me maybe a month or so later and they said, Hey, we’re interested in bringing you to Stamford to shoot some more anger management stuff. And I was like, Oh, cool. Yeah, I’m available. And they said, okay, but first, we have to know what is your relationship with TNA? And I was like, I have no relationship. I didn’t have a contract. I just did a couple of dates for them and that’s it. And they were like, okay, and I never heard anything else.”

What is Scorpio Sky grateful for?

“Resilience, health and to be a part of the wrestling business.”

Donovan Dijak (@dijakfye) is a professional wrestler previously signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Toronto, Ontario to talk about his WWE departure and the letter he posted to social media, being backstage at AEW Forbidden Door, RETRIBUTION and the original pitch for the group, returning to NXT and his relationship with Shawn Michaels, being on the receiving end of a brutal Cody Rhodes chair shot, what next for him and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday. – Steve Jobs

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TIMELINE NUTRITION: Save 10% off your first order of Mitopure at http://timeline.com/INSIGHT

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PLUNGE: Get $150 off your Plunge with the coupon code CVV150 at http://plunge.com

On how he is feeling after the release:

“Excited. Yeah, it took a little bit of time to get over the initial waves of emotions, mostly disappointment, frustration and fear. But now I’m in a really good spot because I’ve had a good solid week of let’s call it return on investment, right? Because there was there was a window of time there where I didn’t know what was in my future. I had a general idea of what might happen and people were telling me and my agents that I work with were telling me, and that’s Paragon talent group, Steve K and Mojo Rawley, who have been outstanding throughout this process. I’ve said this a number of times and I hand to God, I genuinely do not know where I would be right now without them. Just confused and a 1000-yard stare. Them, my wife and my family. Because that’s the group of people who knew, right? And my close close friends who I told just because I needed somewhere to vent and like coping mechanisms and stuff. But this past week has been outstanding for me because it’s validating in a lot of ways to receive such a response. Not just a response online, because that’s one level of the pie, but really more of a tangible response. Like you’re booked here, you’re booked here, you’re booked here, you have seminars here, you’re a trainer here now. There’s just this outpouring of like, Hey, you still have a lot of value in this business at a point where, by definition, I didn’t feel like I had a lot of value, because I was told by the company that I loved and to a certain extent trusted, and wanted to be with that we don’t value you at all. It was heartbreaking, it was scary. Because I’ve been in this business for 12 years now and seven of it has been with WWE. So the majority of my pro wrestling career has been with WWE. A lot of people don’t know that, because there’s been years where I just kind of sat in developmental at the Performance Center, there were years where I was on Main Event as T-BAR, and just sections of my WWE career that people weren’t watching, right, because you either couldn’t or there just wasn’t a lot of access to it, or whatever the reasons be. Or just people who only watch the main roster, right? If you only watch the main roster, which is a huge section of the WWE audience, then you only know me as T-BAR, and that’s not even me. So there’s a section of fans out there that don’t even know I exist in this form, other than the guy who looks like this but was named T-BAR and lost twice on Raw to Omos in a battle royale. And that’s if you watch religiously, right? So you might have missed those episodes.”

On not having a non-compete:

“It’s a double-edged sword. So on the one hand the 90 days is like you mentioned a cool-off period, but it’s also a good time to get your ducks in a row while you’re getting paid. So that’s obviously a key factor. Three months out is about how most booking on the indie and meet and greet scene kind of works. So you can fill your schedule relatively easy. My November and December are looking pretty good right now, my July is not. There’s some favors in there, there’s some guys who I’m very close with, there are companies that had to rearrange their schedule entirely just to try to sneak me in because they think it’ll be a worthwhile investment. So it’s good that I’m fortunate in that capacity. But there’s some vacant spots in there because it’s just difficult to rearrange your booking and your whole show and they have budgets two weeks out, right. It’s like, we can’t afford this, we need to shift that, are you free in August? And then it’s like, no, I’m not free in August, my whole August got booked out in like, three minutes. So it’s kind of this double-edged sword. But the good part of it is the buzz, obviously, I timed the tweet with the letter very specifically to be at a time where I was hoping it would kind of be the only pro wrestling story of that day.” 

On the letter posted to social media:

“So I wanted just in terms of my mental approach to it, I gave a lot of thought to what I wanted to do and how I wanted to approach this. Because I was in a very unique situation, I can’t think of anyone else who was in a situation like that, because it’s only recently that they really started letting contracts expire. From what I can tell everyone who had that situation was notified decently well in advance, like maybe a month or two out. So I don’t know that there’s a lot of situations where it was such a short window of time before the notification happened.”

How short notice?

“Well, I mean, I was on WWE Speed and that aired I think 10 days after we taped it. By the time that aired, I had already been notified. So I was on WWE programming knowing that I was not going to be with this company anymore, or at least having been told that. It wasn’t set in stone, there was the possibility that it was a negotiation tactic, there was a lot of things on the table. But that tweet, because I assume they have some sort of deal with Twitter in some capacity, or some sort of payment and Hunter tweets about it every week and mentions it. So he’s tweeting about me, the tweet is on there, it’s posted to the top of @WWE on Twitter, and it stays there until the next week. So I was the pinned tweet on Twitter under WWE one day before I posted that. It’s Speed, but at the same time, I think 2.5 million people saw that post, so that’s a relevant match in the WWE umbrella. Then almost immediately you’re getting this information from me that’s like, they’re not interested in me anymore. They didn’t even make an offer. So I knew that I had those options and frankly, lots of people were telling me to take a different approach mentally. It was suggested to me that I take a more classical approach, people have done this before and who knows what situation is. But the standard approach is thank you for everything I had a great time at WWE. I’m appreciative of everyone we just couldn’t agree on a new deal and I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna make a name for myself and I’m excited for what’s next. You keep it vague, you say we couldn’t come to terms, it makes you seem like they offered you, but you feel like you’re worth more, and you’re gonna go prove yourself, whatever. So I had that option on the table, and that maybe there’s a chance that another company sees that and they go, oh he’s worth X amount of dollars or whatever, it becomes a negotiating thing. My opinion was there was more value, maybe not monetary value, but there was more intrinsic value with the fans and with trust and just how I felt personally about everything in telling the complete and entire truth. Because I don’t feel like the people who support me support me just for no reason. I feel like there’s a large group of my fan base that loves how blunt and honest I am, and maybe that’s what gets me in trouble. Maybe the blunt honesty is what rubbed the right people the wrong way. I’ve talked before about the conversation that I had with CM Punk and it was influential to me. I could see my support trending in a better direction after that, once people started to see the real me and started to feel my honesty and feel my upfrontness and things like that. Maybe my career suffered? I don’t know, it’s hard to say, because I don’t have an explanation. I was not told what happened in any capacity. So I can’t say, oh, I should have done that, I shouldn’t have done that. Because I just don’t know.”

On being backstage at AEW Forbidden Door:

“I did not talk to Tony [Khan]. So what happened was I was having these conversations about what’s going to happen with this letter, how’s it going to be received? I feel strongly about it, I’m gonna present it this way. I feel like this is genuinely authentically me, this is how I would do this, I want it to look like this, etc. And once we came to that conclusion, it’s like okay, well, pardon the pun, but let’s go all in on this. So some phone calls were made, we saw where we could go and Steve [from Paragon] has enough connections at AEW where it was, I don’t know who’s in charge of green lighting who goes backstage, but in some capacity, I was approved to be backstage. I was welcomed with open arms. Tons of my old friends were there, I got to have a great long conversation with Swerve. Just all sorts of guys, Tommy End. Because what happens in WWE is you don’t see these guys. The way they leave is a slow, slow process, right? It’s just like one guy has gone one week and one guy’s got another week. And then two guys are gone the next week. I’m not saying it’s week by week, but we’re talking about releases now. Most of these guys were released, unfortunately, because they didn’t start the real process of letting contracts expire. And quite frankly, most of the people whose contracts they let expire don’t pop up on AEW, because it’s just those wrestlers [who have been released] tend to be more in demand in that style. So these are guys that I haven’t seen in a long time. But on the other end of the coin, I’m now realizing that the last time I was at Raw was the last time I’m ever going to be in a WWE locker room. And that hits in a personal aspect because a lot of those guys are my friends. There’s there’s a ton of crossover now from NXT. All the guys I was with for the past two years, there’s a bunch of them now in that locker room. There’s guys that I was in the locker room with as T-BAR in Retribution and afterwards for a long time. So I’m familiar with all these guys. And lots of them are my friends. So I’m dealing with that aspect of it as well, because it becomes this thing and I was talking about this with Ricochet. Because he knew he wasn’t coming back at that point. Bron destroyed him on the car. So we all said our goodbyes, he assumed that that was his last Raw. So we’re saying goodbye to each other and he and I have had conversations about our contracts and what they look like and the days and stuff like that. So I said goodbye to him not knowing whether I’ll see him in five years or two weeks. We had a laugh about that. I’m like, Hey, man, I’ll see you maybe in five years, maybe next month and we laughed about it. And it’s good that I’m sure I’ll run into him shortly. But on the other end of the coin, I said goodbye that day to a bunch of guys and in the back of my head, I thought this might be the last time I see these guys. But once it happened, now I know it’s the last time I’m going to see those guys in a professional capacity. Maybe I’ll see them in the street right now or something. But in terms of a locker room, sharing a locker room with them, it’s gonna be a while, if I ever share a locker room with these guys ever again, that’s disappointing. So going to AEW was the other side of that, which is I get to see all of these guys all at once and it’s amazing. Not only do I get to see the wrestlers, but I get to learn. Because I’ve never been backstage, I get to learn about all the production staff at AEW, which is a ton of old Ring of Honor guys where I used to work. So I’m seeing these guys for the first time in seven years. And I’m like this is this is amazing. I’m seeing so many faces, so many friendly faces. And I get to meet a bunch of new people as well that I’ve never met before. So it was a really positive experience for me on a personal level.”

On why he didn’t go back to NXT again after his second main roster call-up:

“I can give you my hypothesis. I don’t know this to be fact. It’s a complete guess and no one has told me otherwise. I don’t know when this decision was made. But at some point, there was likely a decision made that Dijak or T-BAR is on a main roster contract and under that main roster contract, it concludes on June 28 2024. So I’m in NXT on a main roster contract. So at some point, whether it was before I went to NXT, or during NXT, or whether it’s right before the draft, I think at some point a decision was made that he’s on a main roster contract on NXT and that doesn’t work in whatever capacity. I’m not sure, but my guess would be they don’t want to renew a contract for someone who’s on NXT. My guess would also be, not my guess, but I know that they didn’t have a creative plan for me on Raw. So at that point, what do you do? You can leave me on NXT. But if you leave me on NXT, and the plan is to just let my contract expire, then that doesn’t look good. Right? Because if the plan was, I wasn’t directly told, but it was alluded to me that the plan was for me to, or there was at least a pitch for me to feud with Trick Williams for the NXT Championship. So if that happens and it plays out at Battleground and we have a match, my contract is up maybe a week later or something like that,  I don’t know the exact timing of it. But so if you’re WWE, do you want someone having a feud for the main championship and then not being employed the next week? That’s probably not a great scenario. So I think, my guess is they looked at all the possible scenarios and said, Okay, best case scenario right now for us and what we want to do with his contract is just kind of quietly bring him up to Raw and just kind of hope he fades away.” 

On if writing that letter may have burned a bridge with WWE:

“That’s not up to me. I’ll put it this way. If that letter burned a bridge with WWE, then they need to take a long hard look at themselves because everything in that letter is true and it’s what they did. So if me telling the truth about their actions, burns a bridge, then maybe they should consider changing their actions because that doesn’t reflect well on them. All I did was say what you did to me. I didn’t scorn anyone, I didn’t throw anyone under the bus. I didn’t call anyone names or throw out thoughts or allegations or anything like that. All I said was these are the facts of exactly what happened to me. A little bit of opinion mixed in there with I exceeded everybody’s [expectations] but honestly, in a sense, it’s not. Because I was told from people, I was told from Shawn Michaels, from Triple H that you’re knocking it out of the park, you’re doing a great job. You did it again, another match, these are the things that they would communicate to me. So it’s not like I’m making these things up in my own head. And I have this grandiose picture of myself. No, I was told these things by the people in charge. So ultimately, at the end of the day, I have no idea who sat in the room and made these decisions. It used to be a lot easier because he could just say it’s probably Vince. Because he owned the company. He did all the booking he had the final say on literally everything. So if you got released or if you got something else, you pretty much knew who made the call back then. Now Endeavor owns the company, they got their own set of rules. There’s different levels of creative and how it relates to the board of directors and whatever. I don’t know how any of that works. Somebody had to sit down at some point and say this contract isn’t worth it. I’d love to have been given that explanation and I requested that explanation and it was not given to me and that’s disappointing. I don’t think they had a contractual obligation or a legal obligation to give me that explanation. That’s probably the rules and the parameters that they live by, which is fine. On a business sense, I kind of respect that, because it’s like, your business and the bottom line is all that matters and that’s great. At the same time, there’s there’s a lot of talk about family and community in WWE, and we’re all on the same team. I’d like to see a little bit more of that practice because that’s how I felt like I was part of the family. I felt like I was part of the team and I wanted to, to work towards that. I still feel that way but now I feel it about my coworkers, the wrestlers in the locker room. Those guys will always be my family. They’ll always be my team. But, you know, now I understand that this is a business, so we got to treat it like a business.” 

On being destroyed by a Cody Rhodes chair shot on the indies:

“So we knew we had the angle and I think I proposed most of it to him. Because as a wrestler, you never want to be like, Yeah, man and then I’ll do this and I’ll drill you in the head with the chair. That’s not something that you pitch, it’s something that the guy taking it usually wants to offer. So I knew we had to do some sort of angle because it was leading to maybe the main event of that show was him and an eight man tag or something like that. So we started with the singles match, and then he needed to get rid of me somehow to get there, whatever. So I was like, why don’t we do a chair shot? He was like, okay, and then I came up with this plan, or one of us came up with a plan to sit the chair in the ring and put me in the chair. Then I told him and this is a direct quote and I’ll remember it because he said it a lot of times after. I told him ‘I want you to be Barry Bonds just swing away.’ And he was like, Okay, if that’s what you want. The angle that we got was really good, because you can’t really see my hand sneak up into the frame last second. Because what ended up happening is I took 100% of it right on my wrist. So my wrist got destroyed, not broken. But it just hurt a lot. It was like a bad bone bruise for a couple of weeks, but didn’t touch my head, didn’t touch my face. I was completely fine, no [damage], nothing. It did look really good. When it happened. I didn’t know how good it looked. And then I watched the video back I’m like, Oh, brother that looked like it ripped my head clean off. But especially because the most viral video of it was like a, like a fan holding a grainy cell phone camera. This was back in 2016 and the fan is like screaming like so it just looked like death. But yeah, it wasn’t it wasn’t that bad.”

On the original pitch for Retribution:

“The original pitch that I got for Retribution was no pitch. Yeah, there was no pitch given to me. I made the pitch. Because Retribution existed before the members of it were selected in any capacity. The original group of Retribution that you saw on Monday Night Raw was a bunch of writers and extras all wearing those head-to-toe blacks and throwing Molotov cocktails at a generator. That’s the first time you saw Retribution. And when that happened. I was in this weird middle ground of sort of called up sort and sort of in NXT just kind of floating around the PC because it’s in the middle of COVID. Right. So sometime along that storyline as it begins to progress, I say, All right, I’m gonna go make my pitch to Vince because I have some names in mind. I have a concept in mind. Because right now on TV, this is kind of getting laughed at right? The whole general feeling of it, and the only feedback that we have at this point is Twitter, right? That’s the only that’s our only source of feedback because there’s literally no fans. We don’t even have video screens at this point. It’s just wrestlers standing around being told to cheer now, you know, so who knows what the reception of this is other than Twitter, which is destroying it right there. It looks like a bunch of school kids jumping around, playing at recess. That’s that’s the general thought process. So I’m like, okay, but they’re clearly invested in this project. It’s a mainstay of Raw and SmackDown they’re destroying the ring on SmackDown. There’s sawing the thing, the commentators are running away. They’re running angles where Randy Orton’s punt kicking Ric Flair, and the lights turn out because of Retribution. So I’m saying, okay, they’re invested in this angle, let me give them more of a reason to invest in this angle. I have the perfect set of people to execute this. I have a good vision as to why I can tie it all in, I can keep continuity. Let me pitch all this directly to Vince, he’s easily accessible because he’s at the Performance Center where we are every day. So as I was telling you earlier, I like to film vignettes in my basement and stuff. So I filmed this little vignette in my basement. I bring it on an iPad, I type up a thing with a list of names, a lot of the names that ended up being in Retribution, some that were some that weren’t, a whole synopsis of why we’re doing what we’re doing, what we look like what our motivation is, and I gave it to him and I showed him the video. We had not a conversation, but I presented all of it to him straight there. He watched all of it, he absorbed all of it. And then he gave me a five-minute talk about professionalism. Which is an interesting conversation in hindsight. But it’s a conversation that happened. I think that’s based on the fact that the first time I ever met him, so this is the second time I’ve ever met him. The first time I ever met him was about a month earlier and I was told through the grapevine that I made a very bad first impression. I don’t necessarily know why. But I think it was because I was a fan in the PC, not even the Thunderdome yet, but the PC, because they had NXT wrestlers and I was sort of called up. But they told us to dress like fans basically. So I walked in to just introduce myself because I had been told I had been called up to Raw and I’m kind of dressed like a fan basically at that point. I just introduced myself and maybe he didn’t like all that, maybe he thought that I should be more professional about how I should have been in a suit and tie in something. Because that was basically the talk he gave me after I made the pitch about Retribution. He was like you need he’s like you need to have more respect you know for these board members, these CEOs, then he goes not me, like he’s one of the boys. And it’s just a very confusing message and I’m like yes sir. Sounds good. Yeah, I’ll be more professional next time. And then I left and nothing happened for another two or three weeks and I’m like whatever it did, I shot my shot and it missed is what it is.”

On Fox not liking Retribution:

“I never heard that in an official capacity. I never saw a report that said that. But yes, that is the rumor I heard that Fox did not like Retribution, which for the record they had every right. At that time, it was okay, it was trending in a better direction, right, we did the whole angle, we’re standing at the edge of the apron to close Monday Night Raw, it felt cool, it looked cool. Then the day came for the big reveal. And the big reveal was these masks, which was part of what I pitched, I pitched masks, but I had pitched entrance masks where we rip them off, and we reveal who we are. And this is why we’re angry and all these other things. We were not going that route. We were going a different route. And we were told that our names were T-Bar, Slapjack and Mace and Reckoning and Retaliation and we were like uh oh.”

On how the angle would have been received if there was an audience there:

“That’s a great question. I think better, because there would have been more production, there would have been more interaction, it would have been clearer that we were bad guys trying to make people angry, rather than just what you saw, which was crazy people just kind of screaming at nothing, right? It’s like what? We’re going to take over these screens? It doesn’t translate very well. I know that they broke off me and Mace and put us in a tag team and had us take our masks off. And that seemingly was well received by the audience even though I was still named T-Bar and he was still named Mace, which by the way, we pitched to not have those names anymore because we didn’t want the stink attached to us. But it was still there, we still the same music and everything. But even still, we’re getting good reactions from the crowd. It just apparently wasn’t Vince’s cup of tea the tag team so that got split apart too.”

On Shawn Michaels:

“In terms of WWE, my overall tenure at WWE, Shawn Michaels is probably the most important figurehead for me simply because it felt like that was the first time where I was really, really heard. When I was moved down to NXT, I came into a meeting with Shawn and Johnny Russo, who I mentioned earlier and Matt Bloom. We sat in a room and I very hesitantly pitched to them my idea because this was not my first pitch in WWE, I told you about the Retribution pitch I’ve made. Probably throughout my course of T-Bar, I probably pitched directly to Vince, probably five or six things and just in general to like my writers, or to Bruce, or to whoever else in the creative process, probably upwards of like 20 things. That sounds like a lot and it sounds like I’m bombarding them. They were well-spaced out. I was on the main roster for a long time doing nothing, or doing Main Event, two years is a long time, especially when there’s clearly no creative plan for you and you’re just trying to go can I do this on Raw? Can I try this? Oh, this just happened I’d fit in here. And the more you pitch, the more they’re like shut up. They didn’t say shut up but it’s like, hey, we’ll use you when we need you. So just stay out on the bench a little bit.”

What is Dijak grateful for?

“My family, my wife, my support system around me and the ability to get to do what I love.”

Raj Dhesi (@rajthemaharaja) is a professional wrestler formerly known as Jinder Mahal in WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood to talk about his recent WWE release and how it is different from the last time, working with Indus Sher as their manager, whether or not Brock Lesnar actually refused to work with him, fighting for the 24/7 Championship on a golf course and on a long haul flight, working with Drew McIntyre, being a part of the final WWE Punjabi Prison match, a promo he regrets, being paired with The Great Khali and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” – George Elliot

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On no longer being with WWE:

“It feels great. I always have a positive outlook on things, on life. I know the future’s bright, I get to explore other avenues, business ideas that I have, other stuff outside of wrestling we can touch on later. But yeah, I’m excited. And obviously wrestling, the independent scene is amazing right now. I got some bookings coming out. My calendar is getting full. So yeah, it’s awesome. I had a great time in WWE, had a great run. And I was always smart with my money. I always invested it. So now I have the luxury of doing whatever I want.”

On the release:

“So actually, during WrestleMania week, myself and Indus Sher, we talked to TR [talent relations], They were wanting to go back to India, a few months prior Veer had a religious event that he holds, it was a one year anniversary of his father’s death. He got told that, no, we were needed for Raw, he can’t go back home. Sangha is also from India. He wants to go back home and we were told no, we were needed on Raw. And sure enough we weren’t booked, we were just sitting at home. So they were quite frustrated. And also myself, started off the year with The Rock and had the WWE championship match. Then one week later, I’m not in the Royal Rumble. Which was I thought it was very weird. So we talked to TR, we just said, Hey, listen, like, if there’s nothing for us, we can go our separate ways. And sure enough, a few months later, we went our separate ways.” 

On it being time for the next generation in WWE:

“It was frustrating, but that’s okay. Because that’s what WWE is, it’s time for the next generation. It’s time for the Bron Breakker’s and the Carmelo’s, it’s their time, I had my time. And maybe my time will come back. But it’s time right now to step away and do other things. And if works out in the future we come back, if not, it’s all good. There’s plenty of other things to do. Starting off the year strong with The Rock, then the title match, thank you Tony [laughs]. Then WrestleMania week, I’m in a match two segment match with Tozawa on Main Event. So obviously, there’s frustrations and but it’s all good. Right? I had many years there. I’ve done everything that I wanted to do. And yeah, it’s a young man’s game.”

On comparing the 2024 release to the first one:

“This one is much different. I am a grown man now. I’ll be turning 38 the day after this interview airs. So yeah, it’s just I’m at a different point in my life. I’m at peace with it. I’ve had a great career because at that time when I got released, the best thing I had done at that point was being in 3MB. Now I’ve been a WWE Champion. I’ve been in WrestleMania, headlined PVVs. I’ve done everything. I have travelled the world, and I’m in a different place financially. So yeah, a lot has changed.” 

On there being a lot of love from the fans when the release was announced:

“Yeah, definitely. I generally get a lot of hate online. But it was one of those rare instances where I got to show my real personality, actually, this happens to me all the time. I meet people and they’re like, wow, like you’re not what we expect. [They say] you’re nice, maybe it’s the Canadian in me. Always respectful, polite, and the Jinder Mahal character was the complete opposite of me. Like some guys are the wrestling characters with their personality turned up. Mine not so much. It was something completely different.” 

On Drew McIntyre:

“I became WWE Champion before Drew McIntyre, don’t you forget that [laughs]. Drew’s the man. What Drew is doing right now is incredible. This is the best version of Drew. Drew’s the man. He’s like a brother to me and to see him in this position. He just signed a new contract so he’ll be there for a few more years. Something about a man like he is incredible. He’s having fun. I just don’t think he cares anymore and that’s usually when the best comes out. Like CM Punk, he doesn’t care about anything and that’s why he’s the best.”

On being told he was no longer a wrestler:

“I always stay ring ready. Actually, while I was managing Indus Sher, when we got drafted to Raw, I was told that I’m no longer a wrestler. I’m just a manager. But I still stayed in shape. [They told you that?] Yeah, becasue I was pitching. Well, the writer told me. I was pitching all kinds of storylines, like six man tags or matches for myself where Indus Sher is managing me and nothing was happening. I asked the writer, I said, What’s the deal am I [wrestling]? I also know this because I saw the roster sheet. Male heels, Raw, SmackDown male heels, tag teams, I wasn’t listed under male heels. There was the male heel tag teams Indus Sher and I was in brackets. So as a manager role. So I wasn’t even listed as active talent. And I asked the writer I said, Hey, was it discussed that I’m not wrestling anymore? He said, Yeah, it was brought up that you just gonna manage Indus Sher. But then I had the match with Seth Rollins. Luckily, I was in shape already, and stayed in shape. Because that could have went that could have went the opposite way where I started eating desserts in catering every week. But I’m always being ready, motivation comes and goes, right? It’s very hard to stay super dialed in year round. Generally, if I know something big is coming up, it’s a little bit easier. But now that I know that I get to spread my wings. Yeah, it’s motivation.”

On being in the Royal Rumble:

“No, there wasn’t [any plans]. I was asking, again, this was two weeks after the Seth Rollins match. So like a week out, I asked one of the producers who I’m friends with who was doing the Royal Rumble. I said, Hey, am I in the Royal Rumble? He’s like, I’m trying to get you in your name has been brought up but as of right now you’re not in it. And I actually jokingly said, Hey, diversity. And he’s like, actually, someone did get in because of that I was like I don’t count? Yeah, I and the day of the Rumble. I brought my gear. I was ready to be in the Rumble. And the list came out and it wasn’t in it.”  

On WWE not capitalising on the Indian market:

“Yes, especially with Indus Sher. So both of those guys didn’t come from pro wrestling. Rinku was a baseball player and Saurav actor and kickboxer. So they’re brand new to this, they went to the NXT system, then they go to main roster, which has its own learning curve. From day one, they came back from the first match and I told Triple H put us on the live events, put us on the live events, put us on the live events. Because what they need is experience. They just don’t have enough experience or the experience that maybe they were looking for, the experience with long matches, they mainly had shorter squash matches, where everything was kind of laid out. I really wanted for them to experience a live event match where you don’t call as much and you just listen to the crowd and you feel it. And I even suggested like, there’s two live events, one on Saturday, one on Sunday. I’ll tag with one on one night, the other night, I’ll tag with the other one, I’ll wrestle both nights. But we just never put on live events. I was put on Live Events alone right after that Seth Rollins match for like two weeks. And then that was it. They just never got the experience and you get that from live events. There’s no other way you don’t really learn much from TV matches, especially a squash match, you do, but not a squash match. If you have a 90-second match, or you’re planning everything like A,B,C,D, you don’t really get to feed off the crowd or change a match based off of the crowd reaction. You do that on live events. So I think it was a missed opportunity, not putting those guys on live events, because that would have got them to the next level. Right? Like if they want to have a 15-20 minute match with DIY with all these intricate, false finishes and saves and the timing needs to be worked on, time is super important. You get that from live events and if you mess up, it’s okay. It’s not a live television. Several million people around the world don’t see it, so that would have been the place to do it. But all good.”

On the 24/7 Championship segment on a golf course:

“We were on live events that week, and I got a text from Adam Pearce. He was the agent on the live event. He texted me, Hey, we gotta go film this thing. So I could have just showed up in regular clothes but I was like, Nah, I gotta do it in gear, It’ll be better. gotta commit. Right? I just didn’t have any baby oil, though. You look, I don’t have any baby oil, or I don’t have a pump. So we go to this golf course and luckily, WWE had gotten permission already from this golf course so it wasn’t that awkward. It still was but yeah, showed up in trunks. We did the thing and actually, I didn’t warm up or anything and I threw out my back, like really bad. Later that night, we have to live event. But luckily, a few hours later, Adam Pearce actually texted me and I think he was kind of giving me the heads up like hey, sorry, it’s written on the show is going to be ding ding ding and Alistair Black just gonna give you his kick. And I just texted God bless. I just said God bless. And then when I got to the building, I came like limping in and he said, Oh my God, what happened? [I said] I threw out my back on the golf course. I’m like Yes, please, this is a great finish is a great match. Walked to the ring, barely just got kicked. 123. So yeah, it worked out.”

On the Punjabi Prison match:

“So first off, the Punjabi prison match sucks. It’s terrible. [In what way?] It’s so hard. The inside cage is the blue old school cage. You can hit it as hard as possible and it won’t even make a noise. It was terrible. And then just the crowd reaction they couldn’t really see the people in the arena, there’s two cages so when we’re on the inside, there’s two cages they couldn’t really see. And it was just painful. Kendo sticks, chair shots, everything. But then The Great Khali. So actually funny story. So I knew Khali was going to come. Singh Bros knew, Randy knew, nobody else knew supposed to be a big secret supposed to be a big secret. They have the Punjabi Prison tarped off and all the way from the roof. Kick everybody out of the bowl, no security guard like no one’s in there. But they gotta get Khali ringside to rehearse. So they like wheel them in on basically like a buggy between crash pads, what are you guys doing? They tried their best to hide him. But everybody saw him. Khali saved my championship I won, at the end he raised the championship like he won it. So it was good yeah, it was amazing and actually Khali’s hand is so big like he’s patting me on the back but it feels like someone’s slapping me, he’s like yeah good job, good job, slapping my back. I’m gonna block it with my elbow. Last thing I want right now.”

On a scrapped Punjabi Prison match:

“Actually, I was supposed to possibly have one with Roman Reigns at Extreme Rules. I think we just had a regular straight-up match and it was in Chicago, too. There was talk of the Punjabi Prison match coming back. Me and Roman in the Punjabi prison. [And then did he just say I don’t think so?] Yeah, just like Brock [laughs].”

On the scrapped match against Brock Lesnar:

“This is just my opinion, and, obviously there’s a lot of misinformation on the internet. The headline came out, ‘Brock Lesnar refused to work with Jinder.’ I don’t think he refused. I just think it was he probably pitched for a match with AJ because stylistically, it is a much better match. Me and Brock are both heels. Who’s gonna put heat on who? It was gonna be a flat match. It would have just been him suplexing me a bunch of times, maybe Singh Bros get involved. But the match he had with AJ was phenomenal, no pun intended. So yeah, I don’t think it was that he refused to work with me. I just think Brock has some pull and him and Paul Heyman probably said, Hey, we should talk to Vince and said book the match with AJ Styles. Which is okay, I have to lose a championship at some point anyway, I had it for six months and I didn’t know that I was losing the championship until the day of. We were in Manchester and we have the title match. We get to the building. Michael Hayes tells me and AJ go talk to Vince, and send us to Vince’s office, Vince tells me you’re dropping the championship, now you’re going to chase it. AJ, you’re winning it tonight, you’ll work with Brock at Survivor Series, then me and AJ at Night of Champions, one more championship match. And that was it. Yeah, I found out on the same day I’m winning it, lost it the same way found out the same day.”

On the offensive Shinsuke Nakamura promo:

“There was one promo in particular. Recently, I actually just saw Shelton Benjamin tweet that if he could take back one thing in his career, it was a promo with Yoshi Tatsu. Same thing, kind of like a racial promo. So that day, I had the promo, I got the script from the writer ‘This is from Vince, he wants you to say this.’ I was like, Oh man, I don’t want to say [this], is there anything else we can do? He said, No, it’s come from Vince. So I even asked Vince, this is gonna get negative backlash. He said no, no, no, no, don’t worry. Who cares? It’s not you. It’s a character, just entertainment. So did the promo, was not happy with it and not proud of myself for doing it. I really wish that I could take that moment back but unfortunately, I can’t. And right when we came back and got a lot of negative backlash, like I remember coming back from Gorilla. I was still hanging out by Gorilla and one of the social media managers came up to me and said, Hey, this is getting a lot of bad PR and Vince wants you to tweet something, like a statement. I said, okay, cool. He came up with something, maybe the PR team wrote it, someone came up with a statement. And as we were about to tweet it, he said, Actually, Vince changed his mind he said No. So it was just one of those things where it is what it is, not proud of doing it. But on the plus side I don’t think something like that, a promo like that will ever happen again in WWE. Things changed, the regime changed, everything is much much different now. That was a different era, different time. Under Vince his style was different. Sometimes he was stuck in his ways.”

On the lines being blurred

“You separate the performer from the on-screen character, but for some reason in wrestling, and WWE, it doesn’t happen. That was the explanation that was given to me, I was like fine we’ll do it. I had asked can we do something else? Is there anything else we can do? I was told no, this is what Vince wrote and you can either do it or you take your ball and go home.”

What is Jinder Mahal grateful for?

“The future, the past for all the lessons and family.”

Cody Rhodes (@CodyRhodes) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE and is reigning as the Undisputed Champion. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Toronto to discuss the night he won the WWE Championship at WrestleMania and what happened next, the twists and turns that led to the eventual victory, whether turning heel turn will ever happen, comparisons to Homelander, his thoughts on The Rock and the mystery item that was given to him on the Raw after WrestleMania, whether anyone crossed the line with their promos leading up to WrestleMania, making every night special for the fans and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “The key to success is to start before you’re ready.” – Marie Forleo

Sponsors: PURE PLANK: The future of core fitness! Use the code CVV to save 10% on Pure Plank which was designed by Adam Copeland & Christian: https://gopureplank.com/

PRIZEPICKS: Download the app today and use code INSIGHT for a first deposit match up to $100!

TIMELINE NUTRITION: Save 10% off your first order of Mitopure at http://timeline.com/INSIGHT

BONCHARGE: Use the code CVV to save 15% off your infrared sauna blanket at https://boncharge.com/cvv

BLUECHEW: Use the code INSIGHT to get your first month of BlueChew for FREE at http://bluechew.com

ROCKET MONEY: Join Rocket Money today and experience financial freedom: https://rocketmoney.com/cvv

PLUNGE: Get $150 off your Plunge with the coupon code CVV150 at http://plunge.com

On WWE breaking kayfabe with the WrestleMania documentary:

“Well with the behind the scenes documentary, that’s really as far as I think you should ever go. Not because I don’t want people to know, but the legend is supposed to be cooler than the fact. So watching the documentary the other night, I feel like people have all these questions and there’s kind of these different outlooks and takes and I like that more than someone definitively saying no, here’s actually what happened. Plus, I like that Rock, Roman, me, Seth and Triple H all look like we were involved with a bank heist, but have different stories when we got caught by the cops. Like everybody in the interrogation [says] it was him, it was him, it was me… I do like that.”

On what happened the night he won the Undisputed Championship:

“I didn’t sleep. I went right to The Today Show, I laid in a bunk and I texted a bunch of people, including The Undertaker. And now Undertaker has a podcast and a stage show. So things you might say could become public knowledge, these legends, that’s what they do. I left him what I would say as a rambling, perhaps intoxicated little rant just thanking him for being there. It’s the frickin sheriff. But yeah, immediately after, here was sincerely, I said it in the behind-the-scenes documentary, but it’s really how I felt. I was almost worried there’d be a sense of completion, this sense of fullness. I was genuinely concerned like, well, stories over. But as soon as it was done, it felt like literally [I was] 10 feet tall, felt bulletproof, felt younger, felt faster, like just didn’t feel grizzled at all, to the point where I thought, Oh, this is going to be a lot of fun. But what do we do next?”

On people not liking his character:

“Have you ever watched the show Parks and Rec? Okay, so there’s a really great episode, she is running for city council and there’s a guy who hates her, and for no reason. He just has a thing and hates her. She throws his bowling night and ultimately at the bowling night. She’s not supposed to be putting time in on him. But she clearly is trying to turn him and the message is that that’s never going to happen. With me, that’s where I feel very comfortable these days, I’d rather rock and party with the people who were part of all this and in the fans versus it’s nice to prove fans. It’s also nice to prove critics wrong, but it’s not my main focus. Feel like for a long time chip on the shoulder, you wanted to turn them, change them and you can to some degree, but I feel like when you do that you discard the ones who are right. They’re like, hey, we got your back. Why are you so focused on this?”

On making memories at live events:

“You want to know something funny about grabbing kids out of the crowd? Sometimes you see a body and you think wow, that cosplay is great. That’s perfect. I’m gonna have he or she do the Whoa with me. And then you don’t realize because maybe they’re not standing on their chair, you don’t realize that you just picked up a 15-year-old, like over 100 pounds, you know what I mean? Like, it’s kind of funny, you’ll see my hands go under, I’m always assuming it’s like an eight-year-old. And then it’s just sometimes you get, it’s like getting a real big fish. It’s like you’re proud of it, but also have man, I gotta get you back over the rail. It’s so funny. I don’t have the best eye for it. [Do you pick them out ahead of time?] No, Nia Jax is pretty good about when she’s on the live events and she’s been skipping some live events lately, which I don’t like, at all. And Road Dogg needs to put her on the live events. Now, she’s good about saying Bayley is also good about this as well saying, hey, there’s a kid out there, they’re in x row, and that’s, that’s super helpful, not ribbing actually, they’d find a good spot. But usually on the way out, I got a good head on a swivel, because now we’re wrestling so much the wrestling is never secondary. Oh my gosh. But you might have that down to the point where you’re able to free yourself up to look around, WWE has more signs now, it’s coming back, and to see them and just have a moment with each person to thank them for being there for me.” 

On being hyper aware of how he acts around fans:

“So there’s like a lot of discussion on the stuff I do at the end of the night at the shows. Internally, I think people thought WWE has been really great about hey, yes, it takes longer and we have to break the ring down 45 minutes to an hour later but we like this. It was kind of new to WWE it’s almost this thing that I took from the independent scene, just everywhere I go stay until the very end. If you kick me out, no problem if there’s a curfew no problem like that’s fine. Drag me out. But I don’t think of it that way. I love that, I hope it is a core memory. I hope people do have something that they remember and selfishly probably I’m hoping that I’m their guy. But I sincerely just really enjoy it. One of the things I think Roman Reigns called me political and I thought it didn’t shake me at all, he didn’t hurt because I thought, no, it seems political. And maybe it looks political, but it’s not. I just like this. You don’t know how long you’re going to have. You don’t know how many spins around the earth you get and don’t know how many times you’re going to be the kind of the North Star of the wrestling business. So I just really enjoy it.”

On if he remains fully in character:

“That’s a great question. I would hope, and again, I don’t know if all wrestlers are as aware as we’d like to be about how we are in a group setting, in the world, not revolving around us. I think once I left WWE the first time and went out and did my own thing, I think I kind of ceased to be a character and just accepted the fact that present the self that you want to be, that’s where the suits and stuff came from present yourself. But, be yourself. Actually so no, I don’t feel I’m in character now. But it’s something that I’ve kind of lived and dreamed out loud with my career and what I want stating here’s the goals at the end. As shocking as it is to say, sometimes I wish there was a little bit more of a character that I could hide into, because it feels like again, you have questions. You don’t have to have questions because you know me. So scary thing like that doc that just came out in my own documentary. Part of that’s a little intimidating. In the world they know you, they have a sense of you, and they can wrap an opinion around it. And it’s just again being vulnerable and being out there. It’s the wrestlers. I grew up loving the big, bombastic, loud talkers and bright colors, and you didn’t know who they were. With me the individual that caught on was me. And it can be a burden in addition to being amazing, but it can be a burden as well.”

On having Brandi Rhodes be a part of his WrestleMania 40 entrance:

“Everything wrapped around that. You got to kind of relate back to or credit back to Triple H and Nick Khan and Bruce Prichard. They understood there’s a difference between, hey, I want to get my buddy on this show or hey, this is a friend but it’s really a niche market that might understand it. They understood what I was just telling you earlier that this has been lived out loud in front of them. She’s a huge part of that. A massive part of that. She’s not a stand behind you type, she’s a stand next to you type. So it was very nice that they wanted that to happen. It was even more special. I was touched how great the wrestling fans were to her. Because I think if you’re around the business long enough, you look at your social and stuff. You look at things in a vacuum, you have peaks, you have valleys, I don’t think she remembered how cool they can be as an audience. And that was really nice to hear the reaction they had for [Brandi]. To me, it will be my favorite entrance ever. And it’s very simple. You know, there was the prelude, Brian Fadem at WWE helped get all that together. It was this Prelude music that they let me pick and then to rise up and Jason Baker, who developed a lot of the stuff for The Fiend, had come up with making the tattoo an actual mask and he did mind blowing job, that’s my favorite entrance ever. And it’s very simple, minus the pyro, it’s relatively cost-effective.” 

On if The Rock has ever crossed the line with some of his promos:

“Depends on what line. When you’re the director of the board, you can do whatever you want. The show is not going off the air and no one’s getting fired if you do something that’s a little outrageous. That gave him free rein to develop and enter into The Final Boss. [you turned the Rock heel]. Well what happened with The Rock at WrestleMania 40 is the first time I ever believed in my own hype. So first time I ever thought, oh, maybe someone from this generation did get over. Because to me, I tell my students I tell people all the time nobody today is over. Because you hear over all the time and to me over is you can’t step a foot out your house without cameras, without a moment. I just have a loftier opinion of over, John Cena is over. This is the first time I thought oh, maybe maybe that’s happening. Line wise, the only line I think he crossed was he made my sister Teil non-canon because he had mentioned that I had two other siblings and that being Dustin and Kristen who are from my dad’s first marriage, which is you know, you’re not wrong that I do have them, and he was explaining [that] when he called me a mistake. But he made Teil non-canon and Teil was like the closest I have this is my original best friend. You know, so that was a little I felt bad. I felt bad for her. I feel Mama Rhodes is a person who never wanted to be ever on camera. And now you got a security guard in Heathrow terminal airport [who recognises her]. If he thought that was a line that he was crossed, I feel maybe it actually backfired because she’s now a part of it all.”

On if Cody ever felt like he crossed the line:

“I feel maybe I crossed the line. I did a promo where I said he had LDS. Actually I feel like a lot of people liked the interview and got a nice round of applause when I came back through the curtain but it felt so off-brand for me. Because we have so many young kids that I felt like this one guy is the guy that I’m gonna go to these lenghts for. And maybe that’s what makes this all click this genuine animosity and smile at each other but probably deeply dislike one another. If he’s the one who’s gonna bring it out to me. It’s probably good TV, but it did feel a little, I guess icky in the moment.”

On The Rock and the mystery item:

“It’s very important that whenever I talk about The Rock and I feel like I’ve talked about him a lot, people have a lot of questions about him and things of that nature. Very important, he is my boss, which he’s not on the ground as much so you don’t remember, but he’s my boss. He is one of the biggest if not the biggest name that ever came from pro wrestling. I mean, there’s an argument. Some people don’t even make the argument, if you’re looking at your Hulk Hogan’s, your Austin’s, Rock’s, he’s a Mount Rushmore wrestler. He then went on to be the biggest star in the world in terms of film and Hollywood and a modern action hero when we needed one. If Rock decided today he’s going to run for President of the United States my gosh, he would win in a landslide. He’s just one of the most recognizable people on the planet. I’m sure he’ll explain down the road what it was and I’m sure his kind of, what would you call Brian Gewirtz to him? Extremely talented individual Brian Gewirtz who kept Raw on track for years and years and years, but he’s kind of a Starscream to Rock’s Megatron. I’m sure Brian will do some media where he puts something out there or skews the timeline. Again, utmost respect for both of them.”

On calling out The Rock at Elimination Chamber:

“Offer still stands. And again, if he never comes back, he’s done it all. He really has. And as much as I insulted him previously, it was an honor to be part of his last outing. But what I learned physically in the ring with him, it shouldn’t be his last outing. There’s more. There’s not just gas left in the tank, there might be multiple tanks. There’s more and I would like the WWE Universe or pro wrestling fans. I’d like them to see that. I think there’s a world where [he’s the] WWE Director the Board great. But I think there’s a world with WWE really benefits and this young audience being able to connect with him they don’t know him as the people’s champ they know him as The Final Boss. That offer stands whenever.”

On being told he might not be in the main event of WrestleMania 40:

“There’s a group of people who were visiting and who kept coming on my bus. And at one point, we just had to have a full hey, I need you guys to know what’s about to happen. And everyone who was in that group knows it is one of the best and worst days of my professional career. It somehow was both. If you watch closely after I win, and I kind of like hunched down over the mat. I am saying I’m sorry, I’m saying I’m sorry multiple times. And looking at people dead in the eye saying I’m sorry because I knew pretty much to a degree based on what Triple H had told me that it probably isn’t going to happen and I was as lost as I have ever been. So here I am. We’re talking about am I in character? I had lived my life to finally find myself finally have all the utmost confidence. And it was the lowest I’ve ever felt, but also I just won the Royal Rumble for the second time. That’s a life-changing moment. How can you not appreciate that and enjoy it and feel it? But that was a very rough day. And I kind of apologized to my colleagues and peers around me because I was forgetful. I was in the ring I might have been a little forgetful but I was also trying my hardest to make it seem like that meeting had never happened knowing it had happened and you know having a look at Punk in the eyes and Wonder like do you know? And I never had this discussion with him, do you know what’s happening? But it was also, I freely discuss it because the documentary is out there and everyone’s told their story and all that, but it was just a very, very tough day. I have great relationships with some of the top brass at WWE really huge respect. And it got shaken a little bit. But also I realize the burden, like I mentioned, this is the problem with being yourself. You can’t not sell this, you can’t not hide this, if you were playing, the astronaut characters, it’s a different thing, the astronaut characters winning the Royal Rumble but not wrestling at Wrestlemania. In this case, I felt like I was, I took it personally. And it was a nice reminder, not to take anything personally in wrestling. And if anybody who’s in the I’ve worked in management, I’ve done this, I should know that more than anybody. So I had to walk out of that room and not take it personally.”

On the Homelander comparisons:

“With all the love I have for The Boys and his performance as Homelander, the entire cast, and their production is first class., what a production. The robe is not based on it. The robe is based on military dress uniforms. It’s the little bit of scales, the gold are on my bigger robe that has the eagles and of course, the blonde hair and I think the AEW run where people thought I’m pretending to be a good guy but I’m actually a bad guy, which maybe it was what was happening? I think that’s where it really became is he’s gonna go full Homelander? Truthfully, Homelander the character is a terrible human being.”

On not turning heel:

“You can do whatever. WWE is such a hot ticket now. It moves on. It’s great to have a quarterback, great to have franchise players or top stars, whatever it might be, but it’s going to move on with or without you there, someone will fill that spot. Social media for pro wrestling is very important and you’ll hear people try to say it’s not important, you’ll hear people say they’re just trolls. I think you need to know what a troll really is. This is a real person who probably has a pretty good high-paying job. This is how they release. This is their event, whatever. This is my weird psychology or theory on trolls. But with all that said, there’s a whole section, a huge section of WWE audience that’s not actively on social, they have it, they do stuff on it, but that is not their bread and butter. They’re not dictated to by it. Whereas some of the other independent and smaller promotions are dictated to by social media so we have to always look at it. “We want Cody” is a prime example. Is this social media or is this bigger? It only became bigger when we showed up in that arena on Monday and they started chanting it in real time. That’s where you know the difference between a fad, between this thing and something that okay, this is a wave that’s far far bigger. It could happen for sure. I just don’t see it happening.”

On a negative moment from his time in AEW:

“I hated that in The Young Bucks’ book they said I was last to the signing. Because that’s a big thing. Some of the AEW defenders who don’t realize they’re turning people off to their product more than they’re turning people on. That’s one of the things that people always sight, Oh, he was last, he wasn’t that big a deal to the origin? No. This guy here who’s off camera was the first person to ever meet Tony. And he met him in a vetting process for all of us. So yes, I guess I was the last and yes, I had different thoughts and it’s not incorrect at all what they said. Yeah, it’s not incorrect but I was just in on it as well as anybody else.”

What is Cody Rhodes grateful for?

“Healthy family, the WWE Championship and the opportunity to take this story and remain interesting.”

Booker T (@BookerT5x) is a WWE Hall of Famer currently calling the action each week on NXT. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at Reality of Wrestling in Houston, TX to discuss his time in WCW, WWE and now NXT, the recent partnership between NXT and TNA, the iconic supermarket brawl with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and how much the damage cost, being paired with his wife Sharmell on TV, winning King of the Ring and becoming King Booker, his rivalry with Edge over a shampoo commercial at WrestleMania 18, whether or not he will ever have one more match and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: It doesn’t take talent to show up on time and work hard.

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On Reality of Wrestling:

“The Reality of Wrestling is something that I thought about many, many years ago when I first got in the wrestling business. It was an underground sport, it is not something you can just get into. So I wanted to give young people a chance to actually be a part of something, but the reality of it is you got to work your ass off for everything here at Reality of Wrestling. Nothing is given to you. We’ve had guys that have been here for many, many years that have worked on their craft and didn’t get it in the beginning. They could have easily left but they stuck it out and those are the guys that excel to the next level. That’s the reality of it. Here at Reality of Wrestling, I lead by example. I’m one of the first guys to get in and get the job done and I’m one of the last guys to leave just to make sure everything is done properly. So is Reality of Wrestling is just a little bit of everything.”

On still being in great shape:

“I’m blessed, but it’s all about just action, as well. It’s just staying on the move all the time. I mean, I’m on my way to Jacksonville here in a little while and then got to turn around and go to Vegas, and then turn around and go to Orlando, then back home for a minute. But then when I’m home is all about still staying on the grind, working with my partner Brad Gilmore with the ESPN podcast, as well. You know, it’s just all about staying relevant and sometimes staying relevant means you got to do the little bitty things. I love it, though.”

On one more match:

“Well, I’m never gonna retire. I’m definitely gonna get back in the ring at some point in time to do something. But it’s gonna be here, in Reality of Wrestling, or in Saudi [laughs].”

On the return being another Royal Rumble spot:

“You know, I think that spot was a great swan song for me doing it at that time, it was one of those unexpected entries. It was a moment, it’s kind of hard to really create those moments, duplicate those kind of moments, replicate that. So I think Rumble for me, I’m not looking to do anymore. “

On NXT rising stars:

“The talent that’s coming in NXT right now that I’m high on, he’s not gotten really his full shine right there is Lexis King. He’s gonna be here this weekend. The kid is definitely cut from the same cloth as the old man. The old man was innovative and before his time. I mean, he’s here all the time as well. But to see him from the perspective to where he didn’t have to listen to me, but he sits and listens, he takes it all in, sucks it in like a sponge because he wants to be the best and he knows that is not something that’s going to happen overnight. It’s something that he’s going to have to put in time. But like I tell him, you put in the time when you get there, everything else is gonna pretty much play itself out. If you put in the work, nothing else matters. Talent trumps everything, cream rises to the top. So to be able to work with someone like Lexis definitely has been cool. And then I watch a kid like Wes Lee, who when I first came into NXT and I saw him. I watched his matches and I thought he was just a regular flippy guy like most of the smaller guys, but I watched this kid and I look at guys and base them on whether they can fight. I was never really a good wrestler. I mean, I was a good wrestler. I was okay, but I was a good fighter and I was a really good performer. I was a really, really good entertainer. And when I watched Wes Lee, no matter who he works, no matter how big, how medium, how small, he goes out to perform at that next level, so yeah, man there’s a few guys down there on the rise.” 

On Bron Breakker:

“I can see his dad and his uncle, he’s a hybrid. And then I’ve watched him grow and get more comfortable over his time as well. He went to the main roster I think pretty much at the right time. No sooner, no later, I think perfect timing for him to actually make his way in and make his mark and have his moment. When he hit the ropes one time in NXT, he hit the rope so hard the ring actually shifted a little bit, it moved and I was like wow! So I talked about that got a little bit of stuff like that. He’s found something that’s so small, but it’s his signature. Boom. He’s out of the blocks. It is so awesome to see this kid make it to the WWE and do something his dad and his uncle really didn’t get a chance to achieve. I’m talking about that WWE run, and really have that WrestleMania moment. He’s gonna have a hell of a future, and he’s going to look back and say, Man, Dad, I did it.” 

On the NXT and TNA partnership:

“Well, back then in 2008 I couldn’t see that. Just because 2008 TNA, they were rumbling, they had a lot of steam behind them. Like they would make a big play to perhaps be that next competition. AJ Styles, Joe, Roode, all those guys, Awesome Kong, Sting, Steiner, it was nuts as for talent roster went back there. But now I can see it just because TNA is not a threat. I think being able to cross-promote and work with someone, a company like TNA I think benefits the talent more than anything. I think it helps the company stay alive in their markets, they’re gonna dig out a hole, they’re not gonna go anywhere now, I mean, just because they see the collaboration. So I think is a good thing for everybody, just because everybody is not going to be able to work in WWE at one time and be able to get shine and it’s just not going to happen. But look at Jordynne Grace, as far as what she’s doing at the Rumble. It was a huge moment for her as well as coming to WWE is not going to be for everyone. It’s just the way it is. Jordynne Grace, she’s the standout. She doesn’t look out of place at all. She’s a star by any means no matter how you look at it. She’s a bonafide star. And when you got guys like that, that need to be looked at like Moose. I say you give them a shot. Yes, I say because it’s only going to be good for business.”

On the resurgence in popularity:

“It’s crazy. I think I am. The first person is just coming around the corner, they said ‘Booker T! I saw you on NXT!’ NXT has revitalised me, it definitely has given me a lot more fire, that exuberance that I think I needed. Working on the main roster. I couldn’t get that. I couldn’t get that at all. But working with the young guys, working with the young talent, seeing them grow, being able to mentor them as well. I think that’s been the coolest part for me, with MXT I’ve got a certain crop of guys that have gravitated to me and you know, we network we do film study, you know, we go over stuff, what I think works. It’s amazing how these guys still make the old man feel good. So it’s pretty cool.”

On Bash at the Beach 2000:

“Maybe a week or so before I found out that I might become a World Champion, but it was like a tentative thing. And I was like, That ain’t gonna happen. A lot of people don’t remember I wrestled Canyon earlier that night, so I was like, can I just go home? It’s not gonna happen. And they kept telling me stick around, stick around, it’s gonna happen. And it was a night that it seemed like it was just a dark cloud, over the arena over everything, you know, so I want to be anywhere other than in that arena.”

Was it awkward backstage?

“It really was, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with me other than I knew it was about to be my moment and then Hulk pulled the creative control card. And for me, once that happened, I was like, it’s not gonna happen. So I was like, I actually, I can’t remember who I talked to, I say, Hey, is it alright if I just get my stuff out and get up out of here, and it was like, stick around, trying to work this out. I found out 10 minutes before, that I am winning the World Heavyweight Championship. But I had a professional that I was working with, Jeff Jarrett. Jeff Jarrett was so professional and going out there and doing His work. And he just got me around and, you know, put a title on me, it was an amazing night.”

On WWE informing the grocery store about the Booker T and Steve Austin brawl:

“Yeah, they let them know there was gonna be some damage. They were all for it. I just went back to the area and walked through the neighbourhood, it’s a dollar store now, but in the same neighbourhood, but there was so cool. It was so happy to have us there. You know, we did about $15,000 worth of damage.”

On what caused the most damage:

“I think the produce section, the vegetables and stuff. They would have to get rid of everything, all the fruit, all that stuff, they would have had to get rid of all that stuff. So I think that was the biggest area. Because that whole section we wiped out. But it was so much fun. I just grew out my dreads and I had eggs, milk, and flour in my hair. But you know, that’s show business, Lights Camera Action. That’s the beauty of the beast. That’s the part that I miss. I don’t miss the wrestling, other than the moments, but the show side of it, making the fans feel a certain way, man it is so great.”

On a WCW Mount Rushmore:

2I got a picture on my wall at home and somebody painted it. And it’s the Mount Rushmore of WCW. And it’s Goldberg, Sting, Dallas Page and Booker T. And I go for my time that’s my Mount Rushmore.”

On the Buff Bagwell match:

“Buff Bagwell did get a chance. I mean, he really did. I know there’s a lot of stories. They tried to bury me. I was just like everybody else, I was no different. But the one thing that was different about me, I was prepared for them to try to bury me. I knew exactly what it was going to take to make it in WWE, as well as I knew I was just as good as anybody in WWE. I was talent, man, there’s no way they could deny me other than saying, I would have been blackballed they weren’t gonna do that, because I was gonna make as some money, I was gonna sell some merch, I was gonna go out and perform at the highest level, every night. They weren’t gonna have to worry about if Booker T was going to show up, it wasn’t gonna have to worry about if Booker T was going to be able to perform tonight, that wasn’t gonna happen. I knew I had to make it in the locker room before I had a chance to make it in the ring. So it was a lot of elements that, coming from WCW, a lot of guys thought it was going to be easy. They really thought making that transition was going to be easy. And they found out that nobody there was going to give them anything, they’re going to have to earn it. A lot of guys just weren’t in a position already to put themselves through that.”

On bringing in Sharmell as an onscreen character:

“At one point I actually talked to Vince and said that’s it I’m gonna wrap it up. It was right after Sharmell and I got married, actually. I said, I’m gonna wrap it up. I think it’s time, just got married, I don’t want my wife to be at home while I’m on the road. And then Vince goes well, why don’t we hire Sharmell? Well, that would fix the problem. So they hired Sharmell and brought her on. I tell you, I really [did] just like my best work, Sharmell and King Booker that run solidified my whole existence in this business it really did. I mean that run, I wouldn’t say it overshadowed my career or anything like that, but it definitely highlighted my career in the best way when it should have. The King of the Ring tournament is tricky. Winning that thing and going on and making it something. I think I’m the only king to become the Heavyweight Champion and win the Heavyweight Champion as king. That’s never happened before, because it’s not for you to have that moment. But for me, like JBL said I was like Hercules. It was a time for me to where it really solidified my wrestling career because now people looking at me as royalty. Still to this day, people still call me King. Which wasn’t the master plan in the beginning or anything, but wrestling is is something that you can make whatever you want it to be, if you are willing to go that extra mile. And as King Booker, there was nothing that I wasn’t willing to do.”

On the WrestleMania 18 match against Edge:

“It was one of those things where we had to do something because the match actually was supposed to be a hair match. It was supposed to be I cut my hair or Edge was gonna cut his hair. That was what they approached us with at first. At least they approached me with that. I don’t know if they approached Edge with that, but they approached me with it. The first thing I said was ‘Is Edge cutting his hair? Because I’m not cutting mine.’ I just grew out my dreads and I really had become attached to them. I think they could have fired me before I cut my hair. I wouldn’t want to cut my hair at that time for anything. They couldn’t give me a big enough payoff to cut my hair at that time. They couldn’t have just told me to do it, so they squashed it and then they came up with this idea of a shampoo commercial because Edge wouldn’t cut his hair. It still was a moment, I look back on it and it was cool working Edge more than anything. Edge wanted to do the Spinaroonie in that match so bad. He didn’t do it. Because he just could not figure it out. But he worked on it all day in the arena. He had strawberries on his elbows and on his knees but he still could get it. But he tried so hard. But for me just working in his in his hometown. Like you say, that’s what I get out of it. That’s what I remember. It wasn’t one of my greatest highlight moments at WrestleMania but it was still a great moment.”

What is Booker T grateful for?

“My health, my family and still having a zeal for life.”

Shelton Benjamin (@Sheltyb803) is a professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Houston, TX to talk about his WWE release and what the future holds, whether or not he would consider a return, the possibility of signing with AEW or TNA, why he thinks he is the opposite of John Cena, responds to Max Caster’s comments about him on social media, being called underrated, his epic match on Raw with Shawn Michaels, why he thinks The Hurt Business never should have ended, how much longer he intends to wrestle and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. – Albert Einstein

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On if the WWE release was a surprise:

“Yes and no. Yes, because I don’t think, I know there was more for me to do there. There were more opportunities there and I’m more surprised that they chose not to take advantage of those opportunities. But I also knew that if they weren’t going to do anything then it’s just a matter of time. We got a lot of talent there, a lot of rotation, I’ve been there for a long time. I understand it’s a business. So yeah, it sucks for me but at the end, at the end of the day, it’s a business.”

Why not keep you around?

“Honestly, that’s the question you have to ask them. Obviously, I’m more than happy to be around. But again, I just look at everything as a business decision. I don’t take anything personally. Yes, I’m just as disappointed as most people but at the end at the end of the day, it’s the job, gotta move on. You have to move on eventually. And again, like I said, I put about 18 combined years with WWE, so I’ve been there a long time. Sometimes yeah, you just need to move on.”

On not being that surprised by the release phone call:

“I had a hint. When they did the whole recruiting thing, when I wasn’t assigned to a show that was kind of my first this doesn’t feel right moment. Then as time went on, you tried to have conversations and things like that nothing’s really gaining traction. And again, you get the hints So when the call actually came. I kind of figured. I wasn’t that surprised. I was surprised, but I wasn’t that surprised.”

Was there any talk of being a producer?

“There was talk of me possibly becoming a trainer at some point. I don’t think that door has closed. I just haven’t pursued it yet. [You still want to wrestle?] Yes, I love training people. I love teaching, and that comes from my amateur wrestling background. But at this point, I still think a little selfishly, I feel like I have a few more things that I’d like to accomplish. So while yes, I definitely am interested. I have to put aside my own ambitions to really be able to do that job correctly. And right now, at least today, I’m not ready to not think a little selfishly.”

On still being able to go:

“I’ve got tonnes left in the tank. It’s just a matter of whether or not anyone wants to use it. Like I said, I’m always going to be synonymous with WWE. But I’m open to be anywhere.”

On interest from AEW or TNA?

“I had a brief conversation with AEW, that hasn’t really borne fruit yet. But I’m still open. TNA I haven’t spoken with yet. I’m more than willing to work with them. I haven’t talked to them. I know MLW reached out. So you know, I’ve been presented with options. I just haven’t found something that I’m satisfied with.”

On Max Caster being against Shelton Benjamin being in AEW?

“[Laughs] I guess my first thought was Who is this? I’m like, I really don’t know him. I have nothing against him, as far as I know I’ve never met him. I was more shocked that he would say something like that. And again, I don’t know him, I don’t have a relationship with him.”

On the fear of a spot being taken:

“So to that I will say one, you’re already on your roster and whatever you’re doing there, if you’re not happy, then you need to change that, I’m still on the outside, at this point I’m really no threat to you. But if I were to come in, someone with my name, you looking at me as a threat rather than an asset. Yeah, I’m because one, if I were to say go to any company, to me, my job there is to, again, bring more fans put more eyes on you. And my thing is I want to work with these people. So, at this stage in my career, I want to help other talent. So if you’re looking at this as Oh, you’re stealing my spot? Well, first of all, if I can steal it, that wasn’t your spot. I can’t take Roman Reigns’s spot, I can’t take Swerve’s spot, I can’t take anyone’s spot. However, you can lose your spot. That’s how that’s how I look at it. If I were to come there or anywhere, there’s a reason I’m being brought in. And I would think is to help grow the company and help bring more eyes there. So if anything, you would think you should welcome in old established talent. Because that gives you another opportunity to work with someone who can elevate you so that that spot that you’re so afraid of losing? It helps you secure it, because now you’re working with people who elevate your game, you’re working with people with experience, you’re working with people who fans know, and will tune in to watch because I don’t know anyone running around with Max Caster merch, I don’t know anyone. He’s not a household name.” 

On going back to WWE:

“I would definitely consider it. Like I said, it’s the biggest game in town. So because I’ve worked there for so long, to answer your question, Yes I will go back if they offered me a position back and the right amount of money. Yes, of course, I will go back and I’ve said it before you’d be a fool not to at least consider it. Because I look at pro wrestling as a business. I love it, but it’s a business. So despite everything that’s happened, despite people’s opinion on creatively how they viewed me, it’s still a business to me. I look at wrestling as a business. So I will make the best business decision, not personal decision.”

On The Hurt Business suddenly breaking up:

“To this day. When I spoke to Vince and I asked him why and his comment was we’ve gone as far as we can with The Hurt Business. I’ve had a few, quite a few conversations with Mr. McMahon, and that was the first time that I could look at him and go, Okay, now you’re blowing smoke, that’s bull. But that’s also when I was like, Okay I don’t see much happening here. At least right now.” 

On being undervalued:

“I would say undervalued. Mainly because I think, to your point, most people know I can have great matches with anyone. But great matches are not necessarily the most important thing in WWE. In New Japan, I don’t think I was undervalued. In Ring of Honor, I don’t think I was undervalued. Because they really push wrestling. Like that’s what’s at the forefront. In WWE, there’s a lot of glitz and glamour. While it was, pro wrestling, the entertainment aspect of it. I’m an athlete first and I’m fine with that. But because of that, it’s like yeah, the guys who were a little more theatrical is just valued more there because it’s easier to market. And I understand that. I don’t like it. But I understand it.”

On feeling like he is the opposite of John Cena:

“No, no, I didn’t [fight for myself]. Because I felt like my work should speak for itself and I didn’t want to fight for myself. I knew what my strengths were I knew my weaknesses were and obviously I tried to work on them. But at the end of the day, it’s like, sometimes, once you’re typecasted or pigeonholed into one idea, no matter what you do they won’t let you out of that. I know I used to get so much slack from my promo work and it’s like yes, I was horrible that one time and then like I said, I improved. But while I improved, I still wasn’t as flashy. I will say I’m the anti-Cena because in a wrestling match in a move-for-move, whatever, he can’t hold a candle to me. But when it comes to mic skills. I’m at the shallow end of the gene pool. I just think what he brought to the table they valued more. Or Even my look, I was in the land of giants and when you got a guy like Brock, it’s really hard to stand out when standing next to Brock, and a Batista. So while I always had a great physique and things like that. Again, you got these monsters around you, it’s really easy to [stand out], because it’s also visual, our audience is visual. So, I don’t want to call them shortcomings because they weren’t shortcomings. It’s just a matter of what the company valued at the time.”

On his biggest regret:

“I was taught to just, again, let your work speak for itself. I’m not going to go argue for a spot, I’m not going to go cry for a spot. I’m just going to keep doing my job to the best of my abilities and whatever you asked me to do is like, Okay, I’m just going to do it. It’s been very rare that I said, No, I’m definitely not going to do that. There’s only one thing I can really look back at and go, I wish I never had done that, the Yoshi Tatsu promo on ECW. That is, to me the biggest black eye of my career. Just because quite frankly, it was just racist. It didn’t reflect who I was then it doesn’t reflect who I am now. And literally, from the moment I did it, or when we did that segment, I hated it. I love the story. Because, you know, he kicked me in the head and beat me in two seconds. That’s exactly how that story should end. Just to find out that sometimes I’ll see that pop up. And I’m like, that’s the one thing I wish I would have put my foot down and go, I’m not doing this.”

On Billy Gunn:

“I don’t know. I mean, I see guys like Billy Gunn is what 60? By the way, Billy Gunn is the greatest athlete in pro wrestling, period. Because if you want to judge athletes, you want to judge the greatest, you can’t look at it from when they’re in their prime, you got to look at the entire career. Who’s done it. Who’s been as athletic as long, high quality matches, as long as Billy? Billy, like I said all the time, Billy on TV, David Banner, Billy in person to Hulk. Like he’s phenomenal. I consider Billy Gunn, the greatest athlete ever in wrestling. But again, it’s because of his longevity.”

On how much longer he intends to wrestle:

“I’m pretty sure I could do two [years] easy, five depending on the schedule. But I also don’t want to overstay my welcome. I’ve been doing this a long time. Again, there’s going to come a time I have to stop thinking selfishly and look at things like as far as the wrestling business go, where am I bigger benefit, in the ring or behind the scenes? Right now I still feel like I can be a huge contributor in the ring. Definitely can still be behind the scenes, but again, this has to be in the right place before I can do that. And that’s definitely coming. I will say that’s definitely on the horizon. But right now, I still feel like I got a little more I can give.”

What is Shelton Benjamin grateful for?

“My children, my health and that I still have a good reputation in the business.”