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Omos On His WWE Absence, Brock Lesnar, AJ Styles, Bobby Lashley, Wrestling In Japan

in LATEST EPISODES on May 29, 2025 January 30, 2026

https://cvvtix.com – Get your tickets for INSIGHT LIVE in LA and NYC with VIP Meet & Greet!

Omos (@TheGiantOmos) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Los Angeles to discuss his time away from WWE TV, his recent work in Pro Wrestling NOAH, wrestling Bobby Lashley and Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania, being endorsed by The Undertaker, day-to-day challenges of being tall, setting the record straight on incorrect information and more!
Quote I’m thinking about: “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” – Marcus Aurelius

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On the challenges of being his size:

“Shopping for clothes is difficult. Pretty much having to buy really expensive furniture so I don’t break it. So I’ve broken couches. I remember seeing my one of my best friends, Dennis. It is in Arizona, and before I got signed to WWE, I was living with him. I broke his bed because he gave me beds, and I slept on the bed for like four months, and I just broke it because it couldn’t hold me. So I have to make a constant effort to make sure that I invest in actually well-made furniture to sustain my size, because I will break it.”

On how many times he has been asked how tall he is:

“If I count it, I’ll be a multi-millionaire. I promise that people ask me every single day, multiple times a day, it never stops. It’s, ‘Do you play in the NBA? What do you do? How tall are you?’ I actually have fun with it. My wife hates it because she cringes at us. I go, ‘I’m not a basketball player, I’m an accountant.’ I go, ‘Yeah, what do you think? Just because I’m tall, you think I should play basketball?’ And they go, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I go, ‘I’m just joking.’ Just to lighten up the mood. But I love having fun.”

On when he had the big growth spurt:

“I was always a tall kid. I remember my primary school teacher used to call me tall man as a kid. By the time I was 11, I was already six foot. Then by the time between 11 and 13, I had this huge growth spurt. By the time I was 13 I was six seven.”

On when he realized he was not growing at a normal rate:

“Not until I got to college in the States. It took me years of playing basketball, and then the doctor realized that what’s going on with you is not normal.”

On what would have happened had the doctor not realized:

“I’d have been dead. So it’s kind of similar to what Andre The Giant had. It’s called acromegaly. I think Big Show has it as well. But mine is kind of unique, because I have acromegaly, I also have gigantism, just means that you just grow really, really tall, and I have what you call Partial Cushing’s disease. I don’t know how to explain, it’s kind of complicated, but I have all three combined, and it was the first time in endocrine history that they found a patient that has all three combined. So I’m a really, really rare case, to the point where they had a journal published about my case. Yes, it was a treat for endocrine doctors to say we have read about this in textbooks, but you’re the first person to admit that actually has this condition.”

Is there any pain?

“I have no pain, I’m pain-free. I’m great. The thing about it is once you keep on growing your heart, your organs keep on growing too. Then it’s like cardiac arrest and things of sort. It’s a protein; you probably heard about this in bodybuilding. It’s called IGF-1 [Insulin Growth Factor]. My body produces too many growth hormones, so I have to take a medication to stop my body from using the growth hormones so that I don’t get any bigger.”

On getting the condition diagnosed:

“I walk in and they pull out my MRI. They go, Hey, so we did the MRI on your brain. They go, you see this little dot right here, you have a pituitary tumor. We’re gonna take it out or one or two options. Either you’re gonna go blind or you’re gonna have a heart attack. Because my body was just producing so much growth hormones, it was making my heart enlarged. So they said, We need to get this fixed now. So that’s how I found out about that. I know it was a blessing. I was 18 years old, and it was just me and myself in college. My parents were back home in Nigeria. I’m like, this huge that has been put on me. I never expected anything like that to happen my entire life.”

On what car Omos drives:

“I drive a Honda Palisade, which sounds crazy, but it has a lot of leg room, and I recline, sit all the way back to drive it. I do need a bigger vehicle. I would acknowledge that. But for right now, it does the trick.”

On his passion for fragrances:

“This is embarrassing, and before I say this, I do acknowledge that I do have a problem [laughs]. I have about 350 bottles. I can wear one for every day of the year and not wear the same fragrance twice, it works.”

Do you not have your favorites?

“It’s hard, they’re all my babies. It’s something that I discovered. Everybody likes nice smells, but something I discovered I had a passion for when I went to Saudi Arabia, and it just kind of hit me out of nowhere, and I just fell down a rabbit hole. But I don’t have a favorite. It’s so hard because it all depends on how I’m feeling.”

On receiving advice from The Undertaker:

“I’ve been blessed from the first day. I remember the first time I met him. I was at NXT, this is when we were still filming at Full Sail. I’m walking to Gorilla in the back, and I see Hunter. Hunter goes, ‘Hey, I have a special surprise for you.’ He [Undertaker] just walks out, and I rarely get star-struck. I just go oh it’s The Undertaker! He goes, ‘Hey big fella’, and he just gave me a big hug. I was shocked. I was shook. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and from that day it just became like a bond. He’s pretty much like a, because he can’t be my dad, sorry Taker, but he’s been such a great influence on me, and I appreciate him. We talk quite often. He gives me advice. Whenever I’m trying to figure out a match or a spot, I always ask, What would Undertaker do? Because I do admire how he’s been able to transcend the business, because he has built one of those characters that, even after he passes, that character is going to be forever.”

On competing in Japan:

“What happened was I saw Tavion Heights of NXT and Josh Briggs go to Japan. I was just watching the videos and everything. Then, as they were doing shows in Japan, an interview came out with Great Muta, they asked him, Who would you love to have in Japan? The first name he mentions is me. I’m like, Oh, wow. That’s great. I didn’t think he would remember me, but he did. So I kind of threw the idea to a couple of guys about Japan. I remember seeing Road Dogg at the PC, ‘Hey, do you have a couple of minutes to chat? Not really busy right now, but I would love to go to Japan.’ He said, ‘You know what? Let me think about it.’ And then a couple months later, he was like, ‘Hey, you have an opportunity to go to Japan. Do you want to go?’ I was like, Yes! I want to go to Japan. To be honest, I am glad I did. I needed to go to Japan.”

On his style in Japan:

“I would say a little bit [different]. I took a lot of things that I learned while I was working with MVP. There were a lot of things that we talked about when we were on the road together, because he taught me a lot. I just took all that style. When I was there I called him, because he wrestled in Japan. I called him. I called Shelton Benjamin, and they go, ‘Hey, in Japan, you’re a heel, be a heel. They love it, be the nastiest heel.’ I’m like, Oh, really? So I really got to embrace that. And they loved it.”

On when he expects to be back in the ring:

“I don’t know. I’m just waiting. I’m kind of in a scenario where I’m kind of like a special attraction. Whenever that time comes, I’m ready.”

On the cage match with Bobby Lashley:

“Another fun thing about that match is that’s also one of my favorite matches, the cage match, because that was also my birthday. I think that was 2022, and I was sick as a dog that day. I was so sick. Oh, my God. I remember the couple days before we had the show in Wilkes-Barre. We had a dark match, and this is when we used to do the big man class. Shout out to Adam Pearce and Jamie Noble. We used to do big man class, had a little snuffle but I was fine. Then I catch my flight on Friday morning to Philadelphia, end of my flight, I don’t know what happened, whether it was atmospheric pressure, but I just start sweating balls and having a headache, and I just feel so horrible on the plane. I’m thinking, maybe it’s just the plane. I landed in Philadelphia, go to the bathroom, splash water on my face, and then I’m like I’m okay. I get my luggage, try to get a rental. I’m gonna call an Uber to the hotel, thinking to give myself a couple of hours, take a nap, I’ll be fine.

Every hour that I woke up that day, I got even more progressively sick. I had to call the doctor and say, ‘Hey, I’m here. I’m at the hotel, but I am so sick.’ I had a phlegm coughed up in the sink, and it was just like gunk of this colored mucus in the sink. They’re like, we’re gonna send you a COVID kid to test and make sure you don’t have COVID. Luckily, I didn’t. Spent the night in Wilkes-Barre, I felt better. Drove from Wilkes-Barre to lower Maryland, because my wife was doing a rotation at that time in medical school. I drove out there, when I joined her there, she drugged me up that whole weekend. Because we had this cage match, we had it advertised for the whole week, and it was my birthday. There’s no way in heck I was missing that match. So that whole weekend was just recovery, hydration, and drove to the show in Norfolk, Virginia. We drove that Sunday night, got there. On Monday morning, everybody goes, Are you okay? I’m like, Oh, I’m fine. I’m fine. I was like, 50% okay. I did the match, and something just happens to me. It just happened to me in the ring. I just performed and whatever you’re feeling just disappears. I felt amazing in the ring, Bob and I put on a great show. Everything was great. Then on the drive back, just felt sick again. I guess I got sick on the way back, because my wife drove halfway. She also felt sick. Then I drove the other half, and it was a miracle to make it back to her apartment that night. But yes, that’s the story of that day. So that deal, which sticks in my head.”

On whether there were concerns the cage would not break:

“Yes. I was like, please, break. Because if it doesn’t break, it is gonna be a sh*tty spot. So I said, Please, please, please. It was on my birthday. I said, you cannot mess this up. You have to throw this man through this cage with all your might. And I’m glad I did, because if you didn’t.”

On whether there were concerns the cage might break too early:

“I wasn’t thinking about that because I was so in the moment that I just forgot until we got to the spot. I was just in the match, and we’re just having fun, until we got to this spot, like, Okay, time for you to break. You better break!”

On whether there were concerns Brock Lesnar could not German suplex him:

“No, Brock, he’s a specimen. I wasn’t worried at all. People forget he’s a farm boy. He throws hay for a living. So him picking me up at 300-400 pounds. I knew he was gonna be able to do that. If Bobby can pick me up, I knew he could. That was my first time ever taking a suplex. Never taken it in training, never done it to PC, not from anyone. That’s the first time I ever took it in German suplex was during that match.”

You didn’t do it the day before?

“No. He’s such a great dude. Because I remember during rehearsals, he just goes, ‘Hey, how many Germans do you want to do?’ I’m like, ‘Brother, it’s you Brock. However much you want to give me, brother. You’re doing me a favor with this match. So however many Germans you want that makes you look good, we’re gonna do it.’ He goes, okay.”

On the F5:

“That F5 was easy. The Germans sucked. But for the first time in my entire life, I never felt someone hook me that way, and I could feel the muscles contract when he picked me up. For the first time I felt that oh sh*t, I can’t do anything.”

On being thrown through the announce table by 6 guys:

“That was Money in the Bank 2022, I believe. I had never been put through a table. I don’t know what that feels like. I remember during rehearsals, the guys picked me up. It was Sheamus, Sami, Drew, Matt Riddle, Austin Theory, Riddick Moss and Seth Rollins all pick me up and I was like, whoa, this is high. I said this really feels like taking my finish. Oh, wow. This is high. So they go, because they had a crash mat out. And they go, 1, 2, 3. Oh sh*t, this is gonna suck. I remember during the spot, during the actual match, and we did a spot, if you watch the video I’m just laying down there like this. I just close my eyes, and I’m just dreaming. All I hear is 1, 2, 3. It was the longest fall, the highest fall ever. I just saw my body going, and it kept on going. Okay, where’s the table? It kept on going and kept on going and kept on going and I hit a table. And I was like, Oh, this sucks, but okay, I’m here. It’s done. My part of the match is done for the night. But I was pretty high. I was like, wow, this is hot.”

On playing a ninja on TV:

“We shot at like 5 am, 6 am. They were shooting all night because they had all these spots they had to shoot. I remember The Viking Raiders running through the glass, and the glass exploded. Dawkins spearing Ivar through the glass, and it exploded and he had glass shards in his body he had to take out. We’re just off shooting. It was just so much fun. I remember pulling out the katana sword, because I’m a huge nerd, so you give me a sword I become a five-year-old kid. I had a blast. I was smiling cheek to cheek under the mask. I’m like, wait, I get to be a ninja on TV?! You’re telling me you’re going to give me a katana. Thank God it wasn’t sharpened!”

What is Omos grateful for?

“My health, my wife and life.”

Hornswoggle Is Hilarious! Little People’s Court, DX, Vince’s Son, WWE Legends Deal, The Rock

in LATEST EPISODES on May 27, 2025 January 30, 2026

https://cvvtix.com – Get your tickets for INSIGHT LIVE in LA and NYC with VIP Meet & Greet!

Dylan Postl (@DylanPostl) is a professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE as Hornswoggle. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Oshkosh, WI to discuss his WWE and overcoming the odds to make it as a professional wrestler, being under a WWE nostalgia deal, what happened when he met The Rock for the first time, cosplaying as AJ Styles in TNA, appearing at WWE World in his leprechaun gimmick and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “If nothing changes, then nothing changes.”

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On losing weight:

“I lost 38 pounds. My heaviest was 181 and when I weighed myself last I was 138.”

Could you work a full match right now?

“Chris, I have not worked a real match ever. I don’t work matches.”

We’ve all seen WeeLC:

“I’m never touching that again, and I had 19 other guys helping me with that as well. Obviously the most proud I’ve ever been in that match, and I’m very happy with what I can do. I didn’t want to be the guy biting ass and doing haha bullsh*t, and now I’m the guy doing haha bullsh*t. But it’s okay, because it pays the same. In reality, I don’t need to do 19 flips. When I got fired, my thing was I’m gonna be the indie guy, and I clearly found out quickly I can’t be the indie guy. My stature and my weight at that time just wasn’t meant to be. I’m okay with that. So now I’m back to biting asses and getting a reaction.”

On the WWE legends deal:

“The legends deal, man, it nostalgia. It’s a WWE nostalgia deal. They don’t call me a legend anymore.”

On how the call came:

“Legitimately, Landon and I were on our way to see Blink-182. I get the call, I literally had to pull over, and I just froze. You know me, you know how I view me through these interviews, a lot of people know how I view me. I don’t view myself as very great in wrestling. So to have that recognition is the ultimate. This is pretty f*cking awesome. It just makes me feel like I mattered in WWE with this now, that it wasn’t a got rid of me, released me, which is okay. No one deserves a job. That’s my thing. Whenever people get released, internet goes crazy about ‘How could they do this?’ No one in any workforce deserves a job. You’re lucky to have that, especially that kind of job. And so now to be back under a legends deal, it’s incredible. It’s just like the coolest thing ever.”

On doing WWE World in leprechaun gimmick:

“All these promoters wanted me to wear it. I’ve never worn it. I don’t want to be, nothing against him, I don’t want to be Dink. I don’t want to be these guys at the conventions, showing up in their stuff that doesn’t look right anymore. It looks disheveled. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to do that. But for that, I had to. Almost cut the hair.

I did the signing at the World, and I didn’t think that would ever happen again, and so I needed to wear the suit. And like putting a suit on was emotional, because I felt home, literally, I felt home. For those three hours being treated incredibly by WWE, by Fanatics.”

On whether his son Landon has started training:

“He goes to our school. Professionally, I won’t train him until he’s 17. [Why 17?] Because our other classes start when they’re 17. One of the Joshes that you met today. Bearded, bigger Josh. He’s my business partner. I’ve known him since I was in third grade, best friends ever since. He’s the head trainer of our school with me, he made a good point to Landon and he goes, you’re gonna have enough of an uphill battle because of who your dad is. No matter what you can be the best out there, but everything’s gonna be the thought of it’s because it’s your dad. You need to already break those barriers. If we start training you early, it’s another thing they can hold against you and hold against us.”

On when he was being ok being himself:

“I’ve never been okay with it. Secretly, through counseling and therapy, I realize that even more. It’s okay, guys. LA Knight talked about it, it’s okay to go to counseling. It’s okay to go to therapy. I thought for the longest time it wasn’t, but it’s the best, being better with yourself and having that is the greatest thing ever. I love it. I don’t think I’ve ever accepted okayness. I’ve just accepted that it’s life, if that makes sense. There’s things that suck, having to kick a stool around my house, around my kitchen to get things, having to do that, just boarding a flight and having to ask the stewardess to get my bag from above or put it up there. That’s just life, though.”

On reaction from non-wrestling fans:

“Kids, obviously. When I go out, there’s two reactions, [gasps] or why does that baby have a beard kind of thing. You see in their minds he’s like me, but he’s not. It’s just life though. Landon, I’m just dad to him, obviously, and I’m just me. This is who I’ve always been. So he never saw me, obviously, differently, and he was very young when he [noticed], but his friends noticing me, how I am, and him just kind of saying, ‘Hey, that’s just my dad.'”

On issues with Peter Dinklage:

“F*ck you Peter Dinklage, piece of sh*t. F*cking hate him. He costed so many people in my community jobs with that Snow White bullsh*t, it p*sses me off.”

“I think he wanted to make a statement, and he thought he was making some cool, hip thing. But it wasn’t. When he did Elf, that check cashed just fine. Tyrion Lannister was a role for a little person. He cashed that check for all those years. I’m okay not going out for Brad Pitt’s role. Give me Grumpy or Happy or Sleepy. Major Disney remake? Yeah! Come on. Then you’re gonna have seven dwarves. Then there are extras, then there’s stunt doubles that are all gonna get paid. And he f*cked it.”

On little people’s court:

“So happy, man, there’s gonna be a whole segment for me again, insane. They’re going through that, that whole time, going from the Vince’s son stuff to that everything was just like, it’s crazy to me. I would have full segments just for me. Now I’m finally starting to be able to look back and go, whoa. It’s pretty cool.”

On the mini battle royal:

“Little Batista got kicked out of backstage because he was taking photos.”

Who was he taking photos of?

“We don’t need to talk about that. He got escorted out. I go, ‘Where’s little Batista?’ They go, ‘Oh he got asked very politely to leave the building.'”

On the first time he met The Rock:

“So I am in a suit, a legit suit, not my leprechaun outfit, with my gear bag, and I’m gonna meet him behind the curtain as he comes through. In my mind, best friends, I see my buddy Dwayne come back through, oh boy he we go! I say, ‘Hey man, thank you so much for coming back. Thanks for what you’re gonna do for WrestleMania and what you’re gonna do for the company, and just glad to have you back. Good to meet you. My name is Dylan.’ He extends his arm out, goes, ‘Did you have a good time tonight buddy?’ Taps me on the shoulder, leaves. I go, Oh no, he doesn’t realize I work here. I was on the show before that. I told Kofi, thinking he would have my back and support me. He supported me by texting 97 people immediately while driving because he couldn’t wait on it. Within 30 seconds, I had so many people message me. ‘Rock thought you were a Make-A-Wish kid, huh?’ Big Show called him out the next week about this, because it got to Big Show. Rock goes, ‘No. Yeah, I did, yeah, I did. I don’t watch the show.’ I approached him about it too and he said, ‘Yeah, Big Show already got on me about this.'”

On getting thrown into the cage by JBL:

“He threw me, and I landed right on the Shillelagh, which hurt the worst. Everything was okay, and it sucked, but landing that bump into the Shillelagh under me and going, Oh no. But then having to sell dead, it was weird, because I was like, I can’t sell. I can’t actively sell because I’m supposed to be just out of it. It’s nuts. It’s not the thing that that whole thing was, the original plan was Fit versus Vince at WrestleMania. That was the original idea, man.”

On when he realized he looked like AJ Styles with long hair:

“Never, not until I did a stand-up thing at a Conrad Thompson show. I did one of my evening with things, opened up for him, and someone posted a photo of me with the long hair and the goatee. I forget who even said it, but someone said, Mini AJ or AJ Swoggle, posted it, and then it took off. Orton tweeted about it. The Good Brothers, they loved it, so they pitched it to Scott D’Amore, of course, or Scott pitched it to them. I never saw it. I just never saw it at all. But then, as soon as they thought of the idea. I was like, Yep, let’s do it again. TV time. Fine by me.”

On his favourite WrestleMania memory:

“I always go back between 23, the bump from Ken, and 24. 24, that match was because of me. And that’s not an ego thing, it was written because of me, because of my role. It’s crazy. Having an entrance at WrestleMania and that was my first day back with WrestleMania. Insane. Love it.”

What is Hornswoggle grateful for?

“My son, my family and friendships.”

Mr. Kennedy: WWE’s Biggest “What If”, MITB, Brutal Undertaker Chair Shot, Training Tiffany Stratton

in LATEST EPISODES on May 22, 2025 January 30, 2026

DESCRIPTION:https://cvvtix.com – Get your tickets for INSIGHT LIVE in LA and NYC with VIP Meet & Greet!

Ken Anderson (@mrkenanderson) is a professional wrestler previously signed to WWE and known by his ring name Mr. Kennedy. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Indianapolis, IN to talking about his wrestling school “The Academy” and to discuss his WWE career highlights that included winning and losing the Money in the Bank briefcase, nearly being named Mr. McMahon’s illegitimate son and feuding with The Undertaker, his signature microphone entrance, why he never returned to WWE, winning the TNA World Championship, training Tiffany Stratton and more!

Give Ken a call: 507-772-2776

Quote I’m thinking about: “You can have results or excuses. Not both.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger

Please support our sponsors!
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On how much longer he intends to wrestle:

“You know, it’s funny. When I was in TNA, I had a really bad attitude about the business. I had sort of soured on it, and somebody asked me in an interview, and I was like, ‘If I’m still doing this in five years, somebody shoot me.’ I kind of look back on that, and I just like, I can’t believe I said something like that. I don’t know how long, but I’m going to go until the wheels fall off. I mean, not like, ‘Hey, you should have retired 15 years ago…’ wheels fall off, but I still feel like I have some juice.”

On the first time he met Tiffany Stratton:

“So she was friends with Greg Gagne. Greg is a family friend, and Greg reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this girl, she’s a power lifter and she does gymnastics and stuff. She’s a super athlete, really good look, and I want to train her. Can we come?’ So she started coming and, right away, day one, she’s one of those people. I was saying earlier, we take our time to get to the flip bumps and stuff like that. But Alex Findley and Tiffany Stratton, day one, they’re doing perfect flip bumps, landing perfectly. Gable Steveson, show him how to get up, bump, and then get up a certain way. He did it. I said, get up this way, and he started getting up the wrong way. I said uh uh, then he reversed himself, back down, and got up perfectly the right way. But yeah, Tiffany, day one, there’s some stuff people just have instincts for. I think she’s one of those people. However, the funny thing was, I don’t mean this in a negative way, she didn’t have any charisma as far as she just did the work. She didn’t have the character stuff down. I have her first promo. I’ll have to ask her someday for her permission to put it out there, right? Because it’s not good.”

Rate it on a scale of 1 to 10:

“Zero [laughs]. And I think she would probably agree with me. Everybody’s first interview is terrible. But to see how far she has come is pretty awesome.”

On what Gable Steveson was missing:

“I don’t think that he loves the wrestling business. I mean, WWE has done the NIL thing for a while. I remember back when, I think when I was there, there was always these rumors that WWE is only taking guys that are six foot one or taller. Then for a while, they wouldn’t take anybody that had independent experience. I just think the guys who are successful love this.”

On whether he wanted to come back to WWE after being let go:

“I didn’t want to, I swear to God, I had no desire. I think that I never wanted to blow the bridge up completely. But I really had no desire. When I was at TNA, I was like, I’ll never go back there. I’ll never work for them again. Now it’s changed. I would definitely [go back] now.”

Was it the animosity?

“Yeah. And I think the animosity was, instead of looking at myself, I was looking at this person did this, and that person did that, and they screwed me. Then at some point I realized I played a hand, a huge hand, in all that.”

On when he realized that was the case:

“I don’t exactly know what it was. But it was like well, you know those guys who went to Vince and said, ‘Hey, we can’t work with this guy anymore.’ Had I been doing all the right things up until that point, that conversation would have gone differently. The fact was that that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Vince was tired of [it all]. There was a lot of negativity around things that I was doing, my attitude, and then that, like, get rid of him.”

On being one of the biggest what-ifs in wrestling:

“I guess there’s a ton of mistakes that were made along the way. And the one thing, I can’t go back, can’t change any of that. I can just move forward. And what I can do is hopefully show my students, hey, don’t do this. To some degree, we all think that about our kids too. I’m just gonna tell my kid not to do it, and he’s gonna listen to me, right? Don’t touch the stove. They gotta touch this stove at some point, but hopefully they don’t have to put their own hand on it.”

On missing out on becoming World Champion:

“So, I had won the briefcase, and they had me say on TV that I was going to cash it in next year at WrestleMania, and that was the plan. At the time, I don’t know if things have changed, but it’s literally week by week, the writing for the most part, because things change so rapidly. So it’s just kind of like, Hey, we’re thinking about doing this, but you never know what curveballs are going to be thrown at you. So then one night after SmackDown, I got a call from Michael Hayes. He said, ‘Vince needs to see you in his office.’ So I walked in and Vince and Stephanie laid out the scenario. ‘Hey, Taker’s hurt.’ I think he tore his biceps. He was the champion at the time. ‘He needs to have surgery. He needs to go away.’ Then they laid out the scenario for the next week on SmackDown. He was going to have a cage match with Mark Henry, or Batista or somebody like that. He was going to barely squeak out, somebody else was going to come out and do some more damage to him, and then I was going to come out and pick the bones, cash in the briefcase, cover him, 1 2 3. So then I remember that night going out with, nobody knew about this, except for a few people, and Michael Cole and Mark Carrano were the only two that knew. For some reason, I didn’t make it a habit, or I just generally didn’t hang out with these guys, but we went out to the bar that night, and they were kind of like toasting me. ‘Here’s to hard work kid.’ I just had this weird feeling. And then the next week, we did a double shot in Poughkeepsie on a house show on a Saturday. First show, I’m in an eight-man tag. Batista gives me a little clothesline, I went down, and I felt something pop in my tricep, and I rolled out to the floor, and it just started swelling up, right away. And I remember Finley standing there going, ‘That doesn’t look good.’ By the time I got downstairs, my arm was swollen, was starting to change colors, which is weird, because that usually takes a couple of days. Honswoggle drove me to the ER in I think it was Erie, Pennsylvania, then I went to the hotel room. Next day, Stephanie called me. She said, ‘Ken, you tore your tricep off the bone. You’re going to have to have surgery. You’re going to go away for nine months. We still need to get that title off of Taker, though, so we’re sending the jet to come pick you up. You’re going to come to Penn State. Edge is going to challenge you for your briefcase, and then he’s going to go on and do what you were supposed to do.’ Okay, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, whatever, that’s business. Flew there, got wrapped up. I couldn’t move my arm. It was kind of like, what can you do? Not much. So Edge beat me up, I think he jumped me on the ramp, rolled me in the ring, ding, ding, ding, spear, 1 2 3. So then the next day, I go down to Birmingham, Alabama, sitting on Doctor Andrews’ table, and he just feeling my arm, and he goes, ‘That’s not a tear.’ Excuse me? ‘No, I don’t think that’s a tear.’ Then he took another MRI. It was just a large hematoma. It was just a bunch of blood vessels that popped. So MVP says you were a misdiagnosis away from becoming World Champion.”

On becoming TNA World Champion:

“I’ve said this before. Like you just said, it’s not exactly the same, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t proud of that. At the end of the day, it’s a prop, if you don’t understand that, The Rock just put out the tweet and said it’s a complete work. It always is. It’s fiction. If you don’t understand that. So I didn’t really win anything, but at some point it’s like all these people felt that you could carry the [company].”

On always being able to catch the microphone in his entrance:

“I didn’t. There’s a really funny video, because they used to mess with me. They drop it real slow sometimes, or sometimes they just drop it. There’s one time where they dropped it fast and I missed it, the thing goes swinging. I just look up, there it is. I just knew where my mark was. It was one of those things too. I think for the most part, every day it was different in every ring, or in every arena. So I’d just get in there and check it and make sure. Or they’d come up and say, like, hey, it’s a little farther to the back today.”

On knowing Hornswoggle would be safe on that ladder bump:

“I didn’t [laughs]. I was hoping to. No, it was something that I had. So when I made my debut, it was supposed to be a dark match against Funaki. He was going to Super Kick me, 1 2 3, it was just going to be dark. Dave Lagana walks up. This is right after Dreamer called me and said, they want to see you. Vince walked by me. Dave walked by me. He goes, Hey, there’s a change. I immediately thought they cut the match. That’s cool, whatever. Then he was like, ‘We need to come up with a finisher for you, because you’re going over, and this is going to be televised now on Velocity, welcome aboard.’ So right away, Fit Finlay was our producer. And he’s like, what can you do? And I was like, I do the Finlay roll off the second rope. And Funaki [looked shocked]. I was like, ‘Please, if you just hold on to me, squeeze tight, I’ll take care of you. I’ll set you down gently, no problem. I promise.’ He trusted me, and when we came back through the curtain after doing it, he was like, Oh, I didn’t feel anything, was great. So I knew that I could do it safely, and I knew that I could. Hornswoggle is probably one of the heavier guys that I’ve done that too. I’m kidding! Then you’re in an awkward position trying to get him, scoop him up the other ladder. So we had to really walk through that a couple of times. Luckily, it’s WrestleMania. I’m sure it’s the same way now, but they would have a big ballroom with a couple of rings, crash pads, extra ladders and stuff like that, so you could go practice and try some things.”

On a stiff chair shot from The Undertaker:

“It didn’t hurt. I feel like WWE has erased that from their [history], you can only find that on YouTube. Every once in a while it gets scrubbed and taken down, because I’ve tried looking it up a few times, and it’s actually sometimes it’s kind of hard to find or to get a good copy of it.”

How did that not hurt?

“Because instead of holding both legs, you hold just one set of legs. Get your thumbs inside. Then when you hit it, it just opens up. It just kind of folds. It wasn’t bad. He was one of the lightest guys I’ve ever worked with on anything, nothing he ever did connected.”

On the exploding microphone with The Undertaker:

“Magic! No, there was a guy in WWE, that was his job, magic department. If you go backstage, it says magic. It was like he was in charge of anytime there was a special effect that something needed to explode or blow up. He was the guy that did it.”

It didn’t look safe:

“It was. The way he rigged it. He just said, as soon as you go to pull it back, we’re going to set it off. I think we tried it during the day. It was fine. It didn’t hurt.”

On the Signature Pharmacy scandal:

“I got home, I literally walked in my door and I got a call from Johnny. ‘Hey Vince needs to see you in Stanford this afternoon, just go to the airport. We don’t even have a flight booked for you. We’ll figure it all out. We’ll keep in touch with you.’ So I just jump back in the car and went right back to the airport. I’m like, here we go, this is it, big time, baby. Things are going to start changing. The car picks me up, takes me to Titan towers. And as I’m pulling in, I see Chavo and Funaki and a couple of other guys. ‘What are you guys doing here?’ ‘I don’t know. They told me I had to come.’ Then I think it was Chavo who said, ‘Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s good.’ I’m trying to think what it is. Then there was 10 of us, I think, sitting outside Vince’s office, one by one. We were like, whoever goes in, come out, smarten everybody up. Tell us what it is. Edge was the first guy to go in. He went and he was in there for about five minutes, and he came back out and he goes, ‘I can’t say anything. It’s not good.’ So then I was like, fourth, fifth, to go in, and that was the Signature Pharmacies thing. The thing was when they instituted the wellness policy, you get all these people, there was a lot of us that had been using PEDs for a long time, and you just suddenly go cold turkey. So there were people, you can see it if you watch video from then, people shrinking, shriveling up. We are still running that hard schedule too, four or five days a week, or doing overseas tours and stuff. It’s tough on your body, and it’s also tough when you go into this, especially with testosterone. You go from this synthetic testosterone to your body has shut down making testosterone on its own. So now your testosterone is depleted. So we asked what can we do? Hey, as long as you go and get a prescription, a doctor’s prescription, you’re good. Then all these wellness clinics around the country, so that’s what I did. That’s what a bunch of us did. So I went and I had blood work done. The doctor prescribed me these things, and I started taking them. I didn’t even fail a test. It was just because my name was attached to this thing, it was on ESPN, I remember. But the thing was, the problem was that because I explained that in the office to Vince. He’s like, ‘We instituted the wellness policy on this day. Why are you still taking this stuff?’ I explained it to him, and then he goes, ‘Yeah, but you can’t have an online pharmacy fill your [prescription].’ That was in the wellness policy. I was like, I didn’t know that. My doctor filled it, he was using an online pharmacy. So that was that.”

What is Mr. Kennedy grateful for?

“My wife, my kids and my health.”

Lyra Valkyria On Making WWE History, Complicated Becky Lynch Relationship, WrestleMania, Bayley

in LATEST EPISODES on May 20, 2025 January 30, 2026

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Lyra Valkyria (@Real_Valkyria) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE and the reigning Women’s Intercontinental Champion. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at St. Louis, MO to discuss growing up in Ireland and making it to WWE, being inspired by Becky Lynch and getting to wrestle The Man, becoming the first-ever Women’s Intercontinental Champion, tagging with Bayley, briefly being a double champion, the inspiration behind her entrance and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.” – Vince Lombardi

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On career setbacks:

“There’s been a lot of points in my career where it felt very out of the frying pan and into the fire. I feel like so far, I’ve never let myself down on that. But I suppose a point where I was on the cusp of something and then it all fell flat was when I tore my ACL in NXT UK. I was on the road to coming back to another match with Meiko Satomura, who was the NXT UK Women’s Champion at the time, and my whole world was who’s going to be the one to beat Meiko? The talk of the locker room, the talk of everything, she was the ultimate champion, the ultimate person you wanted to be in the ring with. That was everything, the NXT UK Women’s Championship. So then we were just coming back from COVID and wrestling in front of nobody. Actually, I heard Bayley tore her ACL, and this was right as the crowds were coming back. I was like that’s awful timing, how awful. I did it one week later, and there’s so much when I think about it. I did it from doing a sunset bomb from the corner, and I was at the show in Dublin where Seth Rollins did the same thing, where he tore his knee. So yeah, I saw his last match as the WWE Champion. If you told me back then that I was going to do the exact same thing, it’s pretty wild. But I feel like I was on the road there to possibly, maybe becoming the NXT UK Women’s Champion, or having that match with Meiko, that rematch that I never got, that I really wanted. But that’s the one thing in my career where I’m like, I wonder what if?”

Did you know it was torn?

“No, I didn’t even know what that meant. I’d never had any bad injuries. I know now you hear about a torn knee or something, it’s big. I didn’t know that. I’ll never forget it. I was on my way into town to meet my now fiancé. I remember I finished the match, and I remember they wanted to put me on crutches going into the airport, and I was like, No, I’m fine. I thought it was one of those things where I’d be fine in two weeks. It’ll be okay.”

Were you in pain?

“No, like, in the moment, it was really bad. But then after that, I really did just think, oh yeah, this will be fine. The surgery messed me up so much more than the injury, it was the surgery that killed me, that set me back. But the actual injury, I was like, ‘Do I even need surgery?’ So they were like, ‘You need a scan.’ I didn’t think I did. So I was like, Okay, we’ll do this, and I felt so confident that it was going to be fine. The fact that the referee did the X and we had to pause the match. I remember actually thinking when we did the scan, I hope there’s something there, just so I don’t look like it was nothing. But I had no idea how bad it was going to be. So I was in town about to meet my fiancé, and I get a phone call and they tell me that I have a torn ACL and I’m like, ‘Okay, what does that mean?’ They were like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be surgery.’ I’m like ‘Surgery?’ They were like, ‘Yeah, you’re going to be out for like nine months to a year.’ I couldn’t believe it. I remember I was standing in the corner shop, and I was just so shocked. There was tears rolling down my face, and I was like, I can’t be out for a year. Then I remember I was meeting my fiancé there, and I remember seeing him and like grabbing him by the shoulder as he was walking by, and he just sees me on the phone crying, and he turns around he doesn’t know what’s happened. It was so rough. But I’d say that was a big down point. But now I kind of just look at it and be like no, it was a great struggle. When you’re out, there’s nothing more you want than to get back. So it forces you to think about why you do this, what you want from this, and when you’re forced to be on the sidelines, it makes you appreciate everything so much more. It kind of just refreshes your work ethic and your drive.”

On possibly coming back from injury and facing Meiko Satomura:

“There was a big part of me that was hoping, maybe they’ll wait for me, maybe I’ll still come back and be the one to beat Meiko. Now I’m kind of wise enough to know that this does not wait for anyone. But yeah, I had a lot of ups and downs in waiting, but I wouldn’t change it for anything. I feel like that injury really helped me, kind of iron sharpens iron. I don’t know, it just made me tougher.”

On her inspiration:

“That was Becky. She was the first. When I saw NXT, the very first thing I saw was her Irish dancing debut. That was it. I was already a fan, but that was what set the ball rolling of she must have started somewhere, she didn’t just spawn over there. If she’s from Ireland, is there somewhere to do this here? That was what made me go down the Wikipedia rabbit hole of where is there to train in Ireland.”

On being one of the few from Ireland to make it in WWE:

“It’s crazy. But also, you look at how small Ireland is, and how many of us are on Raw right now. It’s crazy, I feel like we’re really good at producing the best.”

On why the Irish wrestlers are so successful:

“I feel like it’s just our approach to this, and how we see what happens between the ropes. We have this certain grit about us, we train on the mats. When I started, we didn’t have a ring, we were learning to bump on mats, that kind of thing. I don’t know, there’s just a very kind of, how bad do you want it? Don’t let anyone beside you do more push-ups than you. If you are going to get on the show, you have to earn your spot. You have to bring something to the table that no one else is. You have to be the best. We were very competitive, but also supportive. I feel like there’s two types of competitor. You can be nasty with your competition, or you can [be supportive]. I want you to do great so I can do better. When it’s supportive, you want to help each other, and it’s like, we all get better together by pushing each other and by trying to outdo each other, but it’s in a nice way. And I love that about wrestling.”

On being inspired by Becky Lynch:

“Honestly, I don’t think I went, I can go do that. It was one of those things where I was watching Raw super late, because it starts at 1 am and I was again, down the rabbit hole. Where can I go to do this? I was looking at who’s in the club? I was not very outgoing. I was very, very shy. So if I started something, I needed a friend to go with me and that kind of thing. I was never the one. I was the quiet friend, I think. I was always a bit awkward, but this was the one thing that I was like, if I go, I’ll just do it. I even considered giving a fake name so that if it goes really badly, no one has to know about it, and my friends would never find out anything like that. It must have been 3 am, and I was on my phone looking it up, I kind of just went, I’m just going to do this. It was actually a Saturday night, and I was up watching wrestling, and I went I’m just going to go tomorrow. Because if I put down my phone right now, go to sleep, and I say, maybe I’ll do this next week. I won’t. It was just one of those freak things that I was like, just get up and go, and it turned my whole life around. That one little decision to just try something really did change my life. Because it sounds like it’s just something to say, but it really did. I decided that day that good or bad, that’s what I’m gonna do. So yeah, that one decision to try something changed everything.”

You remember that first day?

“I don’t remember the session very well. I remember the pain the next day, and I remember running around in a circle with the few guys that were outside. I met my fiancé that very first day as well. He was the first person I ever met. Shook my hand outside the gym.”

On now working with Becky Lynch in WWE:

“It’s just crazy, she’s the one that broke all the glass ceilings, the one that did it all. But she didn’t just do it and succeed; she went and did things that no one ever thought possible. So I have a crazy level of respect for that. Because once someone does something, there’s all these studies about the 4-minute mile, the human capability, how much they can go, right? But then once one person broke that. And then one person broke it, and then when that one person broke it, it was broken by the next person and the next person and the next person. It’s almost like you just need that one person to show you that it’s possible. Then suddenly, it just opens up the floodgates and suddenly there’s no limit. So to have a woman from my tiny country of Ireland to have gone that far, I really feel like if she can, then why not me?”

On winning the Women’s Intercontinental Championship:

“[It’s brought me] A lot of confidence, it’s a big responsibility, and there’s a lot of pressure that comes with it. But I think I’m kind of in control once I get in the ring, that’s where I’m like, no matter what outside noise there is, I’m completely in control of what I do here. So that’s kind of where my power is. No one can take that away.”

On when she first heard about winning the title:

“I never was a part of that conversation. I just find out on Mondays what I’m doing. I found out the day of. I was never a part of the decision or the conversation. I just showed up to work.”

How did it feel when you were told that?

“Amazing. I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t believe it. But things don’t hit me when I think they’re going to. I always say that it never hits me in the moment. It hit me when I was driving home and taking my bags out of the car on the Tuesday. The title is just sitting in my bag, the zip opens, and I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s the Intercontinental Championship. I won that. I brought that home. That’s when it hits me.”

On becoming a double champion:

“I was tag team champions with Becky. It’s funny, when you look at JD McDonough, he always says his dream was to be tag champions with Balor. They did that. And, yeah, however short-lived it was, I was a double champion.”

On the meaning behind her entrance:

“So on the Independents I wrestled as Valkyrie. That’s not Marvel character-based, not bird-based. It’s actually from my favorite book, which is written by an Irish author. I discovered it when I was 12 years old. The main character was 12, living in Dublin, starts this whole new secret life, she has to take on a name to start this new life, and she calls herself Valkyrie. So I started that, and until I went to WWE, I never used the kind of imagery that’s associated with the Valkyrie at all. So then I was like okay, well I should probably use that. So I got the kind of Valkyrie-looking gear for NXT UK, and then when I was moving across, I had to change my name, and I actually contacted the author of that book. So his name’s Derek Landy, and he’s Irish, and he suggested this character called the Morrigan. I was actually a little bit familiar with it. It’s like the Irish Valkyrie from Irish mythology. Finn Balor and his demon character also drew from Irish mythology and stuff. The Morrigan basically transforms into a raven or crow and hovers over the battlefield and decides who’s going to win a battle. So I was like, that’s really cool. I went down that rabbit hole, and it’s just a very cool female warrior character who transforms into a raven. I just thought that was very cool. It was related to the Valkyrie, so it’s still tied to my book and my favorite stuff, and I love mythologies. So yeah, that’s where it all comes from.”

On Becky Lynch replacing Bayley at WrestleMania:

“It came at the expense of Bayley, which is a bit sad because we clicked so well as a tag team. So it was genuinely hard to have my Mania moment come at an expense. Becky is a big part of the reason I started wrestling. But it was the era of the four horsewomen in NXT. It wasn’t just Becky; Bayley was a massive influence as well. So it did kind of taint how great it was knowing it was coming at her expense.”

On the moment being bittersweet:

“It’s hard to talk about or to because there’s so much good, but there’s so much, I don’t know, it’s just tough. [There’s a lot of history with Bayley]. Quick history. We only tagged for a couple of weeks, but we hit it off so well outside of the ring. She’s very easy to chat to and get along with, and she’s just so personable. You meet Bayley and you feel like you’ve known her your whole life. I introduced her to my fiancé, and he was like, I haven’t met her before, have I? And I was like, No. And he was like, I feel like I have just from talking to her there.”

On the Nia Jax spot in the Queen of the Ring Tournament:

“[Laughs] She exploded my ribs.”

Did you really break your ribs?

“No, that was fine. I was okay. It was tough. The Samoan drops were tougher, yeah, honestly, but rough match. She’s a beast.”

On where things go from here:

“Well, I feel like it just keeps going up, because that’s the only way it’s gone so far. I feel like for me to say where it goes next and what my next possibility is, it almost feels like I’m creating my own ceiling, because so much has happened that I didn’t even think was possible. So I’m just gonna keep rolling with the punches and seeing what happens. Because this [Women’s Intercontinental Championship] didn’t exist a year ago. When Becky came down to NXT, I didn’t think that was ever possible. No, she’s on Raw. There was a time when it was unusual for people on Raw or SmackDown to come down to NXT, or it didn’t happen. So I just didn’t think that was a possibility. I never in my life thought that I would beat Becky Lynch for the NXT Women’s Championship. Just didn’t even cross my mind as a possibility.”

What is Lyra Valkyria grateful for?

“My fiancé, the opportunities and all the friends I made.”

Matt Cardona On Chelsea Green, Possible WWE Return, Adam Copeland Match, Chris Jericho, John Cena

in LATEST EPISODES on May 15, 2025 January 30, 2026

https://cvvtix.com – Get your tickets for INSIGHT LIVE in LA and NYC with VIP Meet & Greet!

Matt Cardona (@TheMattCardona) is a professional wrestler previously signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to discuss his post-WWE career 5 years on from the release, why a return has not happened yet, his matches in AEW and ROH against Adam Copeland and Chris Jericho respectively and why they never led to more, advice for released wrestlers, whether he is interested in returning as Zack Ryder, being married to Chelsea Green and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “It’s better to be consistently good than occasionally great.” – Nick Bare

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On some fans potentially not being aware of his work in WWE:

“On the flip side, there are fans that have no idea what I’m doing now. I’m at WrestleCon, [fans say], ‘Where you been, Zack?’ Well, all over the world for the past five years. But I don’t blame them, because times have changed, but I was the biggest wrestling fan growing up. I didn’t watch indie wrestling. It was different then, there was no internet, there was no streaming stuff. So I get some people just watch WWE, and that’s fine.”

On how many people ask him for Zack Ryder autographs:

“I think it’s like 75% Matt, 25% Zack, I get it. Zack Ryder set me up for Matt Cardona. I have no problem signing a Zack Ryder 8 by 10 or an action figure. That Intercontinental Title picture, that 8 by 10, I made thousands of dollars off that, so I’m grateful for it.”

On what was missing from his WWE run that he has now:

“Man, I would have loved the opportunity to show the different side, the heel side, if you will. But in WWE, you could pitch all day, they’re not necessarily going to do it. On the independents, you can do whatever you want. So I organically turned heel, so to speak, on the Indies, and I’m so comfortable in that role. I love that the fans hate me. Now I think they’re starting to love to hate me, which is fine too, because they’re still buying my merch. But I’ve said this a million times. I needed to get fired to find myself. So I don’t even want to say blessing in disguise. It was just a blessing. I needed to get fired to find myself.”

On some fans at independent shows not knowing who he is:

“Absolutely, I learned that from William Regal a long time ago. Every time you walk through the curtain, you have to pretend that they don’t know who you are. I tell it to guys and girls on the indies all the time, you can’t think oh, they watch that cell phone promo you cut. You need to reintroduce yourself and tell that story in the ring. For me, it’s just so easy because I’m this chicken sh*t heel. It’s as simple as ding, ding, ding, we’re about to lock up, I just roll out of the ring. It’s just easy stuff like that that I feel like these bad guys now, they don’t want to be uncool. I have no problem being uncool. There’s other things I can do throughout the match, or even just subtle things on the entrance. Some things could be very cheap, like for instance, putting out your hand for a high five, taking it away. I mean, ripping up a sign, like, that’s kind of easy. It’s just right in front of you stuff, but you got to be smart. Every crowd’s different.”

On being The Complete Matt Cardona:

“So I was The Indie God, The Death Match King, and then I tore my pec, which sucked. There’s no good time to get injured, but that certainly was not a good time to get injured. I was about to, as crazy as it sounds, celebrate my four years of being released from WWE. I filmed this whole hype video, and I got hurt the Saturday before. I’m like, sh*t, just tore my pec. I knew I’d be fine work-wise, because people bring me in to cut promos. I ended up being the General Manager of GCW, so I was fine, money-wise. But being honest, I can’t just come back wearing that crown or The Indie God hat again. I needed a fresh coat of paint, so to speak. So I was just thinking of all these ideas and it just hit me, The Complete. It means so many things, like The Total Package, Lex Luger. I can do it all. I looked the part. I wrestled the part, I talked the part. Or The Complete, everything that led to this point in my career, whether it be the Major Brothers or the YouTube Broski stuff, or winning the IC title, or getting fired, then the death match King the indie got everything wrapped into one is The Complete Matt Cardona.”

On whether he feels complete:

“No, I’m always grateful, but I’m never satisfied, if that makes sense. Of course, if it ended today, I’m very grateful for what happened for my career, 21 plus years, getting paid to live my dream. But I have a lot more goals that I want to accomplish.”

On his advice for released WWE stars:

“I’m paraphrasing it, but it was you have three options, right? You can one, fade into obscurity, feel bad for yourself, have a pity party, never be seen again, or be delusional with your prices and never get booked again. Or you can coast off your WWE name. And I don’t just mean your literal name, I mean the fact that you were in WWE just coast off that. Do a couple of indies here and there, some autograph signings, and you probably do that forever. Or the one I chose, work your ass off, reinvent yourself. Have a lot of f*cking fun and make a lot of f*cking money, and you have three options you choose. It’s not the third one’s not easy, but it’s possible.”

On what option most choose:

“I think history shows that they fall into number two, just coasting. And that’s unfortunate. It’s not easy out there on the independents, especially because a lot of these guys and girls don’t know what it’s like to do the independents. I didn’t, I had to just dive in head first, and I had to teach myself. Of course, I stole things from Cody, from Drew McIntyre, the guys who had left and had made their names even bigger. But then I created my own blueprint.”

On possibly finding a way back to WWE or AEW:

“I’ve said this a million times. When I got released, it wasn’t like, what can I do to get back to WWE or get to AEW? [It was] What can I do to prove myself right? And, oh my God, even saying that again and again and again, for five years, I’ve been saying that I don’t want to prove people wrong, I want to prove myself right and my fans right. It makes me sick to say because I feel like I’ve said it so many times, but it’s the truth. I feel like I have. But man, like, what else do we need to do to get back there?”

On being surprised that he hasn’t returned:

“Honestly? Yeah. But obviously I’m missing something, I don’t know what it is. Listen, people say to me all the time, especially since we just had WrestleMania, WrestleCon. Thousands of people, probably every other fan, if not every fan. ‘When are you coming back?’ Well, it’s not up to me. Or at the WrestleMania Hotel. Thanks, Chelsea for letting me stay in a hotel room for free. Saved me some money. Great hotel. Great Steakhouse, too. But so many people from the office or other wrestling, ‘Hey, man, when are you coming back?’ It’s like, I don’t know. I’ve reached out many times. I shouldn’t say many, a few times, every couple months when something cool happens or I have something to say, hey, look what I’m doing. There’s been no offer. Everything’s very nice, professional, but there’s no offer. And you know what, it is what it is, I’m gonna keep working my ass off.”

On a possible Royal Rumble return as Zack Ryder:

“I’ve had gear ready every single year. So this is the truth. So I always have gear. I’m always ready. I always have gear where the trunks are the same, but the knee pads are interchangeable, the ZR or an MC.”

On not being opposed to returning as Zack Ryder:

“It’s not my first choice. I think Zack Ryder is dead, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. Zack Ryder set me up for Matt Cardona. But I mean, obviously WWE thought Zack Ryder was dead. They fired me five years ago. And my Matt Cardona name. I feel like I’ve done these interviews for five years. And again, this is like how many times have I said this? But I don’t care how you define success, money, accolades, happiness, this is the most successful I’ve ever been in my career as Matt Cardona, but it’s because Zack Ryder and WWE set me up for that.”

On his internet videos and whether there was any issues from WWE:

“I’m never going to be one of those guys that say they buried me for doing this or that. I always want to blame myself. So during that time, did it? Listen, I went from the beginning of the year, 2011, nobody. Started a YouTube show, end of the year, I’m the US Champion, teaming with Cena on Raw, The Rock returns. They’re chanted for me over The Rock. The next year, get pushed off the stage in a wheelchair by Kane. Is that being buried? I don’t want to cop out and say that I could have knocked on Vince McMahon’s door and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ I didn’t do that. I just take all accountability for what happened. I like to just blame myself and move on. Then I kind of floated for a couple of years, and I was always ready anytime they threw me a bone. I capitalized, IC Title WrestleMania, that was after the YouTube run. Then back to doing nothing. Then me and Hawkins with the tag team titles at Mania in New York, New Jersey. Well, it was the pre-show, but I still counted this Mania. It was technically Mania. We got the plaque. There’s a plaque with the canvas and all that. Then I just floated again until I got fired. But I was always ready, always pitching ideas, always being proactive. But it is what it is. There’s so many moving parts in WWE. There’s so many characters. It’s a TV show. Not every character on the TV show could be featured, just how it is.”

On wrestling Adam Copeland in AEW:

“Career highlight for sure. You know, having that match with Adam, it was a match I never thought would happen. WrestleMania 24 is my first WrestleMania, and I run in the main event, me and Hawkins. We’re the Edge Heads. We help Edge, not successfully, Undertaker choke slams us. We’re in the main event of WrestleMania, and this delusional, naive kid saying, ‘Well, next year WrestleMania, it’s gonna be Edge Heads explode. Hawkins, there’s Ryder versus Edge…’ No, that didn’t happen. Hawkins and Ryder were lumberjacks in the Tag Team pre-show match. Then Adam eventually gets the unfortunate career-ending injury, he retires. Then he comes back and I’m in WWE, but then I get fired, and then he leaves and goes to AEW. Well, this match could actually happen now, because AEW, the forbidden door, they’re always bringing people in. So he was doing the Cope open, and I just shot him a text saying basically, ‘Hey man, if you ever need an opponent, just please consider me.’ He said something like, ‘Yeah, I think this story is coming to an end, but if we ever do it again, I’ll keep you in mind.’ I totally forgot about it. Couple months later, got the call. ‘Can you show up Saturday?’ I had to cancel my match with Ultimo Dragon. But yes, I was there and it was, it was an absolute dream match.”

On wrestling Chris Jericho:

“So then I go away for a couple of months, and then I got a call, ‘Hey, you interested in working Chris Jericho at the Hammerstein Ballroom?’ Yeah, let me think about it. Duh! Again, one of my childhood idols, he was on my birthday cake, but I was ninth grade. I love Chris. As a performer, I look up to Chris. So to wrestle Chris, we had a whole program, and for Ring of Honor, had to do it. Another dream match.”

Why didn’t that turn into more?

“Again, I don’t know. Dave Meltzer reported that I got offered a contract, but I did not, so I don’t know what happened.”

On whether he would accept an AEW contract:

“If it made sense. I don’t want to be anywhere just to be a guy on the roster. And I know there’s no guarantees in pro wrestling, but I need like intent, like we see you doing this, or we envision you being here. I don’t want to just collect a check. Been there, done that.”

On being a blueprint for wrestlers getting over:

“I say this all the time. When someone comes up and they ask for [advice], like, I just started wrestling, do you have any advice? Yeah, don’t quit. That’s it. Because it’s not over until you quit. When you quit, then it’s over. Right now, do I wish I was somewhere else, maybe? But it’s like, I’m not there yet. I haven’t achieved everything I want yet. It’s not over until I quit. When I say it’s over, then I never achieved that thing. But I’m not throwing in the towel yet.”

On how much longer he intends to wrestle:

“Until the wheels fall off. I love it. Listen, I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in. I feel like I’m not missing a beat. Do I do the most acrobatic, technical stuff? No. But I’m the same wrestler I was when I was 18. I’m still moving the same. Of course I’ve grown and gotten better and stuff like that. But I feel like I’m at the top of my game in the ring. I don’t care who I’m in the ring with. I feel like I bring out the best in them. This is gonna sound ridiculous, but when Jericho and I were having that little AEW thing, he compared me to Bret Hart. I was like, that’s pretty ridiculous, but I’m like, you know what? That’s a great compliment, because I feel like Bret Hart could have a match with anybody and could adapt to anyone’s style. Listen I’m not saying I’m Bret Hart, cause I know this is gonna turn into Matt Corona says he’s as good as Bret Hart. No, I don’t think I’m as good as Bret Hart, the best there ever is. But I do feel like I can adapt to any style, whether it be a high flyer or a death match guy, or just anybody. I can have a great match with anybody, and I feel like that’s one of my best qualities.”

What is Matt Cardona grateful for?

“Chelsea Green, my family and my career.”

Joe Hendry On WrestleMania, Royal Rumble, Randy Orton, Becoming TNA World Champion

in LATEST EPISODES on May 13, 2025 January 30, 2026

Joe Hendry (@joehendry) is a professional wrestler currently signed to TNA and the reigning World Champion. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to discuss his unbelievable year since their last interview that has included a surprise spot in the Royal Rumble and facing Randy Orton at WrestleMania 41, winning the TNA World Championship and his goals as champion, career-altering advice from John Cena, Triple H’s comments at the press conference, his catchy theme song and more!

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On his NXT debut that took place shortly after the last interview with Chris Van Vliet:

“So we had two flights booked, because we suspected it was going to go down for a couple of days. But when the interview took place, I did not know. When the phone went back on, I knew. The timing is crazy. So I got on the plane to Orlando, and yes, I had the appearance the next day. Obviously, you have a dream outcome for how you want it to go, but I could never have expected the response that it got, and I have a theory as to why it got the response that it did. So it actually became WWE’s most watched video on X, it was 21-22 million views, something like that. It was an insane amount. It was the most-watched video. I think the reason is because of this. So in TNA, my music will play for a certain amount of time, and then I’ll walk to the ring. Whenever I see signs, I’ll point. I’ll get up. I’ll do my hand waving, I’ll get in. I’ll do the spin around and hold. In NXT they wanted to try this thing where they load you in and it’s the same. So you’re there right at the start. Is what I did for Mania as well, right? So it’s ‘Say his name and he appears, I believe in Joe Hendry’, and then you do the spin around. Now the timing is slightly different. So, usually I know exactly what I’m going to do at each point. I had not figured in that I would have an additional 30 seconds that I didn’t know what to do with. So I actually just reacted organically. I was just looking around. I was like, damn, all this work that I put in over the years, it was just such a validating moment. I was just looking around, and it was very real. I think it’s that real moment that people could feel. I see it in the comments, and I think when wrestling has those moments of you’re creating something, but you have those really organic moments. I think when the two come together that people really like that.”

On how his theme song got over after 5 years:

“Because in Ring of Honor, I had this song. The audio file is the exact same, but when I do the turn, it’s almost like the difference between the British Office and the American Office. I had this discussion the other day that it’s like wrestling is theater, and it needs to be larger than life. I was really more focused on the nuance before of what I thought was funny. Whereas it’s like with wrestling, you have to be larger than life. So this became that sort of thing. So I think making that transition, and also what I learned at TNA about character development. I learned then that making everything bigger and just learning who and what Joe Hendry was as a character, I allowed that to come out visually in the second entrance video that I had done. And I think by doing that, it just tipped it over the edge.”

On everything that has happened over the past year:

“There have been moments where I’ve gone, okay, we’ve either splintered off into a parallel universe, or I’ve died. It’s getting scary now, I’m saying things, and every one of them is happening. It’s really scary. It’s hard for me to sit here and say that [manifestation] is not a real thing. Honestly, it’s very hard for me to do that, because I’m at a point where everything that I’m thinking about that would be fun, and not just fun for me, but fun for the fans and a really cool moment, it seems impossible. I remember I had a conversation with my friend George, he always brings this up. We did the Rumble, and he’s going, ‘So what do you think next?’ And I’m like, I still think I can do it. This is like a couple of weeks out from Mania. He’s like, ‘I don’t know, buddy. You’ve had the Rumble, you’ve had this…’ I’m like, ‘I still think I can do it. I still think I can be on Mania.’ And somehow it happened.”

On thinking he could face Randy Orton after Kevin Owens was injured:

“No, I honestly didn’t think that at the time. Sometimes, again, I know there was a lot of chatter about when Jey Uso said he needed a tag team partner. The difficulty is sometimes, because you’re so busy, I’ll just see things on Twitter, or I’ll see a clip of the show, and I’ll just tweet the meme out there. Sometimes you go, hahaha, and you’re going, Oh God, this is caught on like wildfire. It’s getting an insane amount of likes to the point where it’s almost like people think it’s a spoiler, and I’m just kind of messing around. That’s one thing I’ve learned that before the first time we spoke, the social media game is very much you can just throw mud at the wall and see what sticks. Whereas now there are actually very real consequences if I tweet even my face at the wrong time. So for example, and again, I actually didn’t know the severity of Kevin Owens’ injury. I just saw the clip of the RKO to Aldis, and I kind of heard something about he might not be doing it. Then there’s that thing there. I thought, well, I’ll tweet at my face now. And actually, I took that down because when I understood the full context, because I was like this is not the appropriate time. So there’s things that where you’ll see a little thing, and then there was the moment with Jey, where I tweeted it because I didn’t really think I would have been in serious consideration. And then you tweet and go, well, actually, I just ruined this for myself.”

Well, Raw was in Scotland:

“Yes. Well, the scariest one, if you ever tweet with emotion and not with logic, that’s when these problems happen. I don’t know why. I was just having a day when a fan said, ‘You know what, Joe Hendry’s really falling off.’ For some reason, I just thought, you know what? And I was kind of joking at this point. I had no idea that I was going to be selected to go into the Rumble, and I tweeted out, ‘Let’s see how well this tweet ages in about four months.’ Because I was like, it’s between three and five months. So I’ll just say that. Hahaha. This tweet goes crazy. And there was a moment again I had this conversation with friends and family where I said to myself, if I’m not in the Rumble because of this, I need to just accept that I made a mistake, and I need to own it. There was a moment where I thought to myself, I may have cost myself an opportunity.”

On the tweet implying that he was going to win the World Championship:

“That’s that’s another thing as well, because it’s like, I see things online where people are like, Oh, well, he just talks about WWE stuff, and it’s not true at all. I spend most of my interview time talking about TNA wrestling, but a lot of the WWE stuff will go viral. So it’s this game where I have to talk about exciting possibilities at WWE, but also need to represent the championship. So for me, this title reign is about doing big business for TNA. That’s my goal. There are certain title reigns that will be remembered for certain things. When Josh Alexander was champ, it was about classic match after classic match after classic match. If you bought a ticket to TNA wrestling, you know you were getting a five-star banger. With me, it’s about me with this championship. When people look at my reign, they will see business; that’s what I wanted to do. And every decision that I’ve made has been about what is going to be best for business. I know a lot of people had a lot of things to say about certain decisions that I’ve made. So for example, people who are in the industry understand how great it is for business for to me wrestle Randy Orton. Whereas other people, they’re going to have thoughts on it. But I understand. It took me zero seconds to decide whether that’s what I want to do. I was like, I’m there. Let’s do it.”

On some fans believing that Joe Hendry was squashed by Randy Orton:

“The thing is, one, it was back and forth, so I got offense in. It’s Randy Orton’s 20th WrestleMania. It’s also Randy Orton. The thing is, I did the spin around. So it’s like me being the Joe Hendry character, the RKO is one hit kill. And in that show the feedback that I got was exactly what it was supposed to be. And let’s be honest, the next how many days later, we had the biggest show TNA has ever had in 10 years, we had a higher attendance at Slammiversary. So we were past 4,000. I understand what this is, and my job is to put asses in seats for TNA wrestling.”

On fans feeling that the TNA World Championship was devalued:

“I think that in wrestling, everything has to be a story. So, in the movie, does Rocky win every single match? I mean, the story is Joe Hendry lost to Randy Orton. How is the champion going to recover from this? You know who else lost quickly at WrestleMania? John Cena to The Undertaker. You know who else lost quickly at WrestleMania? Triple H. People have lost quickly at WrestleMania and these are the stories that we’re telling. When John Cena lost to The Undertaker, it was what is the path from here? And that’s what I’ve really learned from watching John Cena is that just make everything a story. Everything is a story. So it’s just about, okay, where do I go from here as champion? It added more weight and drama to the triple threat that we had, because it was me, it was Frankie [Kazarian], and it was Ethan Page, and it’s like the partnership’s so strong. All three outcomes were completely within the realms of possibility, and nobody knew what was going to happen that night. Not even we knew what was going to happen that night right up until the wire. So that’s when it’s exciting, when anything can happen.”

On being backstage after WrestleMania 41:

“I can’t believe this is real. So after that happened, I got to the back and I spoke with Randy. I spoke with CM Punk. Spoke with Cody. Then as I’m walking, I had this little room, which we should talk about, we gotta give credit. This was a military operation to get me into the building. We’ll come back to that. But I was walking from this little room I had. I was just walking past. And again, this is when life doesn’t feel real, who could have timed this? So I’m walking back. You actually saw this in the backstage footage. I had a nice conversation with Michael Cole. I had a wonderful, quick conversation with Stephanie McMahon as well. Then I was walking to the back, and because I just watched the rest of Mania with William Regal, actually, which was very cool, because he was someone I met really early on in my career and he helped me advance my understanding of what this game is way quicker than I would have had we not had that. He talked to me for two hours when I just started to go, this is what this game is. Ultimately, the big message was that pro wrestling is about building trust with the audience, trust with your peers, trust with your colleagues, trust with management. It’s about building trust with those stakeholders. But anyway, I digress. So I’m walking back from there, and at the same moment the match has just finished, John is walking back with his WWE Championship. He’s literally just become the greatest of all time. It’s now a fact he’s the greatest of all time. He’s walking back, and this is how awesome John is. Sees me, once he came out of Gorilla, immediately walks over to me.”

Had you ever met him before?

“Yes. We’d had conversations. He gave me advice at the Rumble, and as he said on Pat McAfee, I did my very best to implement that advice. He said that he feels I’m going to be a major player in this industry. Praise doesn’t come higher. So he came up to me, and there’s two camera crews. They’re filming this interaction. I’m like, I can’t believe the timing that this is happening. He’s just won the championship. I say, ‘John, congrats.’ He didn’t even want to talk about the fact that he just became the greatest. He wanted to give me advice, that’s who John is, right? He just said to me, ‘I told you exactly what you needed to do at the Rumble. You’ve taken it on board. You’ve done it. You had a good performance at the Rumble. You were brilliant tonight.’ Then John walks off. I hope they release this footage one day, I turned to the camera and I go, can a day get any better than this? AJ Styles walks into shot and he says, ‘If you’d have told me that the TNA World Champion would walk out at WrestleMania, I wouldn’t have believed it. Congrats, man. It’s nuts.’ I can’t tell you how fortunate I am to be living the life that I am. I’ve almost got no words for it. The gratitude that I feel on a daily basis for this journey, I have to say I really have to take a moment to talk about how great TNA and WWE have been, because at any point they could have gone, nah. TNA and WWE have been so good to me to allow me to have these moments, because this has huge benefit for me. We could come up with a million reasons why either TNA or WWE would say, not this time, but they have been unbelievable with letting me have these moments. I just feel like I really do feel huge gratitude to both companies in the way that they’ve worked together to create cool moments for me and the fans, and just those moment, those moments that I’ve had, like with Triple H and getting that feedback and the words of advice that he gives, like, that’s I know how busy he is and how important those moments are. I’m very grateful for it.”

On becoming Randy Orton’s WrestleMania opponent:

“So I heard Triple H say recently, and I don’t want to misquote, but this is what I heard him say. I heard him say that revealing things before they happen is ruining the surprise, saying how it was done afterwards is almost like just the intrigue of how that happened. So with respect for that, he’s talked about conversations we’ve had. So I will say I found out about a week before and Triple H called me personally. And I thought, because I was at WWE World. That’s one of the reasons it was so well hidden, because I was already booked for WWE World. So there was no shock or surprise with me being around the company. I thought I was going to be getting a promo there, maybe presenting a Slammy, something like that. And so he said, can you talk? Phone goes, and very quickly we got to, ‘So I’m sure you’re aware that Randy needs an opponent…’ And I’m in the airport, I did not think that’s what the call was going to be, and I said yes immediately.”

On the surprise being kept a secret:

“I couldn’t tell anybody. So I think that there were two people on the side of TNA that knew, and I had to sit on this for a week. That’s pretty tough. But I thought that you know how wrestling is. You’re never the champion until, it’s not when the ref’s hand goes down, because Chris Jericho won the title once and then un-won it the same night. So it’s like, you’ve won the title, you’re back at the hotel, or you’re on the plane and you’re out there, we got the belt. Okay, now I’m the champion. And with this sort of thing, it’s like, so we had that conversation. But anything can happen between then and WrestleMania. So at that point, I was trying not to get too high or too low. It’s just there. I’m just going to work. The schedule was insane. So I had a 12-hour media day for TNA. The next day I had media in the morning, the TNA show all day, and then the meet and greet after. Then, I believe the next day, I had WrestleCon in the morning and afternoon, Westside gun show at night, I had WWE World in the middle as well on the Saturday of WrestleMania, I might be missing out on a day or whatever, but it was crazy. Then on the day of WrestleMania, I had WrestleCon in the morning, WWE World until I think 1-3, something like that, or we got me to the arena, sort of three, four. And then it was pretty quickly I was in gear and on and on the way there. So it was like there was no time to think, which was the best thing for me. I just couldn’t overthink it. So that was one of the best things about it, but I didn’t think it was real until the night before, when it came to putting the whole thing together. And I thought, Okay, now this has to be happening.”

On working with Randy Orton:

“So I don’t how far I want to pull back the curtain on that one, for a couple of reasons, but this is what I’ll say. Randy was unbelievable to work with, unbelievable. WWE has been unbelievable. TNA has been unbelievable. The way I’ve been treated, I could not have asked for better. Randy was just the coolest guy when it came to this and we clicked immediately. Because I don’t want to speak for him, but I felt like I understood the assignment, and I just really strongly felt that that visual of putting our two characters together, the spin and the RKO combining, to me, was the viral moment. So I think I was in the mindset of having a bit more experience, going back to John Cena’s advice, I wasn’t thinking so much about my moment. I was thinking about the moment for the show and for the business, and I think John giving me that advice at the Rumble helped me to have a bit of a shift there.”

What was the specific advice?

“So I remember going up to John and again, this is how this is how cool John is. So I said, ‘Hey, it’s great to ask your advice sometime.’ This is Rumble, where he’s got a huge spot here. He’s like, ‘Well, why don’t we go talk right now, and you can ask me anything you ever wanted to ask me.’ I was like, All right. So I was like, ‘What am I going to ask you that’s going to yield the greatest return? I’m in there with Roman. How do I take what I’ve got and make the most of it? How do I make it more?’ John said this on Pat McAfee, so you know I’m not kind of peeling back the curtain here, beyond what’s out there. He said, ‘You don’t.’ He paused, and he explained to me, and he was 100% correct. The viral moment at the Rumble for me was the entrance, looking around, coming in and hitting my moves on Miz and then being eliminated by a Roman. After Roman comes in, that’s his moment. So it’s like, what John was trying to say is it’s like your moment is coming out there, and now you’re a cog in a bigger machine. It’s not about you getting what you can out of this moment with Roman, it’s like, how do you prop up Roman’s moment? That kind of taught me to instead of think selfishly about these moments. If I hadn’t had that conversation with John, I don’t know that I’d have been thinking about the best way to do the RKO. It’s like that got me thinking about it from that perspective. I really feel like me and Randy were just on this same page. He was awesome. I can’t tell you how thankful I am to have all the moments that I’ve had.”

How did they sneak you into the building?

“Sorry, I did not answer that question. Alright. So we got me in a car at WWE World, I had to change in the car, not into my wrestling gear. We did that at the building, but I had to change in the car. I got the most generic hoodie possible. So it was like, Las Vegas hoodie or whatever. I had a COVID mask. I had sunglasses. I looked ridiculous. It was covered head to toe. Honestly, I wasn’t even in the betting odds. There was an “other” category where you would have to manually put in Joe Hendry, that’s how secretive this was. It was not one of the standard options. There were about 10 options, and I was in “other.””

On Nick Aldis being the odds on favourite:

“On that topic, this is how cool Nick is. Nick came down to help with this moment. So he invested his time to give input about what we could do. So the fact that Nick gave his time to help that moment, that’s how cool Nick is.”

On using his real name in wrestling:

“You know, I’ve had this conversation a couple of times recently. For many years, I regretted using my real name. But now, I think it’s because it’s also me, that people are so interested in what I’m what I’m doing, because it’s like they’re seeing someone living their dream in real time. Which is, I think again, like I said earlier about when I made the entrance in NXT, that was Joe Hendry the person, that 30 seconds was Joe Hendry the person having that moment, and I think when that comes through, that’s the beauty of wrestling. It’s when stories that you tell and reality intertwine, and you’re not really sure where one begins and the other ends.”

On the story behind say his name:

“I don’t know. I just remember when I wrote the song I wanted it to be as literal as possible. So I wanted it to be I will tell the audience when to clap, I’ll tell them when to wave their hands, and I will explain that if you are to say my name, you will be rewarded with me appearing.”

On whether the John Cena match is still possible:

“Of course it’s possible. The real question is do I think it will happen? Yes.”

Why?

“I mean, my track record’s looking pretty good, but I can’t tell you. I can’t explain it. I just feel it in my heart, to be honest with you. I just would be lying if I sat here and said I didn’t think it would happen.”

On Triple H saying Joe Hendry would be at many more WrestleManias:

“He did say that to me backstage, exactly as he said it in the press conference is what he said to me. This is what I really like about my interactions with Triple H. He’s an awesome guy, he’s just a cool guy, and for him to take that moment to come over when he’s producing WrestleMania, to come over, because that moment is for me, is for nobody else, for him to give me that moment, very busy, to go, Hey, listen, you’ll be here again, but this is the fun one. He knows what he’s doing, and in a way, him telling me that takes all the nerves away, doesn’t it? It allows you to go out there and be free and enjoy the moment. And he did that at Rumble as well, because it could be an overwhelming moment for people. I have no idea why I was so calm at WrestleMania. I do suspect it’s because I ran it through so many times in my head over the last year, and part of that is because he took the time to have that conversation with me.”

On possibly relocating to the USA:

“Certainly. I was kind of thinking about it last year as well. But I think we’re at the point now where I’ve been home for one full day, the time before I was home for two full days. I love Scotland. I love it. But I need to have a place here.”

What is Joe Hendry grateful for?

“Friendships, that I know what I need to do and the time I have with my parents.”

Indi Hartwell On WWE Release, Joining TNA, Becoming NXT Women’s Champion, Mercedes Moné

in LATEST EPISODES on May 8, 2025 January 30, 2026

Indi Hartwell (@indi_hartwell) is a professional wrestler currently signed to TNA. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to discuss signing with TNA and being in the crowd at Rebellion, her WWE release happening during SmackDown, keeping her WWE name, the Dexter Lumis romance storyline, winning the NXT Women’s Championship in a ladder match, wrestling in Australia, finally getting a match with Mercedes Mone and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

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On signing with TNA:

“I have. I’ve been wanting to cross the line. Finally did it. I think that partnership came about after I had already left. I was on the main roster. I was gone from NXT, which would have been cool if I could have done stuff as part of NXT with TNA. But now I’m with TNA, so we’ll see what happens. I’m sure I’ll be mixing it up with some of the NXT people.”

On how things have been since her release:

“It’s been up and down, like a roller coaster. I remember the first week after I got released, I just felt really grateful. This is how my emotions went first week, I was just super grateful for what I had, I like to saturate my mind with gratitude, and that helps me keep perspective. So first week I was really grateful. Second week, I kind of got frustrated and mad. Third week, I kind of got sad. Then after that, I felt fine. Now it’s been like five months, I think six months almost. Yeah, I’ve been feeling really excited, because there’s just so much to do.”

On whether she anticipated the WWE release:

“I didn’t honestly feel like it was coming, especially when it happened. So my whole time at WWE, I was always scared of getting released. Add another factor to it is that I’m an international, so people don’t really understand visas, green cards. But that was something that was always in the back of my mind, being scared of being fired. But it wasn’t till my last two weeks at WWE I finally felt comfortable. I finally felt like, yeah, I’m part of the roster. I did the Netflix shoot and then I got released. I have my green card. Shout out to WWE, because they did it for me and they paid for it. This was a few years ago. I’m super grateful. I know a lot of people have to worry about that. I saw what Steph De’Lander went through when she got released. It’s something that Americans don’t really understand the whole visa thing, but I’m good.”

On being released but her match airing on tape delay:

“It was weird. Fun fact, I missed the call when they called me to release me, so I made the call to get fired. I had a text message. I didn’t see I had a missed call, and then I had a text message saying, ‘Hey, it’s blah, blah from TR, can you call us back?’ So I called back, I thought it was like for a completely different topic. I had lost my voice as well, so when I called back, I was like, ‘Hey, sorry, I lost my voice, haha.’ They’re like, ‘Oh, we’re calling with some unfortunate news.’ I was so confused, because I wanted to say, What do you mean? I’m on the show tonight. My match was taped last week. I’m on the show tonight.”

On some fans not knowing the show was pre-taped:

“People didn’t know that SmackDown was taped the week before, so they thought that I got released, and then had to go out that night and wrestle. That would be crazy.”

On being able to keep the name Indi Hartwell:

“I just asked. Well, this is how it went. So I’ve had this name my whole wrestling career. When I started at NXT, when you start wrestling on live events, they make you wrestle under your real name. So I wrestled under my real name for a bit, and then I think I had a dark match at NXT. I just asked Road Dogg, ‘Can I be Indi Hartwell for this?’ He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll ask. Why not?’ Then they let me be Indi Hartwell for the dark match and then it kind of just kept going. Then I got on TV with it. I got my action figure with that name. I got in the game with that name. Then I think it was when NXT 2.0 started. They went through that whole weird thing of you can’t have your real name, and you also can’t have a name that we don’t own. So they gave me the option to change my name or sell it to them. So I sold it to them, and then it was always in the back of my mind, if I get released, what name am I going to be? That’s a big deal to me. So then when I got the call that I was being released, they said, ‘Okay, yeah, we’re releasing you.’ I said, ‘Okay, cool. So I sold my name to the company. Is there any way I can get that back?’ Then we got it all figured out. I got the rights and stuff to it. I’m very lucky.”

On where the name Indi Hartwell came from:

“I used the porn star method. Do you know who Iggy Azalea is? So this was before I started wrestling. I’m a big fan of her, and that’s how she got her name. So then me and my friend were just coming up with our porn star name, and it was like your dog name plus your street name, I think. Indi Hartwell was my friend’s dog name and street name. Then years later, when it came time for me to wrestle, the promoter was like, What name do you want to be? And I was like, I don’t know, Indi Hartwell? It’s a good name, isn’t it? There’s no other Indi’s in wrestling that I know of, but also the whole like Indi Harwell, indi wrestling, I’m Indi Wrestling. So it all worked out very well.”

On whether she is still married to Dexter Lumis:

“It’s complicated. Not wearing the ring. Everyone asked me that, like all these signings that I’ve done recently, they’re like, are you still with Dexter? I’m like, oh, it’s complicated.”

On how her romance with Dexter Lumis began:

“I think it was supposed to be a one-off thing. I think it started with Johnny was having a match with Dexter, and they had me ringside. We just had this moment where we looked at each other, and I think I backed up, and I hit the ring post. That’s something that I did in rehearsal, like as a joke, which a lot of things I would do as a joke, and they’d be like, Oh, do that on TV. So we did it, and it got really good reactions. So then every week, the creative was something with me and Dexter, and I didn’t know what it was going to turn into, honestly.”

On discovering wrestling:

“I think I went to a local grocery store and I saw a poster for local wrestling. I was like, oh my God, other wrestling exists. So then I begged my dad to take me for ages, and he wouldn’t, because my parents aren’t the biggest fans of wrestling. They didn’t really want me to be into it, I guess because it’s dangerous. So then my dad started taking me to these local shows, and that’s when I realized okay, becoming a wrestler is a possibility in Australia. But it wasn’t until I saw the Bayley and Sasha Banks match NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn in 2015. I remember watching that match being like, Oh, my God, these girls are amazing. I want to do that. I can do that. I know I can do that. Then I opened a new tab on my laptop and just signed up for wrestling school.”

On getting on WWE’s radar:

“I was really lucky. I had a try-out really early on. So I started wrestling in 2016. Later that year, NXT came for a tour in Australia, and my trainer at the time, he helped me put together a resume. The resume was nothing I had, like, 10 matches maybe. So I sent the resume off, and they invited me to the try-out. This was the try-out that Rhea got signed from. Everyone calls it the Rhea try-out because they weren’t looking at anyone else, they were only looking at her. But I thought that I was going to get signed, I was that confident. Obviously I didn’t get signed from that, but I was able to stay in contact with them. The guy at the time, Canyon Ceman, he was the recruiter. So I remember after the try-out, I emailed them being like, thank you. They said, ‘Thanks, but we’re not going to hire you, you need more experience. Check back in six months.’ So then six months to the day, I put it in my calendar, I think I went to America, China, did some indies, and then six months to the day I emailed again. I said, ‘Hey, this is what I’ve done.’ They said, ‘Okay, check back in a year with us.’ So then I go back out, do all this travel around, train, get exposure, experience. Then a year to the day, I email again, ‘Hey, this is what I’ve done. Here’s promo, pics, matches.’ They said, ‘Okay, get back to us in six months.’ So it was kind of just like, go away. And I just knew one day that a no would turn into a yes.”

On getting signed to WWE:

“What eventually got me signed was like an indie show that I did somewhere in New York for Mania Week in 2019. Canyon and Regal were in the crowd. I came back from my match and I had an email from them saying that they were going to sign me. Was crazy. Same night. I got back to my phone after the match, and on my lock screen, I have the screenshot of it, and it said, ‘Regal and I saw you work tonight. There’s an opportunity for you. We’ll connect after Mania.’ Because it was the week before WrestleMania. And at the time, I think it was Mae Young Classic, they were going to maybe do a third one. He said, ‘And just to be clear, it’s more than Mae Young Classic.’ I was like, Oh my God. Then I got home like a few weeks later, I got a call one night and they told me that they were going to sign me.”

On her NXT Women’s Championship win coming out of nowhere:

“It did happen out of nowhere. I was shocked. Everyone was shocked. Because this is how it happened. I wasn’t really being used on TV at the time. I think I was on Level Up, and then I wasn’t even booked in the ladder match. It was like a week before, two weeks before I lost my qualifying match. I just really wanted to be at Mania week, because everyone wants to be at Mania week. So I remember I saw Coach Bloom in the gym, and I asked him, ‘Hey, is there any way I can help with the try-out, just so I can be there?’ He was like, ‘Do you have new gear for LA?’ And I was like, No. He’s like, ‘Well, I would get gear if I were you.’ Then the next week I had a last chance qualifying match, I got into the match, and I was like, Oh, cool. That’s amazing. But then they didn’t tell us the ending of the match till the night before, and so we couldn’t put together an ending to this match. That was p*ssing us all off, we can’t even plan this. Then Shawn Michaels pulled us all aside in the hotel, and I’m just eating an apple because he’s probably going to say that Roxanne’s going to win it. So I was eating an apple, and he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, okay, the winner’s going to be Indi.’ Everyone was shocked, even Sarah Amato. Everyone was like, What the hell, Indi is winning it? I was very surprised. What’s crazy is I could have had my family there because it was in LA. So it was just like a short, 15-hour flight. But unfortunately, that didn’t happen. But it was a cool moment.”

On why they didn’t do more with the title reign:

“I think getting hurt kind of ruined everything with that. But everything happens for a reason. So I think everything happened how it was supposed to.”

Did you know you were hurt?

“Oh yeah. I thought my ankle was like shattered inside my boot. I just remember laying there being like, I’m never getting called up. Then I looked and there was a doctor next to me. Then they took me to the back, and then Roxy and Tiffany had to call the match on the fly. I was on the medical table, taking off my boot, and I was like, no, no, I can go back out, because I felt bad for them having to do that. Also, I didn’t want my title reign to end like that, so I hobbled my way back out there and finished the match.”

On there not being plans for her call-up:

“I don’t really know what the plan was. I think they were going to do stuff with The Way, because we had a few segments together. Then the next week the segment would get cut from the show, put on Raw Talk. Then the next week, it would get cut completely. Then I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t feel like I was in a position to ask many questions. I was just happy to be there.”

On working with Becky Lynch:

“My anxiety was through the roof that day. I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous for a match, but she was amazing to work with. I’m so grateful that she spoke up and asked to work with me and I think Tegan and Xia Li, so she helped us a bunch. That was one of my only singles matches on the main roster, because I was in the tag team. So yeah, I learned a lot from her and I just feel grateful that I got to work with her.”

On having doubts after her release:

“Well, first of all, I had to think do I even want to keep wrestling? Because I remember the night that I got released, Bayley called me. She’s like, ‘Oh, now you can have your dream match with Mercedes.’ I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t even know if I want to wrestle.’ But then I snapped out of it and I was like, I’m only 28, I feel like I have so much more to do in wrestling. So I just had to get my brain right.”

Why did you want to stop?

“Not from being released. I think just maybe the past year or two of not really getting to do much, it kind of, I don’t know, rips away your enthusiasm for it, or your love for it, or your confidence, especially confidence. That’s the main thing for me, I’ve just got to get my confidence back up and remember who I was.”

On getting the Mercedes Mone match:

“That did wonders for the old confidence as well. After that match, I was like, Oh my gosh, I love wrestling. I love this. It was just such a good experience. Getting to work her, she is amazing, she’s doing amazing stuff right now, I’m just like, blessed. Also, that match wasn’t even supposed to happen, supposed to be a six-man tag match. Then the night before, I saw in her story, she posted the match graphic of me and her. So I responded. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re wrestling? This is happening?’ I didn’t know, was supposed to be a tag match. But I think things got changed around. But no one told me. I just find out things either by watching it on TV or just seeing it online. It was a nice surprise. It was good. So I had because I found out the night before, I didn’t really have time to, like, freak out about it, which was good. Everything went so smooth.”

On having a theme song by Downstait:

“Downstait are the best. Also, shout out to Chelsea Green, because she’s the one that made that happen for me. I think the day after I got released, or maybe that night, she put me in a group chat with Zack [Call], the lead singer, and she connected us. I don’t know if they reached out to her to reach out to me, but she put us together. Like I said, at that time, I didn’t know if I wanted to keep wrestling, so I said to them, ‘Hey, I’m not sure right now, I’ll get back to you.’ So then a few weeks later, I was like, Okay, let’s do it. It was such a cool experience, getting to work with them and getting to collaborate, give them some ideas and see what they came up with. Because they’re incredible.”

On a potential WWE return:

“It’s not my intention right now to sign with TNA so I can go back to NXT. I went to TNA because TNA is a company I grew up watching. I’m genuinely a huge fan of TNA, and I feel like that’s where I can thrive the most. But like I mentioned before, I’m only 28 so I do feel like there is a path back to WWE someday, I’m not closing the door on that. All my friends are still there, and there’s a lot that I didn’t get to do, so it’s definitely something that I can see happening.”

What is Indi Hartwell grateful for?

“My girlfriend and my family, my health and my green card.”

R-Truth On John Cena’s Heel Turn, Little Jimmy, Getting Wrestlers To Break Character, Funny Moments

in LATEST EPISODES on May 6, 2025 January 30, 2026

R-Truth (@RonKillings) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet live in Las Vegas to discuss the John Cena heel turn and a possible match with his childhood hero, making it to WWE the first time and returning in 2011, smoking on TV and the expensive fine that was issued, pitching a Little Jimmy action figure to Stephanie McMahon, his favorite comedy moments and more!

On his childhood hero John Cena turning heel at Elimination Chamber:

“Why y’all asking me that? Y’all noticed I haven’t spoke on that at all, right? And I don’t want to speak on it right now. I’m hurt to the beyond hurtstivity, that is a word, saying it’s way up there in the heart somewhere, there’s no need to talk about it. I’m feeling what all of y’all are thinking: hustle, loyalty, respect, never give up. The Make a Wish stuff, all that stuff is just going with me. I won’t even think about it, talk about it, Little Jimmy, I have to deal with that. I’m saying he’s in turmoil because of that. I get off subject a little bit, and they’re talking about belief in my last appearance I did, and Little Jimmy is around because we believe man and I believe in my childhood hero. I don’t know, man, he done does. There’s 2 sides to every story.”

He kicked Cody Rhodes in the balls!

“We don’t know that for sure. It looked like it went there, but we don’t know that. [It could have been] to part of the inner thigh. So it’s like, Y’all know how you’re going through a situation, and you’re thinking about it, you know you need to do something about it, but you leave it where it’s at, because right now it’s still stewing and simmering, and you still don’t know how to react about it. That’s where I’m at with the John Cena thing.”

On a possible R-Truth vs. John Cena match:

“Y’all want to see that? But the only way we can see that though, it’s got to be the right way. The old me, I’m not a bad guy, I’m a good guy now, if you haven’t noticed that. I’m a good guy. I kiss the babies, I hug people, I don’t kick people in the nomads. So for that to happen, it would have to be a complete turnaround. So I don’t know, man, I would love to. Man, he did some wrong stuff, and I like Cody.”

On grabbing his moment:

“My moment was just getting into business. For all y’all that know that watch a documentary with me coming up from the streets, selling drugs, doing this and doing that, and my perception, I wanted to be this big rap star. I want to be known as the biggest rap star, I lived by that, that was the only thing I was going to do. I wasn’t doing nothing else. So you got to desire that, but it wasn’t happening. You can spin wheels, spin wheels, spin wheels. You ain’t paying the bills, things just ain’t happening. So me grabbing the moment was me going a different route to get to where I wanted to. When I met Jack Crockett in the halfway house and he presented professional wrestling to me, I was aware of wrestling. I’ve seen it on TV, Dusty Rhodes, Ric Flair, I’ve seen that, but it still was new to me. So I grabbed that moment to like, you know what? This ain’t working for me. I got to try this right here out. And I just seized that.”

On how he met Road Dogg:

“So I’m in Memphis, Tennessee. I’ve signed my contract. They sent me to Memphis, Tennessee. I’m like, 25, 26, 27, something like that. So I go to Memphis, go to the dojo, that’s the last Dojo they had. So I go there. I’m in developmental, and they told me I would be there for like six months, and I’ll be on TV. Think about this for me, coming from there to signing a contract with WWE. I’m this guy now. They said, go to Memphis, Tennessee, learn how to wrestle our way, get developed, six months you’ll be on TV. Oh sh*t, boom. So I’m in Memphis training, training, training. Six months came. Seven months came, nothing. I was having issues at home, I was discouraged. I felt like a failure. I felt like I was ready to quit. I wasn’t going back to the streets. I didn’t know what I was going back to. So I know what it feels like to not know what you want to do or what you’re going to do, but you want to do something. I did my last show there. My contract was up too. I did my last show there. Road Dogg and his wife were in Memphis on vacation, and they came to the TV taping. That was when I dropped the title to Jerry Lawler, and he watched the match. By the time I got back to the locker room, Road Dogg was back there, and he was like, was that you rapping? And I was like, Yeah. He was like, I want you to be my tag team partner. I was blown away. It’s like, that’s Road Dogg, DX. I’m like, Dogg, I’m fixing to quit. I would love to, but I ain’t made for this, I’m about to quit. He’s like, what? You feel like just giving up and quitting, but you made it here. He ripped into me good. He said, I tell you what, if you can stake it out for three more months, I have you up there on TV with me, and that was just that was enough for me. I did that, and in two months, I was getting a call and that’s when WWF, the New York restaurant. That’s when I debuted with him as K Kwik.”

On what could have happened if Road Dogg didn’t meet with him that day:

“Oh man, it wouldn’t have been looking good. I didn’t know, I was immature still. I was still growing up. I was a young man. I wasn’t smart to knowing how to navigate through this. Life don’t come with a handbook. We live and learn and we’re taught and we’re told, and we just go. So I don’t know, man, I can’t even think of what my life would have been like. I used to be at that point where I didn’t care, that why I was out there in the street. Well, no, I wasn’t out there in the street because I didn’t care. I just for my own reasons why I was out in the street doing my thing, but I had a sense of caring then, so it’s like I wasn’t gonna go back to do that, because I wouldn’t have been able to see my kids. I had been to jail so many times. I was tired of it, like they knew me by name. I don’t know what I’ve been doing.”

On making his way back to WWE after being released:

“Umaga and Randy Orton. I was working for Rikishi. Rikishi had a thing going on. I’ve been around Samoans for years. I was home, and WWE had an event Umaga and Randy Orton came by my house to see me. Yeah, rest in peace. He was like, hey, what are you doing? I’m like, man, just hanging. He’s like, bro come back. Pick yourself up, come back to the company, they’ve been talking about you. I’m gonna bring your name up. Take care of your family, you are supposed to be there, bro, come on back. And I’ll be damned, within a week I called, and I was signed a week after that. And that’s when 2011 R-Truth came back.”

On smoking on TV:

“Vince had caught me smoking, for real. So he’s like, You gonna smoke in front of the whole [arena], and it was illegal. You can’t do that over there [because you’re in an arena], you can’t do that. I broke the rules, $20,000 fine, legit for a shoot. [You paid it?] Hell no! I had paying potential, but no!”

On a possible Little Jimmy action figure:

“I asked Stephanie McMahon, could I make a Little Jimmy action figure? She said, what it’s gonna be? I said, nothing, but it’ll be in the box. She like, Oh my gosh. She laughs. She said, Truth, I don’t think we can do that. We got to give them something. I said, Well, I guess put a stick beside them or something. They got the package. She said no, we can’t do that.”

On who is El Grande Americano?

“There’s been a lot of names thrown in the barrel. I don’t know who that is. I have no clue. It’s not me, it’s not Little Jimmy, too tall. I don’t think it’s Shorty G, too small.”

On his favorite comedy moments:

“Definitely the Brock Lesnar thing, which I got my friend Chris Dunn, he’s is a writer. I kept forgetting to tell people that he was the one that helped me with that in the back. And Paul just surprising everybody, We’re not going to let Brock know what we’re going to do. It’s just going to be a free fall. I’m like Brock is a beast. I think we should let Brock know what we’re going to say about Brock. So funny thing is, I mean, I love Brock. Brock walked into gorilla, and it was simply just like he walked in. He’s like, so what are we doing? And I’m looking at everybody for somebody to say something to this dude. Nobody said nothing. He’s like, alright, well, guys, we just go out there and talk there and talk then. And I’m like, Oh y’all got this dude going out there. But it turned out to be one of the best moments.”

On the injury that kept him side-lined and complications:

“Coming back from the Torn quad, and I had an infection. I caught Staph, MRSA. It was like five different infections I had. My medication for my infection was $4,700 a week. I’m like, what the hell I got? But yeah, it was that bad. And I had to give it to myself too. I had a PICC line in this arm for nine weeks. Then I had one in that arm. Y’all didn’t know that.”

On facing The Rock and John Cena at Survivor Series:

“I felt like that was the pinnacle. You don’t go no higher than that, right? In the ring with The Rock and John Cena, that’s an unforgettable moment I won’t forget.”

Erik On War Raiders, His Near-Fatal Motorcycle Accident, Tag Team Champs, Viking Experience

in LATEST EPISODES on May 1, 2025 January 30, 2026

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Erik (@Erik_WWE) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Las Vegas to discuss his return from neck surgery, being in a scary motorcycle accident and being told he shouldn’t have survived, winning the Tag Team Championships with Ivar, the name changes that included The Viking Experience and The Viking Raiders, facing Mark Hendry in a match on SmackDown in 2006, being married to Sarah Logan (Valhalla) and when fans should expect her to return and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.” — Bill Bradley

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On being a tag team wrestler:

“When we first got teamed up, because it wasn’t even our idea to team up. We wrestled in the Top Prospect Tournament. You had Ivar on the show. He’s going to be very, very proud of the fact that he won that match. Every time we go to Pittsburgh, he tells everyone in the building from the guys sweeping up the trash to Randy Orton and Triple H in the back that in Pittsburgh, he pinned me. So make sure this goes on the podcast, because that’s his most important thing that he brags about all the time. But yeah, after that match, I think Ring of Honor just liked how we looked together in the ring and they were like they both have beards, and both kind of this smash mouth thing. We’ll team them up. I’d only met him once before, and we talked, we had a lot of mutual friends and we got along right away. But at the same time, we had a conversation. We’re like, well there’s not really space on the Ring of Honor roster for us to be singles guys. Let’s do this tag team for a little bit, and then we’ll turn on each other, we’ll split up, and then go our separate ways. And then 11 years later, I think at this point, no split up.”

On competing at WrestleMania:

“Who could have ever drawn that play up? Especially because he and I both at different points in our career, in our lives, had some type of traumatic injury, accident, where we were told you should never wrestle again. I was told I shouldn’t have been alive, I should have died. So it’s a wild, wild ride that you can’t script that.”

On the motorcycle accident:

“So in 2014 actually, just after War Machine started rolling. He and I spent 11 or 12 years each not making any money in wrestling, basically both giving up on making wrestling our career. We get offered Ring of Honor contracts. We start wrestling. Everything’s starting to go good. Then like I had done every day for two years, I got on my motorcycle, went to the gym, left the gym on my way to get something to eat. A girl was texting at a stop sign and she just pulled out right in front of my motorcycle. So I was going about 55 miles an hour, and she was maybe 30 feet in front of me, maybe. I hadn’t even had the conscious decision to brake, whether I was going to try to brake and turn to miss her or lay my bike down, I just kind of said, Oh. I didn’t even get the full word out of my mouth, so I wasn’t even censoring myself, and I smashed into the back of her car. So instead of hitting the hood, I had turned and jerked the wheel and I hit the back seat. So because I had torqued the handlebars like this, I broke my left thumb. I shattered everything above my left arm to my elbow to my shoulder. Then I went up over my handlebars. I punched out her rear window with my face, lacerated above my eye, broke my nose, but I didn’t break the cartilage. I broke the bone, the skull, hit my knee, and then I stood up, and my arm was like wiggling. The girl comes out of the car, and she’s crying. She’s like, do you need me to call the ambulance? And I was like, Yes, please. Then the ambulance shows up and they pull up across the street or across the intersection.”

You’re still standing?

“Yeah, I was. I had sat down at that point, and I just stood up off the off the curb, and I started walking to the ambulance. I remember that I saw the ambulance and the paramedic grabbed a body bag out of the back, because they just assumed from the call that I was dead. I walked over and there’s literally a body bag on the ground. I’m like full Walking Dead, right? Because my whole face is like gnarled up with blood and stuff and the paramedic looks at me, and he’s like, ‘Sir, you’re not supposed to be walking.’ I’m sure I was in shock at this point, and I was like, ‘Do you want me to go sit back down?’ He said, ‘No, no, no, you’re already over here. I just want to stabilize your neck before you do anything else.’ I was like, okay. He’s like, ‘Unless you want to walk to the hospital.’ I was like, ‘How far is the hospital?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s about three miles.’ And I was like, No, I’ll take the ride. I’m sure he was teasing me at that point, but I was in so much shock that I didn’t know what was going on. Then everybody I talked to after that, the emergency room docs, the surgeon, all the doctors were basically like people don’t typically live, because I wasn’t wearing a helmet.”

“We’ve talked back and forth on whether or not that actually saved my life or not, and I’m not advocating that you shouldn’t wear a helmet on a bike. I’m just saying mine one in a million chance, because I hit the window with my head, and there’s a chance if I was wearing a helmet, it would have been bigger, and I could have hit the cross guard over the top of the car, that might have snapped my neck. It might not have, I don’t know. I know that my dad has always told me that I give my guardian angel the hardest time, and I almost outran him that day. But, yeah, he was looking out. There was a reason that I survived that, and a reason that I was there. So then the doctors were like, ‘Yeah, dude, you should be dead. You should have died in the physics of this accident, usually this is a fatal accident. There’s no way you’re going to wrestle again, your arm is completely shattered. It’s destroyed. Everything from the elbow to shoulder is just destroyed, you’re going to be lucky to lift weights.’ Six months later I was wrestling again. I had two plates, 18 pins and screws and, I don’t know, six or seven hour surgery, putting my arm back together.”

On having a new lease on life:

“In a way, I was like, I’ve wasted so much time. There’s so many stupid decisions, or I’ve worried about so many things that don’t truly matter. I’ve let so much time waste, and I felt that I couldn’t do that anymore. I felt like I had been given this second chance on life, literally, where it was like, I don’t want to waste any more time. I don’t want to take anything for granted. I definitely hug people more and was a lot more thankful and grateful. Because to have a doctor tell you should have died, not, hey you’re real lucky, or this could have been bad. He was like, Yeah, dude, I can’t explain why you’re alive.”

On his birthday tradition:

“Went to Japan, went to WWE, became a multi-time World Tag Team Champion on different continents, for different companies. All of the things that I thought my life were going to be is just totally different. Growing up in Cleveland with some of the bad decisions I was making as a younger kid, I thought I would be dead or in jail by 35. I genuinely didn’t think that I would live this long and I can confidently and firmly say that every year since 35 has been the best year of my life. I’ve got a birthday tradition, I never thought I would make it to 35 so every year on my birthday I deadlift 450 pounds, just to be like not dead yet. My wife laughs at me, but she thinks it’s funny.”

On possibly not returning to wrestling after his recent neck surgery:

“Yeah, absolutely. So I got in a freak accident, I landed a suplex, I got dropped directly on my head, just one of those things. I think we kind of say it without really thinking about it that in wrestling any match could be our last, or any move could be our last, or whatever. We kind of don’t think about the weight of that. I was on a live event, non televised, just a match that we don’t really think about or we take for granted, doing a move, taking a suplex that I had taken 1000s of times in my career. Didn’t think once about it. For whatever reason, on that day, I over-rotated and landed directly in my head. When it happened, I knew I was hurt, but I didn’t know how bad I was hurt. I thought it was something that was in my trap, and everything kind of locked up. So I was treating it muscular. It got worse. We got MRIs, saw there was herniation in the disc. I kept wrestling, because I was like, well we can just keep treating this with PT. I was talking with doctors. I was doing whatever we did. I was doing PT like 3, 4, 5, times a week. I was getting dry needling, scraping, everything, trying to mitigate all the stuff I was doing. I was doing electric therapy and stuff like that, trying to stimulate the nerves, trying to doing everything I could to avoid surgery. But at the same time, I was wrestling every single week, I didn’t miss a match, and then I took another bad fall, just got tumbled up going over the ropes one time and it actually didn’t even hit my neck. I hit my elbow on the apron on the way over, and then three days later my tricep disappeared, my right lat shrank like half in size, and then my right pec flattened within days. I came in, and I was terrified. So I came into work that week, and we were scheduled for a match, actually, against New Day. Ironically enough, we were scheduled to wrestle The New Day. I sat down with medical, I sat down with Triple H and everybody, the consensus was, ‘Hey, you’re going to Birmingham tomorrow. You’re not flying home, cancel plans. We’re flying you from TV to Birmingham.’ I saw Dr Cordova. We did try a nerve block thing, because he was like, hey, maybe we can reverse some of this. So we tried that before cutting and then that didn’t have the effect that anyone wanted. So we did neck surgery but it was immediate, it was fast. It was like, bang, bang, bang.”

That sounds scary.

“It was. They’re going through the front now. So it’s ACDF surgery. It’s at level six, seven. Ivar’s got two levels. So his is actually the one above and mine, but our symptoms are totally different, even down to the fingers, our nerve pathway, the way that my nerve pathway was affected was totally different than his. So it’s funny that we both have surgically repaired necks, but our injuries couldn’t be more separate. But yeah, I’ve always been a fast healer. After the motorcycle wreck I was back in six months, so in my brain I was like, I’ll be back in six months. I’ve done this before, it’s fine. Six months came, I went for the scan, still didn’t have full fusion, seven months no fusion, eight months no fusion, nine months no fusion. Now I’m getting scared. What happens if this doesn’t fully fuse? What is life without wrestling? How does this go on? Then thank God, finally it did fuse. We showed full fusion, I was able to start training again, get back really quickly. But then it ended up being 13 months, I think, from surgery that I was out. There were definitely some times of like, this might be the end. So I was thinking, and I’m texting with Ivar, and talking to my wife every day, how do we go from here? What happens now? So it’s sobering to be struck there. So, then having the motorcycle wreck, then having the neck surgery. There’s all of this. Like, Hey, dude, don’t take anything for granted. Not a single flight, not a single match, not a single move, not a single day. Then with kids, you know this is bad as anybody, the days are long and the years are short.”

“So my oldest is already four years old. Even though I know you shouldn’t take anything for granted, you get weighed down by just how hard that is, not sleeping, not whatever, you know what I mean. I heard something that was like, parenting is only hard for good parents. I’m not saying that I’m the best parent in the world. I know I’m not. I just try my best every day. I care. We’re up at night. We’re up early, sleep late, whatever we have to do. I’m not trying to say that I’m better than anybody else, but you think about that, and you think about those kids and you just try to soak all that stuff in, even when it’s hard. It’s something that Sarah and I talk about a lot, like, wow, it’s hard. I remember with Cash, she’s breastfeeding, and we’re co-sleeping, we’re doing all this stuff. She’s not sleeping more than 30 to 45 minute stretches for like a month at a time. She looks at me, and she was just like how long can someone go without sleep before they die? I’m like, I don’t know, but it’s not yet.”

On winning the Tag Team Championships again:

“Oh man, I don’t know that I have the words to articulate that. It’s incredibly validating and definitely something we talk about, appreciating things. We’re grateful. We’re thinking about them in ways that maybe when we were younger, or we hadn’t almost died, or had our careers taken away, we’re not thinking of. So to kind of put that retrospective back into it, we talk about soaking in it. So it’s something that not just on the title win, but a lot of times Ivar and I will go to the ring, and one of us will take the time, will grab the other one. Maybe we’re waiting for our opponent to come down or the lights have gone off right before an entrance music hits. One of us will grab the other one and be like, dude, soak this in. This is cool. This is a moment. When me, Ivar and Sarah all came out at Mania we did that at the top of the ramp. As we were walking down the next opponent’s music started because that ramp was so long in LA, we actually didn’t get the camera on us the whole way down, so we had a moment to look around. So I’m gonna try to steal a moment like that tomorrow or this weekend with Ivar. But yeah, the title win is it’s crazy because it means so much. It means the company has faith in you, the company is making you the face of their division, whatever that division is. Whether that’s the Women’s Title or the Tag Team Title, the World Heavyweight title, you are a face of that company. That’s such a vote of confidence, and such a meaningful thing on a professional level and a personal level. Whether we like it or not, we invest our personal kind of self-worth into your character, how much of you as a person gets put forward. This is an incredibly vulnerable art. Because if you saw Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow, you’re gonna go, ‘Oh my gosh, you play Jon Snow. That’s so cool that you get to act and pretend to be Jon Snow. Oh man, that’s amazing.’ When wrestling fans meet you, they’re like, ‘Hey you’re Erik, you suck. You’re out of shape, you’re this, you’re that, your moves are bad, whatever.’It’s personal and it’s a different medium. We have this knowledge that for movies and TV shows, those are actors playing a role. Wrestlers, because there is so much reality and truth to who we are, the best and most effective wrestling characters are extensions of you, so you put that kind of forward. But as a negative side to that fans are like, Hey, you suck. Not the tongue in cheek, Hey, you’re a bad guy, so I’m gonna boo you. So it is vulnerable, it’s very vulnerable. Because when you get that confidence of the company saying, Hey, you’re the guy.”

On The Viking Experience:

“It was less than a week, it was like six days and then we were The Viking Raiders. However, the only thing that changed was our name. We were still the same people. We still did the same moves, we still did the same entrance. We still wore the same clothes, same horns and armor and all the stuff. I think we still even had the same music, they just changed the name on the tron. But people on Twitter have never let us forget, like ever. Every time we’re on TV, we’ll get at least a dozen Viking Experience tweets, which is funny, but yeah, we can go down that rabbit hole if you want to. It was a silly, silly, silly moment. Because that was our debut from NXT, and we had already gotten our name changed once, because we were War Machine on the Indies, then we came to WWE, and they couldn’t use that name for a variety of legitimate and good reasons.”

On the rumour that The Beserkers was a scrapped name:

“Not until the main roster. So from War Machine to War Raiders, the initial one was Doomsday Raiders. We were like oof. Okay, could we give you some ideas? So Ivar and I went and we talked about a bunch of stuff, we probably gave 50 names back. Then someone told us they really want to put raiders in the name. So we came up with 50 names with raiders in them, and the number one on our list was actually Viking Raiders. We’re like, ‘Hey, this is a name that we like. It kind of fits who we are, the look we’ve got, the energy we’ve got, I like this name.’ So we sent it up and I think it was Hunter who was like, ‘We’re kind of thinking War Raiders.’ I was like, well, let’s give you some different ideas. He said, ‘Yeah, but we really like War Raiders.’ And we’re like, yeah War Raiders is the coolest name we’ve ever heard. So then we became the War Raiders. Then we were War Raiders in all of NXT, we liked the name, and then we got called up. We were the Viking Experience.

Our first day on the main roster. We had never actually physically met Vince McMahon, but we went and stood outside his office to go and plead our case. Because I was ringside, this is fun, I was ringside, and I see our music starts playing, and it’s The War Raiders up on the screen, and then the logo changes, and Berserkerz comes up. Now I’m looking like, oh man. Then that goes away, and the Viking Experience comes up. I look and I’m like, Oh no! So I walk up and Hunter was actually ringside, he’s texting, and I walk up to him and I was like, ‘Hey, dude, is this a rib?’ He just shakes his head and goes, ‘I wish.’ I’m like, ‘What do we do?’ He’s like, ‘Well, you gotta go talk to Vince.’ All right, cool. So Ivar’s plane was late, he gets to the building, I tell him we got to go talk to Vince. This is bad, right? So we go get in line, stand, we make our case. Said, Viking Experience sounds like a Disney ride, it sounds something like a small world, the tea cups and all that stuff. The Viking Experience, bring your kids, right?

So, we pitched that case, and Vince was like, ‘Well, that makes sense, but we don’t have time to get that through legal.’ Because we asked to be Viking Raiders because we heard through a little birdie told us, when we changed from War Machine to War Raiders, it was they were really stuck on Raiders. So all of the names had raiders in them. This time, Vince was really stuck on us being Vikings. He loved Vikings. Little known fact, Vince was a big fan of the history show Vikings, which is probably why we got called up in the first place, because he was like, Hey, we got Vikings on TV? Bring them up. So he wanted us to be the Viking something, right? And the problem is, Vikings are a very popular thing in culture right now. So nothing could get past legal, nothing could get trademarked, nothing could get whatever. Viking Experience was shockingly free, because no one wanted to be that, including us. So we asked to be Viking Raiders. By this point, it’s like, 7:30 right? The show’s going on at eight. He was like, ‘Well, we can’t get this cleared through legal at this point. So what we’ll do is, you’ll be the Viking Experience today, and if we really don’t like it, then we’ll be Viking Raiders next week. And you know, no press is bad press. So worst case scenario, people will talk. They’ll be talking about you.’ So we’re like, okay, and as we’re leaving the office, kind of in an afterthought, he goes, ‘Oh and by the way, one of you is Ivar, and one of you is Erik, I don’t care who.’ We just walked out. I looked and we were maybe two steps outside of his office, and Ivar grabs my arm for real, and he’s like, ‘Please don’t make me be Erik. My brother’s name is Erik.’ The bully in my brain for like, three seconds, I was like, Man, I really should be mean. No, okay, fine, you could be Ivar. But I really, it was close to us being the other way. I was like, Man, I don’t know how they came up with these names. Someone in creative might have just Googled famous Viking names or something. Because I did that afterwards, trying to figure out where they come up with these names? The first one was Erik the Red. Then it was Ivar the Boneless. I was like, Oh, cool. So it’s literally just Erik, Ivar. You guys are Vikings, yep, Eric and Ivar.”

On reverting back to War Raiders:

“More important than that, we got to be ourselves. Now, as War Raiders, we are the closest thing to War Machine that we’ve ever been. No face paint. We’re not even wearing horns and helmets and armor. We’re coming out in essentially biker vests, leather vests. This is what I wear to TV. I just put a vest on, and I cut promos like this on WWE TV. I wear a black T-shirt and jeans, which is what I wear every day of my life. If I’m not in gym clothes, this is what I’m wearing.”

On Valhalla giving Michael Cole the antlers:

“I think that was actually her last appearance on TV before she wasn’t able to be because she found out she was pregnant. I really think that was, it could be wrong. Internet, please correct me there, but I’m pretty sure that was her last moment on TV before she went on maternity leave. It was awesome. So it’s funny too, because Sarah had played around with different looks for Valhalla and different things. Some of it was based on the TV show, or some of it was like Instagram or whatever, where Viking paint and makeup was really, really fun. So she had fun just experimenting with different things and different looks, and then she would wear like the skull mask, or she’d wear different things.

Cole during the day, we’d be in catering and Cole would be like, ‘Hey, are you wearing antlers today?’ And she’s like, ‘No, I’m wearing whatever.’ And he was like, ‘Ah, man.’ So it was real, that was genuine. Sarah, again, didn’t ask permission. She was like, I’ll ask forgiveness, not permission, and didn’t tell anyone. Just came out and put the antlers on him. So those reactions are 100% genuine. TV is live. Sometimes the best moments in wrestling is stuff that’s completely off-script and just not [planned]. Because we all have a rough idea of what’s going to happen, or whatever, to a certain extent. That one, the only person who knew that was going to happen was Sarah, and I don’t even know how long before she knew that was going to happen, but she was like, Yep, I’m bringing the antlers. Because Cole, every time he saw the antlers got really happy, for whatever reason. He’s just a fan of antlers. I don’t know. I can’t explain it, but it tickles him. So Sarah jumped up on the desk and put it on him and that was just a real, genuine moment from all involved, that wasn’t agreed upon. That wasn’t like, Hey, we’re gonna do this. She just was like, Yep, there you go.”

On Sarah Logan/Valhalla thinking about a return to WWE:

“Yeah, she is. She is a constant inspiration for me. She works so hard, she is so dedicated and disciplined. She keeps me on my diet so much better because she’s so disciplined with hers. She’s already running, jumping, throwing things, getting back into battle shape and getting ready. So yeah, I don’t know when this is gonna air, but I’m sure it won’t be too long in the future you start seeing her again.”

On his enhancement match against Mark Henry in 2006:

“Yeah, Matt Hardy actually grabbed me after that enhancement match to check on me and make sure I was okay. He was genuinely worried that Mark killed me.”

On the stiff clothesline:

“Totally fine. Mark, super professional, awesome guy. I’ve known Mark for a lot of years, obviously, since 2006. Didn’t touch me in the head at all, that was all body on body, and I hit his chest, and he’s got a big chest. Had a bigger chest back then too. Had more weight on him at that point. I hit his chest as hard as I could. I’m still living in Cleveland, still have dreams of being a wrestler. I’m thinking this is my shot. If I do something crazy and they see this, maybe they’ll give me a shot. […] So yeah, I ran into him 100 miles and hour, I knew where to put my head so it didn’t get taken off.”

On a possible Erik solo run like Ivar:

“Yes, absolutely. I think there is untapped potential there where I don’t have any doubt. Ivar proved it when I was down with n neck injury, give me the ball and I can perform at any point on the card. I have full confidence in my ability that you want me to cut a promo? Great, I’ll cut a promo. You want me to have, whatever, whoever, anybody on our roster, especially our roster now it’s ridiculously talented, like ridiculously stacked and talented. You want me to wrestle AJ Styles on Raw? Great. I’ll tear the house down. You want me to wrestle? Pick a guy, anybody. I have a skill set, and I’ve been doing this since 2003. From the Indies, I was good guy, bad guy, comedy guy, you know, you’ve seen it just in WWE with Viking raiders. We’re serious, we’re scary, we’re heels, we’re comedy, whatever, wherever you want to go. We can do that. We have the skill set. So absolutely, there is a part of me that wants to have that spotlight always. We’re in this as wrestlers, but there’s also part of me that I never want that to be at the expense of being The War Raiders.”

What is Erik grateful for?

“Family, our farm and fitness, and faith.”

Buddy Matthews On Rhea Ripley, Ankle Injury Update, AEW, Aleister Black

in LATEST EPISODES on April 29, 2025 January 30, 2026

Buddy Matthews (@SNM_Buddy) is a professional wrestler currently signed to AEW. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Las Vegas to discuss signing with AEW following his WWE release, joining the House of Black and what’s next for him and Hounds of Hell now that Malakai Black has left AEW, his ankle injury at Grand Slam and still wrestling Kazuchika Okada, being married to Rhea Ripley, a possible WWE return and working with Ripley in a storyline and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” – Winston S. Churchill

Please support our sponsors!
PURE PLANK: The future of core fitness! Use the code CVV to save 10% on Pure Plank designed by Adam Copeland & Christian: https://gopureplank.com/?ref=tibcloux

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On his WWE release:

“It was weird, because I think I touched on it [in the last interview]. It was like this weight came off my shoulders. It was like this instant freedom. I remember people would tell me and go, it’s like this weight comes off and I never really understood until it actually happened. I was like, Oh, yeah. And then I was like, what happens with my green card? What am I going to do? I’m here on a visa, I own a house, I have dogs, then I went into panic mode. So that was more of the I was unsure about how to handle all of that, especially being an Australian. I’d been over here for a few years, but I don’t know that stuff. We had WWE do all that for me. So then I had to become an adult very quickly and figure out how to do all those things. But got through it, got my green card. It all came through and the rest is history.”

On being on a different schedule to his wife Rhea Ripley:

“Sometimes it becomes a bit of a pain in the ass. But we just kind of lock in that well, she’s definitely on a Monday, whether she’s on live events or not, depends. But then if I’m on a Wednesday or a Saturday, then we get a couple of days in there. But we learn to work it out.”

On making things work:

“Absolutely. But she’s also, I get kind of emotional talking about it, I’ve married my best friend. There isn’t anyone that I’d want to spend any more time with. I only need her. That’s it. I don’t need a massive group of friends. I don’t need approval. As long as I have her I could be the clown too, and we can just be chilled. I don’t need to go out. Give me a pizza, my wife, a horror movie, and we are good. I’m on cloud nine, and then generally, I’ll fall asleep, but that’s because I’m comfortable. That’s a good thing for a guy, if a guy could fall asleep. So yeah, but she’s my best friend, and now I’m very lucky.”

On photobombing fan’s photos with Rhea Ripley:

“I’ve started to try and make it a bit of a thing. So let me get this straight. All right. The first one, I get the photo, but I go into very protective mode of her, because I don’t know if they’re just going to come up. If they’re just coming up to her quickly, and I’m kind of her repellent, right? I’m constantly looking mad. So they [might think], oh maybe we don’t interrupt them. I’m not a very good repellent, apparently. So this one time, I was in the Publix’s line in the deli trying to get a sub, roses in my arm. I’m in my line, and it was a pretty busy line. While I’m in the line, someone gets a photo with her. I’m not losing my spot, I’m not moving, I’m getting that sub. So there’s a photo of me in the background just staring at him with roses in my hand. The next one I think you’re talking about is Walmart. We were in the pet section, now [they’re] following us. It was a weird interaction, because to me, we’re people, right? If you’re gonna ask for a photo, ask both of us for a photo. ‘Hey Buddy, hey Rhea, can I get a photo?’ Yeah sure, that’s fine. You want both. But if you’re gonna go up to one of us, go, ‘Hey, can I get a photo?’ Doesn’t necessarily mean both of us. So he didn’t ask me for a photo. So I just kind of back out, that’s just like my thing, made sure that I was in it. And then it went pretty viral. I know what he was doing, the way he captured and the way he took the photo was pretty obvious, but now I just made my thing. I’m just in the background.”

On being one of the first male Australian wrestlers to make it in WWE:

“Yeah, so Tenille moved over to Canada I believe. She was trained with Lance, so that was kind of her in. I think Tyler Breeze [was there] and there was a pretty big class that came from Lance’s school at the time. Then they had FCW in Tampa at the time was mini developmental, but yeah, she was the first one. She ended up moving over doing that. She actually gave me a little bit of a pep talk before she left. I did a show, and she goes, ‘What are you doing? You’re just going to stay here?’ Because everyone talked to me, ‘When are you going over? When are you going over?’ And just, oh, yeah, soon. But I didn’t want to take that leap in case I failed, because I was never really good at anything. I wasn’t good at school or anything like that. So to think that was my quick, oh, yeah, soon, soon, soon, because I didn’t want to be told that I wasn’t good at it. Then she gave me this little bit of pep talk. She goes, ‘You’re too good to just be sitting here.’ I was like, Alright, I gotta do something. So I ended up seeing a tweet from Bill DeMott at the time, who said that there was a try-out in Florida. I started working with my stepdad at this time, doing construction, so I had a steady job for the first time in my life, because the wrestling dream was always number one. I couldn’t hold a full-time job because I needed to wrestle on the weekends. So after that, I just told him, ‘Hey, there’s this try-out here. If you have to fire me, fire me, I have to take this opportunity.’ He goes, ‘No, that’s fine.’ So I ended up dropping like 10 grand, everything that I had, I put in. I paid for my try-out, I paid for my flight, paid for my accommodation, and just gave it my all. It was four days. I say it was like four days of hell, there were like 86 people, and at the end of the four days, they said, ‘Yeah, thanks everyone, the contract will be given to Matthew Adams.’ I just stood there and went me? There was NFL football players collapsing on us, it was hell, and I wasn’t going to let him break me. But I was so zoned in, and I remember I got it and then everyone’s like, yeah, clapping. Then they look back at them and they go, that’s it. And then they all looked at me like it was a comic book, they’re all happy and once there was no more contracts, they still turned on me, all heel. I was like, oh God. Then yeah, the whole process of doing the medical and then I moved over in 2013 came over.”

On his current relationship with wrestling:

“It’s tough. Because like you said, I’ve seen a lot of it, and I’ve done a lot of it. I’ve wrestled on WrestleMania. I’ve had dream matches. I think that where I’m at with wrestling now is I really as a performer, and to scratch my interest, what I feel like I need is I want to dive more into the storytelling aspect of things. I think that people know that I can wrestle and I can have good matches with pretty much everyone. I do put my hat on if Buddy’s in it, it’s going to be good, and I feel like I really haven’t dropped the ball when it comes to that. But I always try and find a way to hopefully scratch that itch that I want. So in every match, if you can kind of go back with what I’ve done recently in AEW, in every match, I try and put a little something that’s going to stand out in that different way, but something that I can hopefully build something off. So for instance, Adam Cole, when I wrestled Adam, he came back and they put a lot of faith in me to work with him, because he just had all the injuries, and he needed that come back and have a good match, good performance, but he was probably a little bit off himself. Can I do this? So I was very lucky to be put in the situation and work with him, and I love working with him. But I want to create a story in that match, well I could just go for your ankle, but what can I draw out of that 12-15 minute match that’s just not wrestling moves? How do I create a story in that? I don’t want to work his ankle until then he starts hitting a flurry on me, and then I have to go to the ankle to slow him down, because I think I called him fragile in that little match. It was just one match, but build it up. You’re fragile. I just want to prove that you’re fragile. Okay, well, I’m not fragile. Prove that. Then he goes, gets taken away. No, this is what I said. You’re fragile. I’m not fragile. Comes running back, tries to put it on me. I resort to the ankle, I know that he’s got it in him. I use it like Dragon Ball Z, he’s going Super Saiyan. I know that he’s good, but now he’s better than I thought that he was, and I’m bringing too much out of him. So I have to resort to try and do what I didn’t want to do. But when I worked Adam [Copeand], we hit a double cross body, I start coughing up blood. So now I’ve got cracked ribs, so that slows me down. It gives me a bit of I’m hindered. Then he hits the spear, okay? So then that goes into the thing with Brody. Think Brody actually got a little bit of color with Edge. So it was like, then it went into Malakai. So he’s spilled blood with all of us but Malakai, and then they go into a cage. So it’s just like one little thing with me coughing up blood, getting hurt, that then I’ve spilled blood with this person, spilled blood with this person, then it goes, it’s just a small, minor detail that we can stretch like with Andrade. Did the match. He just came back from the torn pec. Okay, well, what do you want to do? You got a 15-minute match, can you go 15 minutes? He doesn’t know. He hasn’t wrestled in a year. So let’s do a commercial break where it looks like you’ve hurt your pec, but you’ve hurt it yourself. But then maybe I get hurt too, and then we’ll use that into the finish. So then he hits the figure eight on me, and I tap out. We create the little story elements and those little details that can play out throughout the match, and that’s what I’ve been sinking my teeth into. But I want more than that. I want to do like the MJF’s that are killing the storytelling, like the Hangman’s killing the storytelling. I want to be in that.”

On his ankle:

“It’s okay. Rolled it pretty bad. Had an X ray, MRI. There was no break, but there was partial ligament tear and cartilage damage. [I’m] Walking. I haven’t ran, I haven’t jumped, I’ve just started implementing cardio, but then it kind of stiffens up. And, you know, we’re working through it, but the docs was were telling me I’ve never seen an ankle roll that much under someone without completely destroying, smashing, disintegrating the bones. So I didn’t break a bone, which was incredible, but then I had to wrestle 15 minutes after it.”

On knowing something was wrong:

“So as soon as I rolled, jumped off, and it went, you actually see me go f*ck. Then I go sit in my corner, I’m watching Okada, and then I could just feel my boot tightening up and I’m like, oh. Obviously I don’t know how bad it is. So I’m wrestling, and that was the first time. I’ve shattered my jaw in a wrestling match, I’ve had injuries before, but that was the first time in the ring that it got to me in the head. I remember doing the thing at the start, and then it started to really sink in, the pain. Then I remember Okada comes up to me and grabs me to whip me to the corner, rather than just going and listening and being in the moment I’m like, can I get there? So then when I got there, I’m like I made it what’s next? Then he just runs and just hits with this elbow. Now I’m two steps behind, because I’m just worried about whether I can even do it. Somehow I did, and we got through it, and pretty happy with how it came out, considering how hindered I was.”

On whether anything was cut out of the match:

“I don’t remember I did a step-up rana, and I was running somehow. Because I remember the doc afterwards. They had some trainer who did some soccer or rugby over there, who was in Australia when I did it. They were pulling on it, and you could kind of tell that they were like, yeah, I think you’ve ripped the ligament off the bone and pulled bone off. When I wiggled it, when we did the test, he was like it’s going to fall off.”

But you didn’t need surgery?

“I partially tore the ligaments, it didn’t even completely rupture it. So when he redid it, he was like oh God. When I touched that last time, it was like it’s gonna fall off. I went on my honeymoon afterwards, the next day. I was miserable, and I’m not letting it get me down. She goes, ‘Do not get injured in that match.’ I go, ‘Well technically, I didn’t get injured in the match, it’s before the bell.’ Then we spent a week in the Gold Coast, and I wasn’t letting her win. She wasn’t going to be able to throw that in my face and go, ‘Remember our honeymoon? You couldn’t walk?’ Well, I was hobbling around.”

On being on crutches:

“Yeah, I had started off with two, then it moved to one, and then I braced it up and taped it up so it was so thick that I was just limping around. But yeah, we got through it. It was a great time.”

On when he hopes to return to the ring:

“I’m hoping sooner rather than later. I’m obviously gonna have to get in the ring and suss it out and get back in ring shape. But I’m hoping in the next couple of weeks, fingers crossed.”

On what’s next now that Malakai Black is back in WWE:

“So Hounds of Hell have started. Obviously, we rebranded as the Hounds of Hell. It’s still House of Black, it’s just not under that name. We’re just adding a little bit more color to it, and just doing a bit more talking ourselves. We don’t want to just be House of Black under a new name. We need to change a little bit, new coat of paint. So we started that, obviously. Then I hurt my ankle, unfortunately. So then that kind of takes me out of the picture. Brody has been killing it, he’s having these f*cking blinders with Takeshita. Brody’s a big man that can do a lot of stuff and is killing it. But yeah, hoping we can get back to the Hounds of Hell, maybe have to a bit of a reboot just to kind of tell us that we’re all back together and stuff with Julia and stuff like that. But yeah, I’m sinking my teeth to get back in. I need that creative outlet to start going again.”

On a possible WWE return:

“I think that’s the big question. So I would love to do something with her. I think that story and our chemistry, just the way we are, would be good television. That’s definitely something, an itch I’d like to scratch. But the good thing about her in WWE and me and AEW and us both being in the business is that I would never want, and I don’t think I’d ever get there, I’d never want to be jealous, or get jealous of her in her position. She’s a megastar, she’s John Cena of women right now, and if I’m lowered, let’s just say I’m doing enhancement matches or whatever. I don’t want to be like, well, you’re doing that, you get this special treatment, and I get this and then kind of resent her for the position. Like I said, I don’t think it would ever happen, but I wouldn’t even want that to be an option. Then also, if something happens at work, I want her to be able to vent to me without me going, ‘Yeah, no, but this is how you play that game.’ I can kind of be that in the other in the back seat, go, Yeah, I understand what you’re talking about, you know you deserve whatever, or you know you should do it like this, or whatever, or just let her rant, and I can do the same to her. I can say I did this and did this. We can talk about the positives. We talk about the negatives. What upsets us and all, and it’s just like we’re on the same team. It would never become a competition.”

On being chopped by Rhea Ripley:

“We were streaming. I like the little Twitch community, it is fun. It’s all positive. It’s never really negative, very rarely negative, and we just kind of go on there to kind of chat. They’re all there to see her anyway. And there’s this thing called the hype train. So when you get a certain thing, it’s like catch the train, it’s a hype train. It goes by levels and I said, if we get to level 10, I’ll let her chop me. Never thinking, I didn’t know it went to 10. Then it gets to level 10, she chops me. We went tanning by the pool, and I’m like, I’m redheaded, doesn’t take me long to get burned. I was like, Man, this is a work, there’s no one else in the house. You could have just slapped your leg. No, that’s the competitiveness in her. She said, No, I get a shot at you, I’m taking my shot. So she did not hold back, and I had a handprint on me. Now everyone’s like, yep, chop him. Chop him. So yeah, she’ll take her shot when she can. But I tried to put her to sleep. She told it on Logan Paul. I put her in a triangle choke, and remember I’m an MMA fan. So I put her in a triangle, just tap. She goes, No, and I go just a little bit tighter, a little bit tired. I go, just tap, just tap. She goes No. I am squeezing a full triangle choke on it. She’s not tapping. My legs gassed out and then she just held me down. Scariest woman of my life. Why do you think I married her? I will be the most faithful man ever. Because if I ever upset this woman, she would kill me.”

What is Buddy Matthews grateful for?

“My wife, life and my wrestling career.”

The Hurt Syndicate On Reuniting in AEW, “WE HURT PEOPLE”, New Members, Cedric Alexander

in LATEST EPISODES on April 24, 2025 January 30, 2026

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Bobby Lashley (@fightbobby), Shelton Benjamin (@Sheltyb803) and MVP (@the305mvp) are a faction in AEW. They sit down with Chris Van Vliet in Toronto, Ontario to discuss getting the group back together in AEW after it was brought to a premature end in WWE, if they are interested in adding Cedric Alexander or any other members into the group, if MVP has retired, a possible World Title run for Shelton Benjamin, the rain delay at WrestleMania 37 that affected Bobby Lashley’s match, dream matches and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: Don’t be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin. – Grace Hansen

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On knowing that the group would one day get back together:

Bobby Lashley: “I did. I mean, it was inevitable. When we came together originally, it was so natural, it was so real. The crowd, you guys knew it. This isn’t just a couple of guys that got thrown together. You see it all the time. You see in WWE, you see it in AEW, guys that get thrown together. And the minute they leave the show, they all go their separate ways. That’s not how we work. We are really friends, we really do stuff together, we really argue, we really fight like brothers. This is real, you guys feel it, and that’s why it gets over so well.”

On whether the plan was for MVP to go first, then Shelton Benjamin and finally Bobby Lashley:

MVP: “Well, the plan originally was to get Bobby to join me. Bobby, let’s go man, let’s get out of here. Shelton’s already at home. All we gotta do is just not sign, get Shelton back and we can run this back. Our final act, we could do this. Bobby, finally, he relented, and he said, Alright.”

On what the group can do now that they couldn’t in WWE:

Shelton Benjamin: “Well, first of all, being actually seen in front of a live crowd. That’s a good start. But I think this time around we have a bit more control of our destiny, obviously, a lot more. What happened before, everything ended way prematurely. None of us were happy about that, and by us, I mean everyone. So the fact that we’re able to come here and give you the product that we want to give you, and everything’s going great. Like I said, we’re having the time of our lives.”

On possibly bringing Cedric Alexander into the group:

MVP: “I believe he is still on his 90 days.”

Bobby Lashley: “We love Ced, he’s like our little brother, so we will see what happens.”

On possible dream matches:

MVP: “I was actually very interested in the match-up that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen just yet, but I was looking forward to seeing Cage and Archer against these two guys, to see some big, giant, physical tough guys that can actually try to bang with these dudes. I wanted to see that. I still like to see big guys go at it. I enjoy a heavyweight bout.”

Bobby Lashley: “Well, you know what? Going over to AEW, those guys are really good, and these guys trying to surprise us even more. When we first got there, we worked with Private Party and they shocked us at the beginning. I like those guys. I truly like those guys. I think those guys are going to be stars. But then The Gunns, they’re going to be stars also, and that’s the one thing that we do when we came over to AEW, we said, You know what, it’s not just about us. It’s about making some of these guys. And we don’t know who we were going to make. We were like, who in the landscape of AEW do we want to help elevate? So far, the teams that we’ve been against they’ve actually really impressed us. I like Private Party. I like The Gunns and The Outrunners, just recently getting with these guys man, we can’t be in the same room with these guys without falling out. I really like those guys, so we are going to beat them up, but we’re going to bring them up at the same time.”

MVP: “That’s something that I think the fandom needs to understand with us specifically. When we decided that we were going to get the band back together, we knew that realistically speaking this is the last ride, this is our last run and then we’re going to ride off into the sunset. Even though we’re in tremendous shape, we are still in our later years. The whole idea with what we want to do on our way out the door is make some stars. It’s one thing just to put guys over. No, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about trying to take some of the equity that we’ve built up through the years and now reestablish that equity at AEW, and then when the time is right, with the right young talent, transfer that equity and make somebody.”

On a possible Shelton Benjamin World Title run in AEW:

Shelton Benjamin: “I’m going to just say yes. I definitely still want a world title. If you watch my performances, I’m not performing like a guy who wants to just retire and ride off into the sunset. While I definitely want to help elevate other talent, because that’s a big part of why we’re here, I still have goals. Being a World Champion in a prominent company is definitely on top of that list. Now, I have been World Champion for Puerto Rico, WWC, but I don’t know if we want to count that one. It counts? ok. But as far as WWE the big name companies, I won a World Championship, and I’m working every day to make sure that dream stays alive.”

On whether MVP has retired from the ring:

MVP: “No, not yet. I got a little bit left in me. It’s funny. We did a six-man about a month ago now, give or take, and they were teasing me because I was actually in there for a little while, and it felt good. It was coming back to me, and Shelton said, ‘Are you ever gonna tag out?’ I’m like oh yeah, maybe I should.”

On Max Caster’s previous remarks about Shelton Benjamin:

Shelton Benjamin: “We’ve spoken, and pretty much what I suspected was true, Max is an idiot. He was poking the bear but then the bear showed up and he decided, okay, maybe I should stop poking. So long story short, it’s my spot now.”

On a unique fan interaction:

MVP: “The one that sticks out in my mind, it’s so ridiculous that I laugh about it. I was at an autograph signing, and this couple came. I’d say they were probably in their late 20s. The guy had on the US championship belt, and he had on my T-shirt, but he was shy and his wife was doing all the talking. He finally broke and started talking. He goes, ‘Yeah, for my birthday, she actually let me while we were in the room…’ His wife just looks over at him and I’m looking, she goes, ‘Well, now go ahead, tell him. You brought him this far.’ And he goes, ‘We did it. I just yelled I’m coming!’ I’m just sitting at an autograph signing. I don’t know this dude, I don’t know this woman, but I’m all up in their bedroom. He said, sometimes she lets him do it with the championship title on. I’m like, thank you for this enlightening afternoon. It was very nice meeting both of you. Please pass the hand sanitizer.”

Shelton Benjamin: “That brings a whole new definition to ballin’.”

On the WrestleMania 37 rain delay:

Bobby Lashley: “When you have a match with somebody like Drew, because Drew brings out a lot of intensity there. I remember at one point we said, I was telling MVP man, I’ll just go fight him backstage, just bring a camera back. Because once you get so amped up and go and get ready for a match like that and it starts raining, you don’t want to just break that. You don’t want to keep waiting and waiting and going back and forth. I knew something was going to happen. I knew we were going to go out there eventually, but I think at some point I was just going to go and punch Drew in the mouth, and maybe we start just fighting. Because Drew was actually one of my favorite opponents. He’s up there on my list, just because he brought something out of me that a lot of guys didn’t. Because I think a lot of guys get out there and they hide behind a microphone, they can say whatever they want, try to be a tough guy. You really know they’re not. Drew just embodied a little bit more than that, and that’s why I was really amped up to have that match with him. So I was ready to go. We kept walking by, and I was like we might just have to start fighting back here. And then if it stops and we can just take that out to the ring. It was going to happen, especially just coming out of the pandemic, this was the first opportunity for us to be in front of a crowd. We were going to have a match no matter what.”

On what’s next for them in AEW:

MVP: “Look, I’m spoiling it for you. I’m telling you what’s going to happen. We are going to hold these Tag Team Titles until we’re done, until we decide as a group that okay, we’re now ready to move on to that next level. And then we are coming for singles championship gold, no tag teams. That’ll be done, but we gotta beat a few more people first and imprint The Hurt Syndicate label on these tag team titles so people will know we were here. They will remember. Then it’s on to the next phase, and that’s singles championships for these two gentlemen.”

On if their kids have talked about becoming wrestlers:

MVP: “Yeah, my son talks about it all the time like, Daddy, when I’m in the WWE, will they play my theme music too? He’s already got his moves named and everything, yeah, so that’s what he wants to do now at 10. I’ll see if I can send him down another path.”

Bobby Lashley: “I have two girls and a boy, and right now my boy is completely focused on football, but that’s what we do this for. We want to build legacy, so I’ve opened up some doors for him, just in case, not not as a fallback, but if he ever chooses to go into wrestling, the doors will be open for him.”

On possibly expanding the group:

MVP: “We are always ready to talk business with whomever, whenever, if the time is right. As they say, if it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense. So I can tell you with the utmost confidence that at some point in the future, we’ll add another. I can promise you that. Who? When? I’m not at liberty to say but I can tell you that there will be another suit in the quartet.”

On the worst bumps they have taken:

Bobby Lashley: “One time when Big E slammed me into the stairs. I don’t know what even happened. The corner of the stairs, the metal stairs, he picked me up and he slammed me on it. And it was one of those ones where I thought when I hit it and I laid down that ground, I was like, am I good? I’m still okay. But when I watched it back, and I have it on my Instagram, it’s horrible. It looked a lot worse than it was. So thank God I was okay afterwards. I wasn’t hurt at all, but it looks nasty.”

Shelton Benjamin: “The worst bump I ever took was actually after I left WWE the first time and I was doing an indie show in Mexico. For some reason, again, this is Mexico. They had a ring and it was like double-stacked. So it was the height of a ring on top of a ring. At some point during the match, I took a bump where I was supposed to just roll out to the floor, and I rolled, and I forgot [the height]. I came down and splat on the concrete. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, I thought everything was broke. So I was like, I will never wrestle in one of these things again. When you hear the wind coming by your ears as you’re going down, you know you’re in trouble.”

Bayley On WrestleMania, Damage CTRL, Life After Wrestling, Mercedes Moné

in LATEST EPISODES on April 22, 2025 January 30, 2026

Bayley (@itsBayleyWWE) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Las Vegas to discuss getting started with WWE and developing her Hugger persona, destroying the Bayley Buddies as part of her heel turn and if they might return, the injury that happened during the pandemic, the original plan for Damage CTRL, fans not liking her finisher, being left off the WrestleMania 40 press conference, her relationship with Michael Cole, life after wrestling and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “You can’t change the weather but you can dress for it.”

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On mixing up the hair colors:

“Since Mania last year, I did purple because IYO and I had both had red hair, and so I was like well we’re not a team anymore, so I kind of need to change it up. Then I wanted to do full purple like this, but it was so last minute. We were on Sunday and then I had appearances Saturday, and I was like well, I can’t just show off my hair at an appearance. It has to show off at Mania. So, my hair lady came to my Airbnb I had for my friends and stuff at like four in the morning and just fixed all my red hair and put purple in. She’s like, I can’t do the whole thing. We don’t have time for that. It’s like, okay, so now I finally got it.”

On Michael Cole:

“We’ll be putting stuff together before the show and he’ll be like, ‘Hey Bayley, so I guess I gotta cheer for you tonight because you’re wrestling Liv.’ I’m like, ‘You don’t have to cheer for me, Michael, I don’t care what you do.’ [He goes] ‘Oh, well, screw you then’, and he just flips me off from the chair and I’m in the ring trying to do my work. He’s just so funny, dude. He’s for real, like a mentor to me. He’s somebody that I can go to, he’s been here for so long, and he’s always available. You can’t always get in Hunter’s ear, Michael Hayes is always available, and he has a very different mindset. But Cole is there watching everything, watching every girl’s match, watching all the guys’ matches, and he’s been doing it and calling matches forever. So getting his mindset on things is always super helpful and he’s just always rooting for us and he has a different insight on stuff. So as much as I give him crap on TV, he’s somebody that even just up until just Monday, I went on Pat’s bus with him. As I was getting ready, I was texting him, ‘Hey, where you at? I’m wrestling Liv, and I just have some notes to give you.’ And he’s like, ‘Hey, I’m on Pat’s bus, come on over.’ I’m like, okay. So I went and sat with him, and Pat and just kind of gave him some notes, but he also asked, so what’s going on with this, and what’s going on with that? How can we make this better? Because he kind of has an idea of the direction I want to go as a character. So he really is the best, and he really wants the best for everybody, but not everyone uses him as an outlet, but he’s so knowledgeable, and I’ve learned a lot from him.”

On how long she intends to wrestle for:

“When I was younger, because women didn’t wrestle as long as we’re doing it now. Trish and Lita, if you think about it, they were everyone’s heroes. They were my heroes, and they only did it like, six, seven years with WWE, and were only on top for three years or something. So to me, that was always in my head. But now you look at Nattie, who’s been here forever. I just wrestled her on Friday, and just incredible in the ring. Just one of one, and everything that she brings to it, not just in the ring, but her experience, and we really need that in the locker room. So I always think that even if I’m not wrestling every week, there’s something that I have that can help the locker room just like she does, just like Naomi does, just like Tamina does. But when I was younger I always said all right, 35 would be my cut off, because, in my opinion, guys can go forever, but it’s not that cute when you’re a woman and you’re 35. But now that I’m 35 I’m just like, Oh we’re all way past that, and we’re still, main eventing, we’re still, doing red carpets, we’re still doing all this stuff. People still care about us. So that’s kind of like something, they still care about us. So that’s kind of like changed my mindset.”

On what’s next:

“I have so many other things I want to make it into. I have a year and a half left on this current contract, so we’ll see what happens then. [And then what?] Man, I don’t know. I think I’ve done everything I really want to do, not everything. There’s still a lot I want to get done, but done so much with WWE and I’ve been here for already 12 years and there’s a huge wave of women coming in that I think are ready to take over, ready to be in those spots. Teaming with Lyra right now has been super eye-opening to what the whole division has to offer. I’ve got to work with Roxanne. I got to work with Cora. But even like last night, hanging out with Lyra, we went out to dinner, and we hung out with Michin for her birthday. But being able to hang out with her outside of wrestling, hearing her mindset and why she does this, why she wants to make it better, what she wants to make better, how she wants to help even me. Things that we’re doing going into WrestleMania, how she wants to be better for me makes me so happy that there’s people like that and women like that that want to be better for the division. So when I think about okay, I might be done in a couple of years, who knows? I know that it’s going to be in good hands. So that makes me really happy. Where before John Cena always says he couldn’t leave, because who was going to do what he does? Who’s going to take his place? Who’s going to be the one to freaking put asses in seats? Who’s going to be the one that the kids want to see, that the kids idolize to the level that he does? Cody’s doing that. I’m not saying I’m John Cena, but that’s kind of the same mindset. As long as it’s in good hands, the goal was to just leave it in a better place than you found it.”

On getting to WWE:

“I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t know how I was gonna get here, it’s a little different nowadays. You see NXT, or you see WWE ID, you see different avenues and routes that you can take to get here. But I never saw how to get here, and I didn’t even know when I ended up training at my wrestling school, I didn’t know they had a school, and I didn’t know what I was going to do, but there was just something that I believed in. Something I felt that was just pulling me like okay, you’re gonna be there one day. So I wasn’t ever worried that I wasn’t gonna make it. I was just like how will I get there? But I always knew I was and it’s just a weird feeling, and not like a cocky thing, I have no business just being here. I’m not athletic, I’m not a model, I don’t have anything that stands [out]. I just had that feeling. I tell people that all the time. What advice would you give to anyone who has a dream, or anyone who wants to be a wrestler? And it sounds like such the lamest answer, but it’s so true. You can do literally anything you want. People think that it’s too out of reach, like whatever they want.”

On developing her hugger persona:

“The fans made that happen. So when I came up with the character, my character came from Molly Shannon from Superstar, the movie, that’s where it stemmed from. I was like, okay, I can have all the nervous antics like her, and then I could just be a super fan, and Dusty loved it. When we started doing promo class, everybody was looking forward to who I was going to be a fan of that day, or what I was going to do and I just had so much fun. Then when we finally did it on TV, I wrestled Alicia Fox, it wasn’t even that match. It was actually my match with AJ [Lee]. We were doing something where I literally went to hug and I was just gonna hug her as a fan. Then just me hugging her got a crazy reaction at Full Sail. Then I was like, All right, I’m just gonna run you into the corner. So I ran her to the corner so it came off like an offensive move, and they went freaking crazy. Then she told me do it again, so then I grabbed her and ran her to the corner. She’s like, one more time, and I did, and they were getting louder and louder each time. Then I think the next match they just started chanting, ‘Bayley’s gonna hug you’, and that was never my thought of being like I’m gonna be a hugger. Never had merch ideas, nothing. But it was from that match and her just saying do it again. All right, one more time. Just her hearing that reaction, it’d be hilarious.”

On the Bayley Buddies:

“I think that was supposed to be Adam Rose’s. I don’t know what exactly happened or why it didn’t work for him, maybe he didn’t want it. But I literally showed up at TV that day and they’re like, hey, we want to go through your entrance real quick. I was like, okay. At that point, I was like, they never do that to me. I’m just freaking loser, I just walk out and I wave to people. I already had the character, but I think that I was maybe a month into the character, then they surprised me with it, came out and they popped up. It’s like, this is awesome. Everybody watching, talent and stuff were like, Dude, that looks so cool and, yeah, it became a thing. I think it was supposed to be for Adam Rose though, because he had a whole, crazy character stuff. But I was so happy even having that. I remember sometimes at entrances for big matches, whenever they would pop up it would get a second pop. I would get a good reaction. But then the tube men got a big pop. It was like oh sh*t, they’re here.”

On whether the Bayley Buddies will return:

“I cut them up and then they sold them. They sold the cut ones. They sliced them into pieces, and then they sold them. I think it’s like a picture of me slicing them, or something like that. I don’t know.”

On her pandemic injury:

“This will be a story for another day, because I’m not ready to share it yet, but my injury ended up being more than what everybody knows. It was a bigger injury than anybody knows. There’s a few people that are aware of it, and obviously the office and stuff. But that’s the reason, wasn’t just an ACL thing, it was a bigger injury, and that’s the reason why it kept me out longer. It still bugs me to this day, I can’t do certain things, it’s hard for me to run, it’s hard for me to do leg curls. There’s a lot of things that I can’t do because of that injury. So there was a time, maybe in PT doing stuff where I was like I can’t even walk, I can’t jump. How am I supposed to wrestle in like three months or something? So there was that little doubt which I’m sure everybody goes through with injuries, but I always knew that I was going to come back. Because, I mean, it wasn’t that crazy of an injury. It was just like where am I going to fit in kind of thing. My whole idea behind Damage CTRL was like alright, I’ve won my championships. I’ve had my Mania moments. Now as a character and as a bad guy, I could be like I don’t even want anything for myself, I want it for them. They’re gonna reap all the benefits of my experience, and they’re gonna get all the championships, and they’re gonna get everything. Then when the time is right, I’m gonna steal it right from them, I’m gonna take the spotlight right back when I’m ready. But while I’m still recovering and finding my ways, they’re gonna do all the work for me. That was my idea behind it.”

On her original pitch for Damage CTRL:

“I had a whole [plan], there’s five of us, my pitch for Damage CTRL. I also had Raquel in it. I also had Alba Fyre in it. I had so many other girls in mind too. I had Toni Storm. I wanted Toni Storm in it. But when I actually sat at the PC and shot stuff, it was with Raquel and Alba, and all five of us. I had reasons why I wanted them. Raquel was obviously our muscle, but she was teaming with Dakota at the time, I believe. So they worked out perfectly. Alba and IYO I think we’re teaming a little bit there, so they worked out perfectly. But in my mind, it was there’s two tag teams, and then IYO was my champion; she was going to be the champion. I just want to do everything in wrestling. That’s how I always thought. I want to be a bad guy. I want to be a good guy. I want to be in a faction. I want to be in a tag team. I want to be a singles wrestler. I want to be in a romantic love angle someday. I want to be able to do everything, because there’s so many different things that we could do in this crazy world to not try different avenues and work with as many people as possible. I just want to do it.”

On having more fun as a heel:

“I’m still having a hard time finding myself as a babyface right now. I feel like I’m just so much of me as a person, like me, Pam, and it doesn’t translate well in wrestling. So I’m trying to find how that works. In my mind, when I was like I’m gonna turn, me and Damage CTRL are breaking up, win the title, I thought I’m gonna have the most fun. Now I have the experience of a good guy and a bad guy I’m gonna be like Stone Cold Steve Austin, I’m gonna have the most fun ever, and it just wasn’t that. It just wasn’t fun, it was just kind of like more I wasn’t having fun, and I felt like the reign wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. So that obviously translated in the ring, and it just nothing was there. So I feel like I’m still trying to find where that is. But as a heel, it’s so fun. I can just turn up my annoying sh*t easily, like how I am with my friends, or how I am with my family or my mom. I’m so annoying to my mom, I can just turn all that up and people can relate to that, I think, because they all know somebody like that, there’s just like too much, and that’s really fun. I feel like Liv is in that spot right now where she’s the sweetest ever, but she also has this side of her of she’s super talkative and social and loud, and now she can bring all that into a character and turn it up a million and do it with Dom, who everyone loves to hate right now, so I think it’s more fun. I know everybody says that, but not everybody can do it, I think.”

On changing her finisher:

“Everyone hates my finish, huh? Sorry guys. It was a finish that I did on the indies. [Why do they hate it?] I don’t know. The setup is really hard. Sometimes I’m like trying to figure out where to put it, or how to get into it. I’m like, Man, this is annoying. This move sucks. But I think it’s hard to get into sometimes, but when I get smooth ways to do it, it comes out really good. But that is why I changed it, and because I thought the Bayley to belly was very gimmicky.”

On some fans still not giving her the respect she deserves:

“And that sucks, because like I said, I don’t let things get to me and I stopped reading tweets or comments and all that stuff a long time ago. But I do feel that, and I see that, and I’m just like, What am I missing? So that’s the one thing that still gets to me, and maybe that’s ego or pride or whatever. But I’m just like, What am I missing that you don’t understand what I’ve done for this industry? It’s hard to explain, especially now, because I feel like, okay, I’ve been wrestling for like 16 years altogether. So I’m like, Okay, well obviously I’m gonna slow down at some point, but now when I see sh*t like that, ‘She’s not this or not this…’ Now I gotta prove them wrong. But there’s also a part of me that feels and agrees with them. I was just telling Lyra this the other day. We’ve been doing a lot of bonding. I don’t feel that I’m at a level of Charlotte or a Becky. We came up together and I wrestled Charlotte in her first match ever, I was signed to WWE before Becky. So to me, they’re up here, and I’m just not there yet. Maybe that’s kind of where people base it off, or where they judge it, or whatever. But I keep saying I get my feedback and opinions from the right people. To me, someone like Tyler Breeze, who taught me so many things. I still talk to him about all my matches, he still gives me feedback, he still gives me ideas to this day and if he enjoys something that I do, then I believe it, and I respect it. But if he tells me you need to do this better, I’ll do it. Someone like TJ, whatever he says, I respect it, and I believe him. So as many people think that I’m not at this level, or whatever, part of me agrees with them, because I don’t think I’m there yet.”

On not being at the WrestleMania 40 press conference:

“I don’t get on the press conference. I don’t get on the posters. I don’t get to do the talk shows. I don’t know what else to do, and it’s not like [there’s an issue], there’s no heat backstage or anything like that. Hunter and I have a really good relationship. Bruce and I have a really good relationship, all the TR, I have such a good relationship with them, and I’ve always been professional. Even when I’ve gone to other shows to support my friends, we’ve had those conversations of like, the do’s and the don’ts, and that was a little too much. We’ve had those conversations, so I think we’re at a real respect level. Hunter has gone on a press conference being like, Bayley’s this, Bayley’s this, she’s everything that you could possibly want out of a superstar, which I appreciate. But it’s like alright, well what do I need to do to get me there?”

On the Hey Bayley chant:

“I think it was in London, the tour we did. Because I did a tour when I was NXT Champion with WWE before our Brooklyn match. But I think it was the tour that we did with NXT before my London match with Nia. So we did a few shows before the London match, and I think the UK crowd started it then, and I didn’t really get it until maybe the second or third show. Because it was our first time there. But they were chanting for everybody. And then when they came up with that, I was like, that’s really cool. But then when we did it in London, that was the first time I felt that the crowd really brought me to life. I wish everybody could feel that feeling. I say that all the time, but it was like she was killing me in the match and I was just like, dead, how am I going to survive kind of thing, dead on the floor. When they started singing, I felt such a crazy energy like they’re really bringing me back to life. It was so, so wild. I just love that it’s come this far and that they still do it. I feel like that’s something I always have when I go over there and I love it.”

What is Bayley grateful for?

“My family, my health and that I get to travel.”

Chelsea Green On Being US Champion, Michael Cole Hating Her, Wrestling Against Penta, Matt Cardona

in LATEST EPISODES on April 17, 2025 January 30, 2026

Chelsea Green (@ImChelseaGreen) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE and the Women’s United States Champion. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Chicago, IL to discuss winning the title and the original plan for the victory, coming back to WWE after her 2021 release, if a Matt Cardona WWE return could still happen, Michael Cole’s commentary during her dumpster match with Michin, her match with Penta in Lucha Underground and a possible rematch and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” – Maya Angelou

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On wrestling under her real name:

“I’m blessed, and I think about that often. Let me tell you, I think about that so often, because when I got into wrestling I so badly wanted to change my name. I wanted an alter ego. I thought that was the whole point of wrestling. You have an alter ego and you turn it on when you get to the ring. Then I realized that some of the best wrestlers are just themselves turned up and then I couldn’t imagine being anyone else but Chelsea Green. I really, really despised the name Laurel Van Ness to my core. When people call me Laurel I was like, Oh God, and that’s why I never related to that name. I related to all the characters I played, but the name I was like, no, please just call me Chelsea. I couldn’t change my Instagram to Laurel. I just couldn’t do it. And all my girlfriends were doing it. Allie was doing it, Sienna was doing it. Rosemary still does it. But I just wanted to be Chelsea Green, and I wanted people to know who Chelsea was.”

On the inspiration for Laural Van Ness:

“I will give Madison Rayne all credit for that name in terms of we put a lot of thought into what we were gonna name me. We knew I was gonna be some sort of rich girl that was bratty and snobby. The very typical girly heel, snotty, bratty, daddy’s girl. So we kept coming up with different names that were very rich-sounding. I really liked the name Whitney. I thought, if I could call myself Whitney, I thought that was so giving Bratz dolls or Barbie and so I really liked Whitney. I tried for it to be Whitney. I can’t remember why that never happened. Then we had a couple of other names, and then we were really stuck on a last name, and we kept going back to it had to be two names, like really rich names, or I don’t know, like Van DeBilt.”

“Then we were gonna go Van DeBilt and we couldn’t get it approved. It was too convoluted with everything Van DeBilt. So last minute I walked out, I looked back on the Tron and I’m like, Laurel VanNess, and it was one word, and then I realized, no they had got it wrong. The Tron people had got it wrong, and it was supposed to be Van Ness. I don’t know why I just spoke about that for so long, but I didn’t like it. It’s a great story and every little bit of me has been defined by a character. You know, my indie run was at the beginning, was Jaida, that was my very first name, and then Laurel Van Ness and Reclusa and the hot mess, I like that. It’s boring if it just all meshes together.”

On her WWE release in 2021:

“So I was in my kitchen with Santana Garrett and I got a call from Johnny Ace, who was in the office at the time. He was very sweet and told me we wish you the best, blah, blah, blah. I immediately got out a pen and paper and I was like, What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? What are the things that I didn’t do the first time around that in hindsight when I got to WWE, I was like damn, I wish I had that on my resume. I wish I could say that I had done that. It was NWA, Ring of Honor, and then I think a couple of countries maybe, but mostly NWA and Ring of Honor were two companies that I was like, if I had just had that on my resume I could have been one of the only girls to say I did it all. Because I worked for TNA, I worked for Lucha Underground. I had worked All In, which was AEW, then NWA and Ring of Honor. Maybe now you could say New Japan, because they have the girls, but you couldn’t say that at the time. So if I just could do that, then I’ve done everything. So I set out on my goal to do those. And I think I did those even before my 90 days was up, I called the office and asked to be released in my contract early, stopped getting paid early so I could do those shows. Then I did that and I’m like oh, boy. Okay, so now I’ve done it, how do I make an impact and get back to WWE?”

On a possible Matt Cardona return to WWE:

“We’re waiting. It’s gonna happen, I hope. Honestly, I could go on a whole podcast rant about all the things he’s done and why he deserves to be back, there’s nobody who has recreated themselves like him. Cody did a great job of recreating himself, but at the end of the day Cody is Cody. Matt was a babyface for almost 20 years in WWE. His career was just all him being a babyface. Nobody believed he could be a heel and then he went out and became the biggest heel on the Indies ever. Well, I actually think the biggest star the Indies has ever seen, period.”

On why Matt Cardona hasn’t worn the Women’s US Title for an indy match:

“So what happened is he found out. When I was winning it we kind of found out maybe right before, and he went and tried to get one sent to him. Before they were even released, they were only going to be dropped that night when I won the title in Long Island. So we contacted Fanatics. We tried to get one early because he had a GCW show at 8 pm on the West Coast. So if I won around eight to nine, if he had that title, he could come out with it, and I would have won with the time change. But it never got to our house in time. So then he was like the buzz has kind of worn off, you want to do it right when it happens. He really didn’t have a show, then it was Christmas, so he didn’t have a show for a couple of weeks. One thing about us, we’re gonna do things right when it happens. We’re gonna try to be topical, or else you don’t really trend the same way.”

On the original plan to win the Women’s US Championship at Survivor Series:

“I was supposed to win it at Survivor Series in, not only in Canada on the West Coast. And do you know how many tickets I bought for that show? [You had to buy them?] Oh, well, that’s a whole other conversation. But keep in mind when I say bought [tickets], I had like 30 friends and family there. I had every bridesmaid and I had like 12 bridesmaids. I had every bridesmaid there, all of their partners. I had their babies there. I had all of my family, my mom’s friends, everyone was there. I don’t know when the plans changed, but when I found out was probably a week before.”

On fans wanting to see Chelsea Green win Money in the Bank in 2024:

“That was how I felt, too. I was just hoping and praying it was gonna be Money in the Bank. But when it was Tiffy I was like that makes sense. Also I feel she’s such an amazing champion, she’s so young. She has so much time ahead of her. She’s gonna be a champion over and over and over again and possibly go on to be in the Hall of Fame. So I think this is a perfect start to her story. Give her something, and let’s see how she rolls with it. Let’s see how people latch on to that. It was great, and then it left this open for me. That’s perfect.”

On a Trish Stratus dream match:

“When is it gonna happen? How many times does she have to come back and not wrestle me? What the hell? Trish, I could have been your tag partner in Toronto. Hello, I was there. She didn’t choose me, but that’s fine. I still love her. I really have always pushed for a Trish versus Chelsea versus Nattie match. I think that could be kind of amazing. It needs to be in Canada, of course.”

On finding out she would win the Women’s US Championship:

“So the funny thing about WWE is they never really want to tell you something, because card subject to change is real. That’s what they always say, card subject to change, because anything can happen outside of the ring, inside, on social media, public perception, anything can change. I can’t tell you how many times I have shown up to work thinking I was going to do one thing and we have gone completely the other way. It’s happening right now, my phone is going off, Change of plans. We’re always rewriting the show, and it goes all the way up until we’re live. Even then, things change as we’re live. So they kind of started telling me, people kept acting like I knew I was gonna win and talking to me like I knew I was winning, so they’re just talking to me like, okay, and then we’re gonna do this and this. And I’m like, Okay, so I think I’m winning, but I don’t want to ask anyone because that’s embarrassing. ‘Um, hey, by the way, am I winning?’ What if I’m not? What if I’m totally misinterpreting all this? So they did this to me for I would say a month of talking to me like I was winning without actually knowing. Michin also kind of told me, ‘Hey, by the way, it looks like you’re winning so let’s plan this match with that in mind.’ We kind of spoke about that a week before and I was like, okay, but I want to build the match not like that. I want to build the match so that anyone could win at the finish, and then whoever wins we just sneak one out on the other one. So I think we did a good job of that, but as we were walking to the ring to go through things I was being filmed. So that’s a big telltale sign, you’re being filmed for something WWE. So they had me walk to the ring, and then they had this very, very, very awkward moment between me and Shane Helms where he basically told me that I’m winning, we were just all downplaying it big time and it was very awkward. I hope that footage comes out, because Triple H is sitting there watching us have the conversation, but he’s not telling me. But obviously he decided it, and I’m like this is so weird that he’s watching me react, so I’m trying to be excited, but I’ve also kind of known and hoped that this was gonna happen, and then I’m also like but if I react too big is that kind of icky? I’m so excited I’m winning, do you know what I mean? A lot of emotions were going through me and I’m not a very emotional person too, so that doesn’t help the reaction. So it was very awkward. So I hope that moment airs somewhere. I hope you guys all get to see that.”

On her US-inspired gear:

“So again, when I found out that there was going to be this path to the United States Championship, Matt and I sat down and we’re like okay, if I was the winner of this inaugural title, I can’t have the title make me, I have to make the title. What can I do? I knew I wanted to take some inspiration from King Booker and stuff like that. We kind of went through all these different iterations and it all came so quickly. I truly hadn’t come up with a game plan, because you’re not gonna really come up with a game plan for this hopeful thing. So I kind of had floated a bunch of ideas by and then all of a sudden, oh my gosh, here I am. It’s Long Island. I won it, now what? I had to make a decision very fast because creative asked me, What do you want to do for your celebration? That was my entry into this is what this title is going to be. This is what Chelsea is going to bring to the table as the first-ever United States Women’s Champion. It had to be something special. And I’m like I’m going to be the President. I’m going to be so delusional, but topical, this is what’s happening right now in America, let’s be the president. Let’s not call it a celebration. Let’s call it an inauguration, and I need a stamp. I need a presidential seal. So I designed the Presidential seal and from there, it just snowballed. What I like to do with these characters is I don’t flesh out the entire character. I like a good backstory, but I just know this is kind of what I want it to look like somewhat. Then every week someone gives me a new idea, just like the hot mess, like with the bride every week someone gave me a new idea and I was able to incorporate that into the character. And then with that you have your future laid out, so you’ve got your backstory already, and then you start to go from there and build the blocks to the future of this championship or this character.”

On Michael Cole’s commentary on the dumpster match:

“I never know what’s being said about me. I don’t go back and watch my matches. I cannot watch myself. I give myself the ick so I can’t do it. But when people sent me the clips of what Michael Cole was saying I was like, my god, you are a legend. I sent him a card, a pop-up card thanking him for doing commentary on the match where I won the United States Championship. The card was so obnoxious. It opens and it’s a pop-up American flag, and I said, ‘You’re the greatest. I love to hate you.'”

On fans wanting a match between Chelsea Green and Penta:

“I did not realize that that would [gain traction]. I mean, it got some traction when it first aired but not the way it has now. Oh my goodness, it’s crazy to see how much steam it has picked up in the past couple of years. And then obviously, when he signed with WWE, we ran into each other in the hall in Toronto, and he was like, ‘You and me, rematch?’ I’m like, I don’t think so, pal. I think we’re good. We did our one match, and everyone loves it, let’s not. But I do remember having the match and coming back, and everyone at Lucha Underground was so kind to me, so kind. I was hired at the end of the season, I came in, I killed Sexy Starr off, and then I teamed up with Marty and me and Penta had this crazy match. That’s what dreams are made of. I didn’t even have to put the work in. They worked all season to make this unbelievable show and I just came in and had this match with one of their top stars. I would have hated me, but they were so kind and so sweet to me and they all gave me these big hugs. I’ll never forget John Morrison being like, ‘Chelsea I’ve never seen you wrestle like that, ever. I’ve already texted Matt and told him how incredible that was.’ I was like, oh, okay, wow, thank you. That’s very nice. I thought he was being dramatic. Then of course, I never watched myself, so I see clips, but I never watched the match. Now I’ve basically watched it because my God, people this year have been showing me every single move I did. I’m like, damn.”

What is Chelsea Green grateful for?

“The support of my husband, the fans, and having this job long enough that I can take care of my family.”

Natalya On 18 Years In WWE, Hart Family Legacy, Training Nikki Bella, The Dungeon 2.0

in LATEST EPISODES on April 15, 2025 April 15, 2025

https://cvvtix.com – Get your tickets for INSIGHT LIVE in NYC & Las Vegas with VIP Meet & Greet!

Natalya (@NatbyNature) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at Insight Live in Toronto to discuss her journey from being a waitress to a WWE Superstar, having to fight for spots on the card, helping Nikki Bella train for her Royal Rumble return, getting her teeth knocked out a live event, memories of her father WWE Hall Of Famer Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, her time on Total Divas, her Canadian Mount Rushmore (with no Hart members) and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus” – Bruce Lee

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On her job before pro wrestling:

“Before I got to WWE, I was a waitress. So I worked at a restaurant called Montana’s. Before I worked at Montana’s, I worked at a restaurant called Humpty’s. And to this day, Humpty’s is my favorite. People will say, where do you want to go to eat? When I came up I said to Bret let’s go to Humpty’s, I gotta get my eggs benedict. It’s just a Canadian thing. I don’t know if you guys have Humpty’s. It must be like a Calgary, West Coast thing. But yeah, I worked at a place called Montana’s. I worked there as a hostess, a bust person and a waitress for like 10 years, until I finally got hired by WWE. I remember telling my manager, and I loved it, I will never forget this moment I told my manager at Montana’s. I was like, I’m so sorry, but I’m just giving him my two weeks notice. I just got hired by WWE. I did not say I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. But I was so excited because I had worked that waitressing job, I cleaned bathrooms, I busted tables, and I did my wrestling when I wasn’t working at that job, and I just fought so hard to get here. I always remembered how much I actually enjoyed waitressing. I think everybody that does public service or works in the service industry, like I give them a round of applause, because you guys, whoever works in restaurants or retail or has to serve people, it is not easy.”

On the moment where it clicked in WWE:

“There’s been so many moments. I mean, just getting the phone call. I remember getting the phone call that I was getting hired. I was so excited. It’s funny now, because you hear about contract negotiations and this and that. I remember when I got called, I was told, Hey, we’re going to hire you at this amount. And then they called back and said, Actually, we changed our minds, it’s a little lower and I was like, no worries. Don’t even worry about it, it’s fine. I just remember being so excited, even though they called back and said actually, no, it’s not gonna be that much. I was like, It’s fine. I was just so excited when I got my first WWE check in the mail. I actually have never shared this before, but I have saved every single paycheck I’ve ever gotten from WWE. I have saved the stub, the check stub. I’ve saved all of them, every single one of them. Because I just remembered how big of a deal it was for me to get that. Even when they were small, and I was only making in my first year in WWE $500 a week. So of course that’s not terrible by any means, when you’re just getting started, but when you have to pay for ring gear and your hair and your makeup, and you have to pay taxes on that. In some ways it was less money than I was making as a waitress. But for me, it was about getting my foot in the door. I just had to get my foot in the door and that’s how 18 years later I’m still here. But yeah, just getting to be a part of the company and I never have ever taken it for granted. I always try to approach going to work like, even though we all are human, we all have our highs and lows and ups and downs. I’m just so grateful that I get to do such a fun job, do what I love and do something that just fulfills me. It makes me so happy.”

On still looking to prove herself:

“Here’s the thing, even right now in WWE we look at the Women’s Division, it’s never, ever been this competitive, ever. Across NXT, Raw, or SmackDown it’s never, ever been like this. The girls that we have across the board are incredible. I look at the NXT Women’s roster and I’m like they’re amazing. There’s so many women there that I want to work with. I look at the Raw women’s roster, everybody is so good. I look at the SmackDown Women’s roster, everybody is very, very talented. So you have all this stuff to choose for all these different styles and different, as we say, flavors of ice cream to choose from with every girl bringing something unique to the table. So for me, because I have been here for so long, I understand that like even for me, I don’t like everybody. Not everybody has to like everybody. Not everybody has to like me. When I signed my new deal with WWE, I signed it last June and I thought to myself as long as I continue to stay in WWE I have to always remember to keep proving myself. I can’t just rest on the fact that I have a world record for the most matches, or the most wins, or the most this, or the most that or that I had a really great match with Charlotte at TakeOver. To me, when you continue to work in WWE, you always have to keep proving yourself no matter what it is that you’re doing, even if you’re not working at WWE.

So I kind of made that vow to myself that if I want to continue working here, I have to not only prove myself and not only fight to be in this division, but also fight to prove my detractors wrong. So that’s why I thought about myself wrestling elsewhere. I thought, Hmm, I wonder what it would be like. I wonder what it would look like for me to wrestle elsewhere, and I want to wrestle everywhere. That’s the thing, I want to wrestle everywhere. That’s what I love about my ring. My ring is really kind of like a forbidden door. The dungeon that TJ and I have. I love all these different people coming in and just bringing passion, whether it’s Joe Hendry, whether it’s Kevin Knight, whether it’s DeReiss, whether it’s Riho, B-Fab comes in, Dawkins, Apollo, all these different people come to our ring, whether they’re on the independents, they come from all these different places and that’s what I want to do. I want to wrestle everywhere. I love that WWE is starting to do that, and actually in the coming weeks, because of how I feel about this and the need to continue to prove myself in the division and fight to be in the division and fight to have my spot in the division. Because, honestly, just because I’ve done a bunch of stuff here doesn’t mean I [should be on TV], wrestling owes nobody anything. WWE doesn’t owe me anything. So for me, it’s always about proving myself with everything that I do, every practice that I run at the dungeon, every match that I have in WWE, it’s all about proving myself. And so in the coming weeks there’s going to be some announcements made. WWE and myself, we’re going to be addressing some very, very exciting things coming up. Because, yeah, I want to wrestle. I really want to wrestle everywhere.”

On helping Nikki Bella train for her WWE return at the Royal Rumble:

“Nikki actually has been coming and training with me privately. So she flies in every week, and she’s been coming and working with me. I will tell you that she hasn’t lost it, she has so much passion for this. It’s funny because I saw her last week. She came to Tampa and I said to her, This is so funny because we started our careers together in the very same week, Nikki and I and Brie. So we started together in the same week in developmental in WWE and I remember when all three of us had nothing. All three of us were hired at the very base amount of pay and it was never, ever about the money. It was always about the work, the passion. So we were just laughing and sharing old stories.

I didn’t have enough money to buy wrestling gear, so The Bella Twins were giving me their clothes. Because when you just get started, you’re just kind of literally just getting started. I went to Florida with this one suitcase because I was like, I gotta get down to Florida, I’ll just leave everything behind. I’ll get back to Calgary. I never went back to live [in Calgary] because my whole life with WWE has been kind of stateside as far as living, but I didn’t have money for a lot of the things that we need to look like superstars. So The Bella Twins, they were giving me their clothes. They were giving me stuff to look nice. I was taking certain things that they had and I was cutting them up and glueing my own sequins on them, and trying to make it. I look back on that now I’m like Nattie you look like sh*t, pardon my language. But I was like, I wouldn’t have hired you looking like that, because you look horrible, but you do what you have to do. I just remember those early years with the twins. So being able to help Nikki prepare for Royal Rumble and of course, I would love to see Nikki back. I’m looking for a tag team partner and of course I’d love to have Nikki as my partner. But I just love her, and I love Brie so much, and they just have so much passion. So seeing what Nikki’s doing in the ring and doing in our dungeon, I mean, our dungeon is really like a dungeon. We try to make it as much like the original dungeon that my grandfather started in Calgary. There’s no air conditioning. It’s in Florida. It’s just a small room with enough room to put a ring in, and there’s one bathroom, and there’s some fans, and there’s a lot of stray cats that my husband and I feed.”

On getting her teeth knocked out:

“So yeah, my front teeth aren’t real, amongst other things [laughs]. But when you’re a lady wrestler, listen, a lot of things get kind of crazy. I feel like at night when I come home after a match I’m like pulling out hair extensions, I’m pulling off eyelashes, I’m taking off my tanner. TJ is like who is that? I’m like, This is me, I’m putting on my pyjamas. But we’ve been on a live event in Las Vegas, and it was a six woman tag. It was me Carmella and Alexa were a team, and it was against Nikki and two other girls and Nikki tackled me. She gave me a crazy shoulder tackle that turned into a head butt and I lost my two front teeth. So there was a picture that kind of went viral of my teeth that were missing, and I was with Renee Young because when I got my teeth knocked out I knew what happened. I gave them to the referee who gave them to the security guard. I didn’t know the security guard, he just had my teeth in his hand. Then I remember Alexa Bliss saying, Do you want me to finish the match? I was like, I’ve got this. I’m already in there. I’m good. Anyway, finished the match like a pro, and afterwards, I remember Renee driving me to an emergency dentist at midnight in Las Vegas. I got two fake front teeth put back, they made me a little bridge, and it got me through the weekend. But, yeah, there’s a lot of teeth that I have that aren’t real and we’ll give Nikki all the credit for that.”

On Jim Neidhart:

“I remember when my dad came to my kindergarten PTA meeting, and he showed up on a Ninja motorcycle with no shirt on. He was wearing a fanny pack. Remember that little pink hat my dad used to wear? He showed up with that hat on and a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses, he showed up like The Anvil, but he had no shirt on. He had three different types of spandex on that were layered, because he loved spandex. And he had these knee pads that were on, he was wearing Reeboks pumps but then the knee pads were down by his shoes and he showed up to the PTA meeting like that.

I remember it was kindergarten, it was bring your parent to work day and all the other kids’ parents were like I’m a dentist and I’m a librarian and I’m a banker. My dad came in and I was so excited. I mean, sweat was dripping off of his chest, he had no shirt on, and he was wearing spandex and a Rolex watch, and he just looked like a maniac. And, of course, I was so excited. Think about it. This guy’s 300 pounds. He’s got no shirt on. He’s just barrel-chested, I would say he was just resembling Otis at some points. So he comes in and then it’s my dad’s turn to talk and I’m so excited. I’m in kindergarten here, my dad tells everybody in the kindergarten class don’t worry about going to school, worry about doing well in sports. The teacher was trying to pull my dad off stage like a referee trying to interfere in a match. She was like, get him off stage. My dad’s like, ‘No, no, it’s fine. Don’t worry about doing well in school. What you need to do is do well in sports. Because I got everything from sports. I never even went to class.’ We were like, Oh my God, my dad was literally telling these kindergarteners not to worry about school. I will never forget that they never invited him back and I was so traumatized. My parents are crazy. But my dad, especially when your dad’s The Anvil. He’s The Anvil on television, he’s The Anvil at home. That’s why a lot of guys didn’t ask me out when I was in high school. People didn’t want to knock on the door and get my dad pulling a beer going like, ‘Hi can I help you?’ Guys did not ask me out.”

On Jim Neidhart on Total Divas:

“So going back to your question, when my dad was on Total Divas he was a trip on that show. He just let loose and I think he loved doing that show because once his career was over in wrestling, it gave him a chance to feel like he was still a part of something. Because it’s hard sometimes when you’re an athlete. Back when my dad was alive and we were doing Total Divas, it’s kind of hard even saying this, but he didn’t always feel like he was wanted. WWE does so much more now to honor legends and to bring back people. But back then, they weren’t doing all of that, it was hard, unless you were getting put in the Hall of Fame, which my dad, when he was alive he was pissed off that he wasn’t in the Hall of Fame. He was like, Why the hell was Hillbilly Jim in before me? I’m just being honest. My dad loved Hillbilly Jim, but he’s like damn it, I should be in there before Hillbilly Jim. But my dad was so funny on Total Divas. But my dad just felt like he got to be a part of something, and he loved the limelight, he loved the cameras on him, and he loved all the attention, and he loved feeling like he was a part of something. So that’s one of the things I loved about Total Divas, is I loved having my dad included on that show, even if gummies were involved.”

On her Canadian Mount Rushmore with no Harts allowed to be included:

“Okay, he’s a very close personal friend, and I think the world of him, Edge. A great little thing about Edge is that he’s obviously one of the most decorated superstars ever, but Edge was somebody that when I would have problems with promos, or when I needed to work on promos, or that I wanted to get better at promos, I would text him and say, Hey, can I get on a call with you? Can you help me with a promo? He would drop everything that he was doing to get on a call with me and talk to me for like an hour and a half and walk me through a promo. He’s incredible, and his body of work is incredible, but he’s helped me so much as a friend. So I think sometimes Adam doesn’t get like [recognition], people don’t know about that kind of stuff. He’s just very genuine and I always remember him helping me and saying, say it like this Nattie and then he would watch the promo, he’d call me back, he’d analyze it with me. It was nice to have somebody like that really care and help.”

“We can’t say Edge without Christian. It’s funny, I watched a match, I think it was on SmackDown. I can’t quite remember, but I watched a match between Christian and Randy Orton, and I thought wow, they have magical chemistry. I always knew I liked Christian, but I remember watching Christian in there with Randy and I was like, you just see that even though he’s in there with Randy, who’s obviously a huge leader in the ring, Christian is a leader. I mean, he’s a bad guy. He’s a heel, and he spent a lot of his career being a heel, but Christian is just very good, and he’s one of my favorites.”

“Okay, I am gonna say somebody that’s a little bit left field, because people would obviously think Nattie is gonna say Trish Stratus. And of course, I do think Trish is amazing. I think she’s incredible. I think she’s done so much as a pioneer for women’s wrestling. But for me, I’m always going to have a spot in my heart for the underdog Gail Kim. So it’s nothing to take away from Trish by any means, because I think Trish is awesome. But knowing Gail Kim the way that I do, and knowing how talented she is she’s had some really great matches, and I know some of her best work has been in TNA against Taryn Terrell, and Gail and Kong. The thing about Gail is that once her career was done she wasn’t done giving back. That’s what I love about Gail is that behind the scenes, if people actually knew the stuff that Gail does behind the scenes, it’s just incredible. She really helps give women opportunities that might not have gotten opportunities before. Just a few weeks ago she had reached out to me about something and we were able to help someone, she was just like, I want to make sure that more women get opportunities that wouldn’t have had a chance to get opportunities. So she’s always fighting for the underdog. She loves wrestling. She’s so talented, and she, to me, deserves her flowers.”

“Here’s the thing, I think I know I’ve said a lot of people that may not necessarily be in WWE, but we can’t say the greatest Canadian wrestlers without bringing up Chris Jericho. So Jericho, actually, it’s funny, because Jericho interviewed my dad. That was the last interview my dad ever had. And so Jericho had asked me, Hey, I’d love to interview your dad for my podcast. And I remember saying to Chris, I’ve just been really careful about not letting my dad do a lot of that kind of stuff because he’s not been feeling himself lately. And Chris, the way he treated my dad, and the way that he just handled the interview with so much respect, because my dad was at that time struggling a little bit with his memory and stuff, Chris was so amazing to my dad. But when you think about Chris, I think Chris is a friend of mine, but I think about Chris’s body of work, it’s hard to go, it’s hard to leave him. You cannot leave Chris Jericho out of the conversation.”

On her and Bret putting Sharpshooters on Charlotte and Ric Flair:

“That day was really emotional, because Bret had just beaten cancer. So that was his first appearance that he had done after beating cancer. I remember asking Bret, hey, they want to bring you in for Payback. It was in Chicago, and Bret had just gone through so much, and so it was such a special time, because it was his first appearance back from beating cancer. And listen, there’s no better feeling than locking Ric Flair into a sharpshooter. But I love collaborating and working with Bret, and he’s been part of such special moments for me in my career. It’s never lost on me when I’ve asked him to be there for me and for him to help me he’s helped me. So to be able to do double sharpshooters with Bret it’s always so special. I appreciate him so much. Because even for my dad’s career, and I say this to Bret all the time, that’s why I wanted my dad and Bret to go into the Hall of Fame together. Because I was asked by Vince, he said Well, do you want your dad to go in alone, or do you want him to go in [with Bret]. My dad would never have had the things that he had in WWE, he never would have had that career had Bret not looked out for him the way that he did. I always hear Bret talking about my dad and he’s like, I never would have found that personality without The Anvil. But Bret really took care of my dad. He looked out for my dad. Brett’s done some great things for our family that aren’t always talked about.”

On the report about women being underutilised:

“Here’s my thing, and it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier. I was talking to my mom, I talk to my mom about everything, and I was saying sometimes it’s so easy, especially nowadays. We all have a platform. If you’re on Twitter, you’re on Instagram, you’re on TikTok, you’re on social media, you have a platform. That’s the cool thing about this day and age is that everybody has a voice. It is so easy. It would be so easy for me to go on social media and be like, I’m mad about this, and I’m mad about that, and I should have this and I should have that. I would have loved to have been the first-ever Women’s IC Champion. I would have loved that. For me, and this is the big thing is that there just has to be the right story. I think everybody wants everything now, we’re living in a world of instant gratification where we want everything right now. So there’s always going to be times where people feel like we should have this, and the Women’s Division should do that, and that there should be this. I do think that booking a weekly TV show, it’s not easy, especially because there’s lots of things that happen behind the scenes that people just don’t know about. Somebody gets hurt, or somebody can’t make it or this isn’t where we’re going for the big picture. Of course I would love to do more in WWE, but I also want there to be the right story. Especially being somebody that has been in WWE for 18 years, I would love to do more, but I also understand that timing is everything, so I have faith that the right story will come. And actually, I feel like we’re right around the corner from some big announcements being made, especially with what I’m doing, I’m leaving you guys on such a cliffhanger, those stories will come to fruition.

So yeah, it’s easy to critique, but at the same time I try to be patient, I try to empathize. And also, the one thing I do is make suggestions. Rather than be like, I should have this, I should have that. I go, Hey, I have an idea, we don’t like that. Hey, I got an idea. We don’t like that. Hey, I got an idea. Something is going to stick. So I have faith, I think that things are going to get exciting. It’s just not easy, because also, right now we just have so many women, and I think that it’s a good thing but it’s also challenging, because you want to make sure that everybody has a special place. I think that’s the thing is that back a few years ago, sometimes I’d be on TV every single week, but I wasn’t always doing the most meaningful things. I mean, at one point I was passing gas. I’m joking about that but I think what I do like about this new era is that we’re just trying to find the right stories. I think we all want more. It’s you’re only human to want more. But I also think that let’s just see what happens.”

On NXT dream matches:

“There’s so many women at NXT right now that are just like, to me, I would absolutely love to tango with Jordynne Grace. I would love to work with her because she loves this, she’s a student of the game. I look at these pictures of her transformation from when she first started to where she is now, and she is a student of the game. I would absolutely love to kick her ass.”

What is Natalya grateful for?

“My health, that I get to do this and my family.”

Kevin Owens On Injuries, WrestleMania, Stone Cold, Beating Up Vince McMahon, Sami Zayn

in LATEST EPISODES on April 10, 2025 April 10, 2025

https://cvvtix.com – Get your tickets for INSIGHT LIVE in NYC & Las Vegas with VIP Meet & Greet!

Kevin Owens (@FightOwensFight) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Chicago, IL to discuss his journey from being trained by Jacques Rougeau to main eventing WrestleMania, being Steve Austin’s first opponent in 19 years, winning the Tag Team Championships with Sami Zayn at WrestleMania 39, beating up Vince McMahon and busting him open with a headbutt, attacking Cody Rhodes off camera at Bad Blood, bringing back the package piledriver, his hilarious t-shirts, why you should never follow him at the airport and more!

Quote I’m thinking about: “When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” – Paulo Coelho

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On learning English through wrestling:

“I started watching wrestling when I was 11, so I kind of started picking it up. Then my dad would watch TV in English so I watched some TV shows with him, here and there. I remember Friends, I’d watch a lot with him. And then I think I’d say by the time I was maybe 14, I couldn’t really speak English that well but I understood everything. I like to say Jim Ross basically taught me English. Then by the time I was maybe 17 I think I was fully bilingual, something like that.”

Did you understand what a slobber knocker was?

“So I actually thought that slobber knocker was part of the English language. I thought it was a normal word, and I would use it in everyday life and it made no sense. So a lot of my friends from the wrestling school that were English, that was one of the things they loved, that I spoke English but like Jim Ross, which is why it’s like Jim Ross taught me English and it made no sense. But I eventually picked up oh that’s just a weird expression that he made up.”

Did you have a bit of an Oklahoma accent too?

“No, I don’t think so. I think I had a very thick French accent for a long time that kind of dissipated over the years. It still comes out here and there. [But you don’t really have that much of a French accent.] I think the more tired I get, the more comes out from what I hear. I guess, that’s what I’m told. I always sound the same to me.”

Are you speaking French at home?

“So I speak to my parents in French. But my wife, although she does speak French, is English and my kids, since they grew up in a English-speaking household. So we speak English. My son understands French, speaks it a little bit. My daughter is pretty clueless about French.”

On whether WWE was always the goal:

“Yeah, absolutely. I was watching wrestling when I was 11 years old, my dad rented the tape. It was like a month after the show actually happened, and he just went to the local video store where we could rent tapes and whatever. He was looking for a movie, we had seen everything, he’s like, let’s just rent this wrestling thing. I knew what it was, but never really seen it and he wasn’t like an avid fan or anything. He was just, let’s watch something we don’t usually watch. I was hooked pretty quick. I really got into the first match. I remember loving The British Bulldog, he was in the opener and I thought that guy rules. Then as the night went on, all the matches I really enjoyed. Then Shawn Michaels came out and to me, at the time I was 11 years old but I was so small for my age. People thought I was like seven or eight. To me, seeing the smallest guy on the show by far being the best one, I was like I could do that, and from that point on, that was it. That’s all I wanted to do. Tape ended, I told my dad that’s what I’m going to do, and then they cultivated my interest. I was very lucky, they could have told me don’t be silly or whatever, like most parents would, I guess. But nope, they went all in. They started buying all the pay-per-views for me, letting me stay up to watch Raw and SmackDown when it later came and yeah, they were 100% behind it from the start.”

On there not being a path for Canadian wrestlers at that time:

“Which is funny, because once I joined Jacques’ wrestling school, obviously he had the WWE connection because he had wrestled there. So of course I met him and I was like oh, this is a big deal. There’s a guy I watch on WWE TV, whoa. And in Quebec, the Rougeau name means a lot. That family is legendary for wrestling in Quebec. So it was a really big deal for me to meet him. Really big deal for me to train with him. Over the years though, I was probably at this wrestling school for three years. We just had different mentalities, different values and just different points of view on life and wrestling as well. He would run his wrestling school a certain way where he would run shows every three to four months. Only one or two shows every three or four months, but he would do them in like 2,000-seat arenas, and because of his name he’d get like 1,000 people or 1,500 people in. So it was great to wrestle in front of those types of crowds, but you can only wrestle once every three or four months.

So by that point I kind of figured out I gotta get more experience, but he wouldn’t let us wrestle on smaller wrestling companies around Quebec just because he was like, I don’t want you guys to get hurt. I don’t want you guys to pick up bad habits from other wrestlers, this and that. But what he would dangle is I’m your way to WWE, which we didn’t know any better, and we bought it. But then about three years in, I think he had some health issues that led to him not running shows. So when he said I’m not going to be able to run shows for a while we’re like, Well, you got to let us go wrestle somewhere else, and he said, Okay, fine. So all the students from his wrestling school started wrestling all over Quebec, and I was booked every weekend everywhere. That’s where I met Sami. I met a lot of people and I just started wrestling every weekend multiple times a week, and it was such a blast. I loved it so much.

Then about six months after, or maybe less than that, three months after we started doing that, he pulled it back and said, Look, I need you guys to stop wrestling everywhere because now WWE is coming for Raw soon and I secured a try-out for two of my guys. He said it’s going to be me and the other guy, Eric the trainer. But if you want that, you have to stop wrestling everywhere else. You have to sign a 10-year contract with me as your agent that guarantees me 15% of your contract, and I couldn’t care less about the money. I couldn’t care less about him, I’m like yeah, whatever, but I don’t want to stop wrestling anywhere else. Until the show, the try-out, I have to keep wrestling. He fought me on it and then eventually he called me. It was in November of 2003 and I was wrestling for IWS at that point in Montreal, which was the biggest wrestling company in Montreal and it was a lot of fun. I just loved wrestling there so much. He called me the day after what I thought was gonna be my last show with them, because I can’t wrestle anymore. So he called me, he just started talking about the tryout and Raw’s coming, and I’m like, ‘When is Raw?’ He’s like, ‘I don’t know. They haven’t announced it yet, but it’s coming soon.’ And I’m like, ‘But when is it?’ He’s like, ‘I don’t know.’ I’m like, ‘Well, is it in three months? In six months?’ He got annoyed with me and then I was like, something just didn’t feel right. I really don’t want to stop wrestling. As soon as I said that he’s like, ‘All right, fine, you made your decision,’ and he hung up on me. That was the last time I spoke to him. And from that point I was like all right, f*ck it. I’m gonna go do whatever I need to do anywhere.”

On his love of Owen Hart:

“So I have a brother that’s 10 years older than me, and as brothers do, we’d fight a lot when we were kids. Because he was 10 years older than me, was a lot stronger than me. So he always won, let’s put it that way. So when I was younger I couldn’t help but have a bit of a resentment towards him, which is not the case. I love him. But when you’re a kid, you feel differently about things. I remember I watched WrestleMania 11, and I liked Bret Hart enough after WrestleMania 11, but then I started going backwards and watching the shows that were before WrestleMania 11. I rented all the tapes, and I believe it was a Royal Rumble of that same year, Bret’s wrestling Diesel and in the match he tries to tie Diesel’s legs up with the camera wires and to me, that’s cheating, he’s cheating. This is terrible. Why is he cheating? Then Owen comes into frame to try to fight Bret. To me I’m like yeah, that’s the right thing to do, trying to keep him from cheating. He’s the younger brother trying to fight off the older brother. So I was like Owen Hart’s my guy. That was it. It was like the dynamic between me and my older brother and him and his older brother is what made me like him at first, and then obviously he’s an incredible wrestler and very charismatic, very entertaining. So yeah, just become a huge fan of his.”

On what his WWE name would have been if he couldn’t be Kevin Owens:

“I don’t really know. So we also share the same birthday and when Owen passed away, I remember thinking if I ever have a son I’m going to call him Owen. Then several years passed obviously, and in 2007 my wife got pregnant and thankfully she was on board with calling him Owen. Which was even crazier, because we visited an apartment that we were going to move into while she was pregnant, and the tenants that lived there previously had left some stuff behind. On the door of what was going to be our son’s bedroom was wooden letters that they put on the door was the name of the kid that was there previously, and the name was Owen. So she was like, that definitely has to be his name. So it’s actually more of a tribute to my son, but my son’s a tribute to Owen. So it’s actually Triple H who suggested I be Kevin Owens. We were going back and forth on names and nothing really sounded right. Then one day Hunter just said, because I had pitched Owen something, and he’s like, What about Kevin Owens? I’m like, Yeah, I love it. So we went with it. I remember after I guess WWE trademarked it. So the websites found out about it, and it started going online. Obviously, it’s gonna be Kevin Steen’s name. I got to the Performance Center, and for some reason I forgot my key cards. Had to go through the front and I’m waiting for somebody to open the door. The door swings open and it’s Dusty, and he’s walking in front of me. He goes, ‘Kevin Owens huh?’ I go, ‘Yeah, you like it?’ And he goes, ‘Nope. Who came up with it?’ I go, ‘Triple H.’ And he goes, ‘I love it.’ Yeah, he was the best. So that was it from then on.”

On the promo that got Kevin Owens hired:

“So the try-outs are hard. They’re very hard. They’re very physically demanding. They’re basically like blow-up drills, nonstop. It’s really not about trying to see if you’re in amazing shape, because they can mold you into shape at the Performance Center. It’s really to see the heart you have and the attitude you have. I was at this try-out, and there were so many guys that were jacked to the gills that you’d think oh these guys are amazing athletes, for sure these guys are as good as signed. They fell like flies, left and right. But me and Willie Mack were probably the guys that are in the least athletic shape there. We weren’t beating records of speed in these drills, but we were doing them, and we weren’t stopping. So we showed the heart that they were looking for and the attitude they were looking for. I actually had to at one point, not give up, but like one of the drills on the second day from sheer exhaustion it’s very hard. You’re jumping over a heavy bag to do drop downs, and I landed on my hand crooked, and I thought I broke my wrist, so I had to stop that particular drill. I was really upset because in mind I’m like, oh sh*t. That’s going to hurt me. So right after it happened is when they sent us back to the gym to get a break. Then Matt Bloom, who at the time was not the head trainer of the PC, was just one of the trainers said come here. So I went, and it was just me and Canyon Ceman. All the trainers were lined up, and they were like, cut a promo. So I got that promo, and then they’re like, Okay, thanks.”

On people saying he doesn’t look like a wrestler:

“Yeah, I mean, I still get it all the time. But really, the people that feel like that’s a knock or an insult, they’re just very stupid. I’m so comfortable with how I look. I always have been, which is probably what’s driven so many people crazy, because my weight has fluctuated over the years for sure. There were times where I was much heavier than I am now and there are reasons for that. They’ll say, ‘Well, you weren’t working out enough. You were eating like sh*t.’ Yeah, that’s true, but it never hindered my work. So you might have not liked looking at me the way I looked at that point, but I was having killer matches either way, I was able to talk better than most people on the roster, and that never changed. So now I’ve lost weight because honestly, I haven’t done anything. This is the funny part. I haven’t done anything to lose weight. I didn’t set out and go, I’m gonna lose weight. I really didn’t, just my weight fluctuates a lot. I might be a little more active in my everyday life than I was for a while, whatever it may be. I don’t know my metabolism. I really have no idea, but yeah right now I’ve shed some pounds. I might put more on. I really don’t know. But I’ve never made a conscious choice to be heavier or be lighter or look better and man, that really drives a lot of people crazy.”

On not being able to fault his athleticism:

“Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. I mean, it’s like everyone, there will be fans that will look at guys that are in incredible shape and still find something wrong. So yeah, some people are just born to discredit other people because of their own shortcomings, I guess. As stupid as it sounds, ‘Oh, they’re just jealous.’ There probably is something to that to a level. If you spend most of your time trying to tear other people down, even subconsciously, there’s kind of something with you that’s the problem.”

On convincing Steve Austin to come out of retirement:

“Well, I didn’t do it. I really didn’t. I don’t know the exact story and how it all unfolded. I will say this part. A couple of years before this happened, I was doing the pop-up Powerbomb as my finishing move and everyone was doing Powerbombs. I would see a lot of guys doing Powerbombs. I’m like everybody’s kind of doing Powerbombs right now, I think I need another finishing move. What could I do? Well, the greatest finishing move of all time to me is the Stone Cold Stunner and nobody does it. Some people will do it here and there. I actually had done it once against Roman in Texas, and I only did it because we were in Texas, but it was just a one-time thing. But then when I was trying to figure out I need a finishing move, I’m like Stone Cold Stunner is it. But before I could do that I had to ask Steve for permission. I could not do it. Like I said I’d use it on the indys once. Actually, I did his podcast on the indys. So two days later at a Ring of Honor show I used the Stunner just because I’d just done his podcast. It was kind of topical and then I used it against Roman once. But I’m like, if I’m going to use it on a regular basis of a finishing move, I have to make sure he’s okay with it.

So I happened to run into him at a show in Baltimore that he was at for Raw. So I went in and we talked, and it’s funny, because like I said I saw him in 2005, then for years didn’t see him at all. Then in 2012 I was at the top of Ring of Honor. I was probably the top guy in the indys at that point and I was listening to the Stone Cold Podcast all the time. At the end of his podcast, he’d always say if you have any questions send it to questions at BSR… whatever his website was. So I said, I’m going to send him an email thanking him for the advice he gave me all those years ago. Maybe he’ll answer but maybe he’ll even have me on his podcast. And sure enough that’s exactly what happened. I emailed him, ‘2005 at the airport you gave me great advice, and my career has flourished since. Thank you.’ And he wrote back, I actually do remember that. ‘So do you want to be on my podcast?’ And like, yeah. So he goes, ‘Okay, I have Jim Cornette as my guest on this podcast, I’ll do an hour with Jim and then your part will be after, we’ll do 10 minutes with you.’ I’m like, great. Then he calls me and goes, ‘Hey, I don’t know what happened, but Cornette’s not answering. So let’s just do the whole podcast together.’ I was like yes, finally Jim Cornette does something good for me.

So yeah, we did the whole podcast. Talked for like an hour and when it came out the next day it was a huge deal because he hadn’t really done a podcast with an independent guy at that point. I think maybe Colt [Cabana] had done his podcast by that point, but that was it. So it was a huge deal for me. And the fans were really excited, and they listened to the conversation, and I think that really helped. At the end of the podcast he goes WWE should take a look at this guy, and it wasn’t long after. I’d already had the communication with them. But I think that helped in making it more serious and making more of a priority, almost. Then years later, here we are running into each other at WWE. I had to tell him just how crucial he was and helping me get there.

So anyway, then I asked him I want to do the Stone Cold Stunner as my finisher, and I just want to make sure you’re okay with it, and he said, ‘Yeah, I actually can’t believe nobody’s asked me already yet. So yeah, please go ahead.’ So I was really pumped. Then I went to Vince and asked him if I could, and he said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Okay. Then years went by and I got hurt. I went away for a bit and I came back as a babyface. My first match back was a tag team match against Erik Rowan and Daniel Bryan, who was doing the protecting the earth, and I had to go over. I had to beat Bryan that night. They’re like, Well, what do you want to do? Stone Cold Stunner? And they said, okay, all right. And that was it. From then on became my finish.

So I would have to admit tying back to how he came back, when I asked him to use the Stone Cold Stunner yes, I wanted a new finishing move and yes, I think it’s the greatest finish of all time. But there was a big part of me who thought in the unlikely event, which won’t happen, but if he ever were to come back for a match, it’s going to be against the guy who was doing his finishing move, and that’s exactly what happened. So I don’t think that played a part in it. I think Vince wanted him to be on WrestleMania in Dallas and he wasn’t sure in what capacity. I’m not sure how. I think they talked. He said no at first from what I understand. Then they went back to him, and he’s like, Okay, who would it be with? And I think that’s when they said me, which I think he was good with. Then somehow, was it going to be a talking segment? Was it going to be a match? Was it going to be a stunner? Literally up until the day of the show we had no idea. Me and Steve had talked, I would talk to Steve, ask him, ‘What are we going to do?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know, depends on Vince.’ So I talked to Vince, and Vince goes depends on Steve. And I’m like can’t you guys talk to each other for f*ck sake? But yeah, up until that day we really didn’t know for sure what it was going to be, turned out to be what it was and it was pretty great. I’m very lucky to have been a part of it. To this day the craziest thing that I’ll ever have done in my career, and I don’t think anything will top it. Even me and Sami winning the tag titles at WrestleMania was unbelievable. In the main event, which is great now, because WrestleMania Main Event night one. There’s a lot of people that argue it’s not really the main event, but now that Punk’s in it this year, everyone says it is the main event, because you don’t want to take that away from him. So now it finally validates that. So anyway, winning the titles at WrestleMania together was insane. We were talking about this stuff when our dream would be a let’s win the Ring of Honor tag titles, we’re talking about this in like 2004 and then we never even really talked about winning the WWE Tag titles, because we’re not going to be in WWE are we? No, we are. And then we start talking, we got to team and win the tag titles, and then we teamed for a little bit in 2018 but then we went our separate ways. So we’re like we didn’t even win the tag titles. And we kind of thought, oh, I guess that’s it. But then the story started to shift with him and The Usos and stuff. And anyway, all the pieces fell into place, and we won the tag titles at WrestleMania as incredible and kind of unlikely as that moment was, it still wasn’t as unlikely as Stone Cold coming back 19 years later for a match. So to this day, that match with Steve will always be and like I said, I don’t think anything will top it the craziest night of my career.”

On whether Steve Austin stiffed him in the match:

“Yeah. Actually the night of the match, when I go back to my hotel my earlobe was swollen like this big from his punches. I went [squeezes] and it just splattered against the mirror. He kept saying, You didn’t give me any receipts. What am I gonna do? But honestly, in that moment too, I felt the punches but they weren’t any worse than anything I felt before. But to him, that shows how much of a pro he is. Bret has always prided himself on how he’s never hurt anyone. You could barely feel him in the ring and stuff, and that’s amazing. I think Steve was the same way, so he prided himself on not killing people and that night he knew he was killing me. But to me it was not any worse than other guys.”

On attacking Vince McMahon:

“He just talked all kinds of sh*t. He’s shaking my hand and just saying, I don’t remember what he said, but he was really trying to provoke me because he wanted to make sure I was going to lay in that headbutt. Little did he know I was already planning on laying it in because I had worked for him for two years at that point, I wasn’t going to miss that chance. So I did and yeah, it was a pretty insane moment. When he came up with the blood and everything I was like, Whoa, here we go. But my favorite part of that whole thing was after, it’s a moment that was only seen [off camera]. I don’t think it was on TV, maybe only caught by digital as everybody’s standing to Vince. I’m walking in the back and I turn around to look at the ring. I’m just looking at the ring, and I hear kind of like a rumble in the crowd. I go to turn, and as I turn Stephanie’s right there in my face. She looked at me. She looks furious. She just looks at me and goes, ‘Get the f*ck to the back!’ And I go, okay, and I turn around. Look, I really like Stephanie a lot. She’s been great, just been so supportive of not just me, but everybody. When Hunter was running NXT, and we all got there at the same time, my crop of NXT guys me, Sami, Finn, Bayley, Becky, Charlotte… Stephanie would be at the NXT shows quite a bit and she was just always so supportive and so just proud of us. And yeah, it was great. It’s like that whole generation of NXT was so special, not just because of the talent there, but the support we had from all the trainers to Dusty, Hunter and Stephanie, they really felt like we were to a degree kind of their kids, and they were trying to get us out into the world. That was really special to be around that kind of energy.”

On the fan footage of his attack on Cody Rhodes:

“It wasn’t me. That was Triple H. That was his idea. He felt confident in doing it that way. I was not sure. I’m like I don’t know, is there even going to be enough people there? It turns out he was completely right, there was and yeah, it’s just a different way of telling the stories and he’s got a different mentality than Vince had. It’s really interesting, and people really responded to it. The same thing with Randy, the way I ended up ultimately turning on Randy it was on TV, but it was done differently. It was something that was released later as well, and you just kind of caught the tail end of it on TV, but then they did the security footage after. He wants to tell stories differently, and he’s willing to try stuff out and see what sticks and I think that makes the show way more interesting. It doesn’t mean it’s always gonna work, there might be sometimes it doesn’t land, but we’re trying different things and new things, and I think that’s so important in wrestling. When it gets monotonous and repetitive, no matter how good the matches are and the promos are, if you feel like you’ve seen it before and it’s okay, I’ve seen it before once. If you see a rematch once or twice, great. But there were times over I’d say, in 2008, 2009, and I was an avid fan. I would never miss any WWE shows, even when I was an independent wrestler traveling the world. But I started paying a lot less attention in 08/09 because I felt like this is literally the same thing every single week. There were times where even when I was here, like 2016, 2017 I felt like we just did this two weeks ago and now we’re doing it again. To me, when it gets like that it’s just not the way to we need to do things. I think we need different things. There’s new things. We need to try stuff, and it has to feel unpredictable and exciting.”

On getting approval to get the package piledriver back:

“Well, the package piledriver was something I’ve asked many times before, and it was always No, not right now, not today, doesn’t work, can’t do it. Until eventually it was, yeah, okay, let’s do it. I didn’t feel like hitting it on Randy was the best decision. I thought a normal piledriver was enough for Randy, because Randy is gigantic and quite frankly I didn’t think I could get him up for the package piledriver, because of the way his body needs to be. He’s just too massive. But yeah, and then Cody at Saturday Night’s Main Event was the right time to do it. It was cool. I waited a long time to get to do that in WWE. And the funny part is I knew Penta was coming, and Penta was doing package piledriver and I was like, he better not get to do it before me, because I will lose my sh*t. But it all worked out.”

What is Kevin Owens grateful for?

“My family, my friends and being at the right place right time.”