Pro wrestling is pro wrestling and it's one of those industries where things change on a dime. I'm coming up on 19 years in a business with various companies and often one day you're there and the next day you're gone.
I feel like I started with wrestling, and a love of pro wrestling, that lead me to MMA and the UFC. And now it's come full circle back to pro wrestling.
I'll be honest, when I first started pro wrestling, everybody else did clotheslines better than me. They did everything about pro wrestling better than me. But when it comes to fighting, getting nitty and gritty, I'm the man.
I trained at All Pro Wrestling in the U.S. Later, I signed up with the New Japan Pro Wrestling. Then WWE noticed me.
I think pro wrestling doesn't seem to get a lot of mainstream attention until somebody dies.
Kurt Angle was amazing. He was the person who got me into pro wrestling. He found me when I was at the Olympic training center just wrestling, amateur wrestling.
When I first got into wrestling as a kid, I would read all of the wrestling magazines I could get my hands on. There was a satisfaction discovering that there was a whole wrestling world that existed that you didn't see on TV on Saturday morning. There was this idea that there was this stuff going on there that they didn't want us to see.
I always wanted to wrestle, but when you're a kid, how do you do pro wrestling? For me, it seemed like the easiest way for me was to get into amateur wrestling and go that route because it was a place where I was allowed to go.
Wrestling for WWE has definitely helped me a lot to get me to this platform where I'm able to do that, to be as busy as I am and travel the world.
The nWo was the greatest time in professional wrestling because we were going into mixed stadiums like the Georgia Dome. That was one of the greatest times in pro wrestling and was the most profitable time in pro wrestling.
I never trained in pro wrestling with The Sheik, but I did amateur wrestling with pro wrestlers in my dad's basement.
There was a time that I really loved pro wrestling, but I'm not a pro wrestling junkie, per se.
But for me, personally, that's one of the biggest perks of the job that I get to do these kinds of crazy things but in a safely created environment.
It took me a few years to explain to my colleagues and my mentors and the people that I looked up to and I wrestled that I'm not in wrestling anymore. I'm in sports entertainment. Pro' wrestling doesn't mean that we're saying we're a step up above amateur wrestling, because there's nothing above Olympic wrestling.
MMA and the UFC have taken all of the pro wrestling fans because it's pro wrestling from 30 years ago, just in an Octagon and the fights happen to be real. But they're marketed exactly the same way.
In pro wrestling, if somebody throws a move, it's my job not to get hurt but also to sell the move and make it look like I'm dying.