I don't have the same knack for the business end that my old man did. Recruiting people has been tough. I don't envy anyone in that spot, especially some of the great non-WWE promoters like 'Evolves' Gabe Sapolsky, Beyond Wrestling's Drew Cordeiro, or Markus Mac at All Pro Wrestling.
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 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.
You go from Olympic wrestling into pro wrestling, and it's a very difficult transition, but if you make it, you can earn a great living while at the same time giving amateur wrestling a lot of exposure by being on TV every week. Fans know where you came from.
Hopefully, when people watch 'Lucha Underground' and WWE, Ring of Honor, New Japan, AAA, and any other promotion out there, they fall in love with pro wrestling. Pro wrestling, as it affects pop culture, is bigger than any one promotion.
In my first fight, I acknowledged it. I'm a professional wrestler, this is who I am, who you know me as. But guess what, I've also been wrestling since I was 5 years old - real wrestling - amateur wrestling, Olympic wrestling.
I never trained in pro wrestling with The Sheik, but I did amateur wrestling with pro wrestlers in my dad's basement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back in the day, when I was getting into the business, you could watch Pro Wrestling Noah. You could watch Ring Of Honor Wrestling, and a lot of people would say, 'the best wrestling in the world is actually at Ring Of Honor.'
I'm very aware that pro wrestling fans can be some of the most vocal and passionate and descriptive about how they feel when it comes to pro wrestling. So I'm totally fine with how fans talk about how they feel, cause if they're not allowed to voice how they feel, then what's the point of being a wrestling fan. You gotta know what you like and what you do't like and that's fine.
I remember when I had just left WWE and I was wrestling in England and Germany, I could just tell that this influx of this new wave of wrestling was coming much like it felt when I began wrestling back in '99.
Bret Hart, you don't really understand the business of the Pro Wrestling business. You only understand the Bret Hart business of the Pro Wrestling business, and they are two different things.
Wrestling can be anything... There's some forms of wrestling that I'm not too big a fan of, but I'm not going to say it's not wrestling because it is wrestling.