I kind of miss that whole NXT thing. When I was there, it was Florida Championship Wrestling with Seth Rollins and the other guys who were there. I wrestled on, like, local-access Florida TV in front of 30 people. It was a tiny little situation.
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.
Wrestling-wise, I've wrestled a lot of the girls that I've really wanted to, like Natalya and Emma.
In my mind, I do have a lot higher wrestling than Woodley. We've wrestled before, and it wasn't competitive, and that's honest.
A lot of my family is from Texas, stuff like that, so I was always in Texas, and when you grow up in Texas, around Texas, you want to go to the biggest Texas school, and UT was that.
More enduringly than any other sport, wrestling teaches self-control and pride. Some have wrestled without great skill - none have wrestled without pride.
I wrestled my guys growing up. I've wrestled with Hulk Hogan. I've wrestled against Shawn Michaels. I've wrestled against Ric Flair.
When I was in NXT, I never wrestled on a TakeOver. I didn't have too many high-profile matches: I probably wrestled about 10 matches in total on NXT TV, including the one championship match against Bayley, which was so much fun and my favorite match in NXT.
We get three of the Ball boys on the Lakers together, and we gonna go championship, championship, championship, championship, championship.
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
when I wrestled, I would set aside the time to wrestle, so that in my mind it didn't interfere with my study time. That helped me psychologically. When I'm wrestling, I'm not studying the universe. And when I'm studying the universe, I'm not wrestling.
Coaching at Texas and playing at the University of Oklahoma, I had the opportunity to see a lot of guys in Texas - Texas lettermen - who I played against.
I was always around wrestling. I went to shows, but I never pictured myself where I am today. My brothers, David and Reid, were more into wrestling. When they wrestled, it was hard on my brothers because they were always compared to my dad.
When I was a kid, I wrestled my high school amateur wrestling in junior year.
When I saw that Wrestlemania had broken an indoor attendance record, I just walked into a wrestling office, Championship Wrestling in Florida, during the offseason, and they introduced me to Hiro Matsuda, who became my mentor... and the rest is history!
In wrestling, you're talking about a fraternity of champions, and I got a chance to be a part of that Olympic championship club. And anyone that ever won the Olympics in wrestling, there's something different about them.