A Quote by Matt Riddle

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.
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.
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.
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.
Amateur wrestling, you can go by instinct. Pro wrestling, you have to memorize, and you have to go by what moves you said you were going to do. Sometimes you have to feel the crowd and do the moves at the right time and know the timing and tell a good story.
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'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.
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'm going to show you how we do it in New Japan Pro Wrestling. That's what you get whenever I wrestle, whoever's in the ring with me.
I never trained in pro wrestling with The Sheik, but I did amateur wrestling with pro wrestlers in my dad's basement.
I started wrestling at ten. I played a lot of other sports: soccer, football. I really enjoyed skiing. But wrestling just took off for me. It seemed to be the sport I had an affinity for; I liked the individual, combative nature. There's something special about that. It took me all the places I wanted to go.
If you're a fan of Indie wrestling at all, you can go back to, I think, 2007-2008, and you can see me wrestle CHIKARA. And you can see me wrestle in a tank top, and you can see me wrestle in a tank top that doesn't look like the one I have in WWE. But it's the same one.
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.
My grandmother played a huge influence in my life and helped raise me, and she and my mother saw how much I loved pro wrestling and how much I wanted to go after it.
When I wrestled, I would set aside the time to wrestle, so that in my mind it didn't interfere with my study time. If I'd say, "I'm going to study this many hours, then I'm going to go work out and wrestle," then when that time comes, you don't feel like you should be doing something else. That helped me psychologically. But otherwise? When I'm wrestling, I'm not studying the universe. And when I'm studying the universe, I'm not wrestling.
Since the day I was born, wrestling has sustained me and my family. It's the way my father fed me; it's the way I feed my kids. More importantly, wrestling is my greatest release. It's been such a blessing for me. I can step into the ring and let it all go - all my anger, all my frustration, all my pain.
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.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!