Watching 'WrestleMania' growing up, it was like a neighborhood party. It was like the Super Bowl on my block, the only difference was, football was only around for 16 weeks while wrestling was every Saturday.
When I was Cedrick Von Haussen, the champion of Liechtenstein, I was only 18 years old. I was super, duper young. I started traveling around for wrestling when I was 16, so I had only been wrestling a few years at that point.
Celebrating Christmas without subscribing to Christianity is like watching the Super Bowl without watching a regular season game. Some people watch the Super Bowl for the commercials; others watch it for the halftime show.
The year we went to our first Super Bowl in 1992, we were the youngest team in football. We played in the Super Bowl against a team that had a wealth of playoff experience and Super Bowl experience, and we dominated that football game.
I want to be so far removed from the idea that it's like, 'Oh, right, he won a Super Bowl.' Football is only a small part of your life.
Growing up, I was the only Indian kid around for miles, so I ached to belong. I had a neighborhood pack of nine guys and two girls, and we hung out all the time. We played football, baseball, and broom-hockey on the iced-up lake.
Like me personally, I'm not a huge football guy, but I do watch the Super Bowl every year, and I get into it because it's exciting.
Every year is Super Bowl or bust, really. If you ain't shooting for the Super Bowl... I mean, I guess if you're the Browns, you're shooting for a win. Or a few wins, at least. But everybody else, you gotta be shooting for the Super Bowl.
As a football player, as a kid and as a professional athlete the moment of playing in the Super Bowl and winning a Super Bowl, that's what you play your whole career for.
...even after you've just won the Super Bowl -- especially after you've just won the Super Bowl -- there's always next year. If Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing, then the only thing is nothing -- emptiness, the nightmare of life without ultimate meaning.
The only difference between baseball guys or football guys and wrestling guys is that when you go to the game, you see a team out on the field wearing uniforms. In wrestling, you see a two-thirds naked guy up real close.
I think anytime you have an event for the first time ever, like a Super Bowl or WrestleMania or UFC, as the years go by, everything becomes more polished with promotion and bigger stars.
To me probably the biggest disappointments, as far as a football career goes, is I feel like I didn't live up to my potential, and I didn't win a Super Bowl ring.
I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.'
When you only have a million dollar annual budget and a Super Bowl ad costs $4 million, you have to do something very creative to get onto the Super Bowl.
Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.
Growing up watching WWE, they used to have bra-and-panties matches or pillow fights, and that's why my mom didn't want me to watch wrestling. But when my parents divorced, I was able to watch wrestling again, and that's when I started to really get into wrestlers like Ivory.