Jan. 20, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:42:52
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. | ||
| WWE royalty, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| The Undertaker and the biggest fucking wrestling fan on planet Earth. | ||
| Like I was saying before the podcast, if I did not bring Tony Hinchcliffe on this podcast, I would have never heard the end of it. | ||
| No one loves you more than that, man. | ||
| Being right next to you right now is probably... | ||
| He's tingling. | ||
| He's tingling a little bit? | ||
| He might be lactating. | ||
| This is the highlight of my life. | ||
| I don't know if I'm happy or sad about that. | ||
| Well, hey man, thanks for coming on here. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| No, thanks for having me, man. | ||
| It's an honor, really. | ||
| Oh, my pleasure. | ||
| Honor to have you. | ||
| So, what is it like being in Austin, Texas right now? | ||
| Are you enjoying it? | ||
| You're from this area, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm from Houston, but I've been here since about 2004. You know, it's crazy, man. | ||
| We've got this influx of people from California right now. | ||
| I know. | ||
| We're trying not to fuck it up. | ||
| What should we do? | ||
| Tell us what to do. | ||
| You know, it's fine. | ||
| Bring the money. | ||
| Leave the values. | ||
| We'll all be good. | ||
| What values do we need to leave behind specifically? | ||
| Well, fuck everything that fucked up California. | ||
| I think that's the government, man. | ||
| No, it really... | ||
| The government gets voted in, though, right? | ||
| Yeah, but I don't think we expected them to do that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, no one expected them to shut down all the restaurants and shut down all the gyms. | ||
| And now that studies have come out, there was a new study that came out, it was in fucking Newsweek. | ||
| I'm hoping that when Biden comes in, they're going to go, well, you know, we realize that lockdowns are not really good, it doesn't really help. | ||
| Give people freedom and let them do... | ||
| I'm hoping that this is a political thing, which is a terrible thing to hope for. | ||
| That this is political. | ||
| That's where we're at, though. | ||
| Yeah, but that's where we're at. | ||
| I'm hoping that it was all political and that they'll adjust once Biden is in office. | ||
| Yeah, I hope so, too. | ||
| It's been nuts, man. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| What do you believe, too, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You hear this, you hear that, like... | ||
| My buddy Brendan Schaub just went down to the comedy store the other day, he rode his bike down there, he said, dude, it's like the fucking Walking Dead. | ||
| He said, sunset is just a zombie land. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| Tents and shit, and weirdos, and no businesses open, and everything's just... | ||
| It's amazing how quick things can fall apart. | ||
| Quick. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like that, everything changes. | ||
| And the sunset strips extra sad because all the neon lights and everything is what kept it. | ||
| When those things are shut off, it's as dark as it gets. | ||
| Even the comedy store, it's just a black building with a bunch of red and white neons around it. | ||
| But if those neons are off, it looks like nothing's there. | ||
| You've got to wonder what's going to happen when everything comes back. | ||
| How long is it going to take for things to bounce back? | ||
| It could take five years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or it could that, or just everybody lose their freaking mind and, you know, just go absolutely apeshit because they've been cooped up for so long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We can do what? | ||
| We're good. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| So, what have you been doing, man? | ||
| What have you been doing with your life post-wrestling? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, trying to figure out what's next, really. | ||
| You know, I've done this for... | ||
| 33 years altogether. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's just one of those deals... | ||
| You're walking around like you're okay, though. | ||
| A lot of the guys that hit 30 years, man... | ||
| I hung out with the Iron Sheik one night. | ||
| That poor guy. | ||
| Yeah, he's... | ||
| Very entertaining. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hilarious. | |
| It's great. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| I love Sheiky. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| He can barely walk. | ||
| His ankle's fused. | ||
| He can't walk. | ||
| I've already got both my hips. | ||
| Birmingham resurface job, so my hips are metal. | ||
| This is incredible that they can do that now. | ||
| Well, it added... | ||
| 10 years to my career, you know? | ||
| Oh, so you did it and then kept going. | ||
| So I did the first one. | ||
| I did the left one in 2010. Wow. | ||
| I was, I mean, it looked like, you know, they filmed the whole thing for me and, you know, my hip joint, the ball socket looked like a landmine had gone off on it. | ||
| I mean, it was just potholes and I had spurs and arthritis. | ||
| It was filled it up. | ||
| Um, Right. | ||
| They didn't have a whole lot of scientific study on how long these were going to last. | ||
| And then no one was going to put it to the test like I did. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Especially with the amount of weight you're carrying around and then picking people up and slamming them and... | ||
| And getting slammed and just all that jarring. | ||
| So Dr. Su out of the hospital for special surgeries. | ||
| He was just phenomenal. | ||
| And he was so gung-ho because that was his baby. | ||
| And he knew what I was going to do. | ||
| And he's like, no one's put that kind of test on it. | ||
| We're going to see. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, we're going to see. | ||
| And it's held up. | ||
| I've been I was in pain easily 12 years, every step of every day. | ||
| I had that searing, down-the-leg pain. | ||
| And you just dealt with it? | ||
| I just dealt with it. | ||
| It's part of the game. | ||
| Thankfully, I've got a high threshold for pain. | ||
| But you know, people that are in chronic pain all the time, and you live with it, You don't even realize the drag it is on you. | ||
| I mean, you get used to it, but you don't know how much until it's gone. | ||
| And when I woke up from surgery and I'm pain-free, it was like, this is a whole new lease on life. | ||
| Remotivated me to do, you know, things. | ||
| Right away you were pain-free? | ||
| As soon as I woke up. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Don't they have a saw at the top of your hip off? | ||
| No, so here's what they do, and I wish I'd have brought it with me, but we're trying to pack our house up and move. | ||
| So they take the head of the femur, all right, the top of the leg bone. | ||
| They go in there first and they clean everything off of it. | ||
| They get all the arthritis. | ||
| They shave all that off. | ||
| They kind of bore it and clean it as good as they can clean it. | ||
| Then they drill a hole in it in the head of your femur. | ||
| And then they take a titanium cap and they stick over the head of the femur. | ||
| Jamie could probably find it if you know the exact model. | ||
| Yeah, there it is, right there. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it. | |
| Jamie's on the motherfucking ball. | ||
| That's money right there. | ||
| Pull that up like that. | ||
| Birmingham hip follow-up. | ||
| So that is what yours looks like. | ||
| So the thing with the stem on the right side there, that goes right into the head of the femur. | ||
| And then the porous piece of metal that goes over the top of it, Goes into the acetabulum and no restrictions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| No restrictions. | ||
| Yeah, I had to walk. | ||
| I was walking... | ||
| So on the left is the old way to do it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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So... | |
| Where they see A and B over there on the right-hand side? | ||
| Yeah, and they still do it that way. | ||
| And if I screw these up, I can still have the total hip where they'll go in there, cut the femur off. | ||
| What would be the benefit of doing that, though? | ||
| Well, at the time, if I had done the full hip replacement, then I would have been finished. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, because it just couldn't have took the trauma that I put it through. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the resurfacing, that way, I have absolutely no restrictions. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, so you have no pain now. | ||
| How long is this supposed to last? | ||
| Like, don't they say that you might have to get another one of these or do something with it eventually? | ||
| Eventually. | ||
| They don't know. | ||
| Like I said, when I did the first one, they'd only been doing them for about 10 years. | ||
| And no one, you know, no one had... | ||
| Got in a wrestling ring and get thrown around 270 days a year on it either, you know? | ||
| I mean, it's just... | ||
| Well, think about cars, right? | ||
| You can get, like, a 95 Land Cruiser with 300,000 miles on it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Easy. | ||
| And they're driving fine. | ||
| Like, and those pistons are just going... | ||
| And maybe it can just keep going. | ||
| Yeah, no warranty. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| There's no warranty, but, you know, I just... | ||
| I keep holding off, and medicine keeps getting better and better, and... | ||
| Yeah, no, it'll definitely continue to get better. | ||
| I mean, it's just incredible that you can do that and then still wrestle. | ||
| Yeah, and then when I did the other one, I did the other one maybe five years later. | ||
| Same thing? | ||
| Yeah, same thing. | ||
| The only thing then is I kind of had to learn how to walk again. | ||
| I mean, I could walk, but my gait was so screwed up from dragging the leg and everything. | ||
| So what they had me do is, weird and strange enough, is start walking backwards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On a treadmill to correct my gait. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How weird. | ||
| Yeah, because you compensate. | ||
| When you have an injury, you start to compensate and do things differently. | ||
| So I walked differently to kind of alleviate the pain. | ||
| So once I had no pain, I still had the habits of walking that way. | ||
| So I had to retrain my brain and my body to walk correctly again. | ||
| So the left hip was the one that was really bothering you for the longest time, and the right hip was bothering you less? | ||
|
unidentified
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Is that what it was? | |
| Yeah, I didn't really have... | ||
| It was kind of weird how it happened. | ||
| Like, my left hip was bad for years and years. | ||
| I finally, you know, I said, okay, I'm gonna call it a day. | ||
| My normal orthopedic surgeon, I said, okay, Doc, I'm going to call it a day. | ||
| He said, shit, Mark, you should have called it a day five years ago. | ||
| He said, you got more out of that hip than what anybody ever should have. | ||
| I was like, well. | ||
| I'd come to grips with my career was going to be over. | ||
| So I cut my hair off. | ||
| You know, I said, I'm not gonna need this long shit anymore. | ||
| So I cut my hair off and, you know, I'm kind of sitting at home. | ||
| Phone rings. | ||
| It's only about two or three days later, right? | ||
| And Dr. Bird, he's out of Nashville. | ||
| Awesome, awesome doctor. | ||
| He's probably the leading doctor in hip preservation, like taking your natural hip as far as you can go. | ||
| Just really good. | ||
| What does he do for that? | ||
| Uh, you know, he'll go in orthoscopically, clean, clean the bone off, clean the spurs out, clean, you know, he just, anytime there's, you know, what, what starts to happen is you start getting that arthritis and then this, the spurs and it just, what happens is every time that you're walking, it's just chewing that up. | ||
| So he goes in there and, and he's, he's, uh, he's actually designed his own instruments. | ||
| That he uses to go in there and orthoscopically clean these hips joints out. | ||
| So he calls you? | ||
| So he calls me and he goes, hey, I might have another option for you. | ||
| And I'm like, fuck, I already shaved my head. | ||
| He goes, there's this doctor in New York that's doing this thing called the Birmingham hip resurface. | ||
| He says, it may give you an opportunity to make a decision that you want to make instead of having it made for you. | ||
| I was like, oh shit, okay. | ||
| So I go to New York and I meet, you know, with Dr. Sue. | ||
| And he goes, yeah, he goes, I think you're a perfect candidate. | ||
| You know, your bone density is really great. | ||
| And he says, I think you'll do good with it, right? | ||
| So I was like, well, fuck, let's go for it, right? | ||
| I got nothing to lose at that point. | ||
| And I wake up. | ||
| I'm pain-free. | ||
| And I'm like, holy shit. | ||
| Like, I'm walking that day. | ||
| That day? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just like... | ||
| No crutches? | ||
| No nothing? | ||
| I started out on crutches because I had, you know, for a while I had an epidural in. | ||
| So, you know, when I first tried to get up, it was funny. | ||
| They bring in two male nurses, right? | ||
| You know, I'm three and some change at the time, right? | ||
| So, and I've never had any, you know, kind of side effects. | ||
| But I guess I got up and... | ||
| Did they catch you? | ||
| They got me. | ||
| I landed on the bed. | ||
| The last thing I remember was getting up to go take this walk and the next thing I'm laying in bed. | ||
| My wife's looking at me like, you okay? | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| You passed out. | ||
| I'm like, shut up! | ||
| I didn't pass out. | ||
| Yeah, they got you up to walk and you passed out. | ||
| Wow, you forgot it. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I was so, you know, I was so looped up. | ||
| I feel good. | ||
| I'm just so happy that they could do that for you, that they could resurface both of them when you walk. | ||
| I mean, because you walk, you would never know. | ||
| Yeah, it is crazy. | ||
| I feel I'm really blessed. | ||
| Now, if I could, obviously, I'd still be going full steam ahead, but I just physically can't perform at the level. | ||
| And that's the thing with when you use your body for athletic purpose. | ||
| At some point, it's going to say, enough's enough. | ||
| John Wayne Parr, he's a Muay Thai champion out of Australia. | ||
| You know John Wayne Parr. | ||
| He has over 100 fights. | ||
| He was trying to get 100 wins, but they robbed him on his last decision, on his 100th win. | ||
| But he just got his hip redone, and he's throwing kicks again. | ||
| Because I thought, like, he was saying that he needed to get his hip done. | ||
| I'm like, well, you know, I guess the career's over if you get a hip replacement. | ||
| But he got a resurfacing, very similar to yours. | ||
| I don't know if it's the exact same one. | ||
| But he's, like, a couple of weeks later, he was, like, throwing kicks in the air. | ||
| And a couple months later, this is him, like, right post-operation. | ||
| But if you go to his Instagram, Jamie, like right now, like if you can see some video of him. | ||
| What is that one? | ||
| Is he running? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, this is crazy. | ||
| You can run? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he was fucked. | ||
| He was in pain for a long time. | ||
| I mean, that's just nuts to see him being able to do that. | ||
| See if there's a video of him throwing kicks. | ||
| He got a float tank, too. | ||
| Someone hooked him up with a float tank. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Yeah, there he is, right there. | ||
| I mean, this is only a couple... | ||
| Oh, this is like a parody of a John Codd Van Damme kickboxer. | ||
| He's being sick. | ||
| John's a funny dude. | ||
| He's always fucking around. | ||
| But there's videos of him. | ||
| Get out of this one. | ||
| It is eventually, but it's going to take too long. | ||
| But keep scrolling down. | ||
| There's a video of him throwing kicks. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Like, scroll down. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So this is, I think this is three months post-surgery. | ||
| And he can throw kicks. | ||
| So he's got someone holding the pads for him. | ||
| Which is just... | ||
| Yeah, that's insane. | ||
| And that's that leg. | ||
| That leg he's throwing right there. | ||
| That was the one that he fought. | ||
| Yeah, and there's so much pressure. | ||
| And John's in his 40s. | ||
| But he's a fucking savage to the end. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy, man. | ||
| Modern medicine, it's phenomenal, man. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And from the fans' perspective, you know, they don't tell you when these guys are getting surgery and things like that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Which thing happened? | ||
| Well, we don't... | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| No, we don't know when they're getting surgery. | ||
| So my point is, for example... | ||
| You know, you're watching The Undertaker, right, who's already been doing it years longer than all of his peers and all that, and maybe you could tell that matches not necessarily are different or slower, but they're just, they are. | ||
| They're different than obviously headlining an hour-long WrestleMania match, right? | ||
| I think you just dissed me. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| No. | ||
| I think he did. | ||
| You felt that, right? | ||
| I didn't like it. | ||
| But the return on that is that people say, like, oh, this must be it. | ||
| This must. | ||
| We're coming towards the end of The Undertaker. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's different than it's always been. | ||
| And then he would come back from one of these hip surgeries, and it would literally add to the mystique of The Undertaker. | ||
| Because all of a sudden, he's faster, stronger, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a while there, that was the template. | ||
| I would, you know, I would... | ||
| At the end of my career, I had to kind of, almost like a fighter, you know, when a fighter goes into camp, you know, because I would get ready for like one event. | ||
| For years, like I had an eight-year stretch where I averaged 270 dates a year. | ||
| That's what a lot of people don't. | ||
| They don't get that part of what we do. | ||
| They don't get the live events, town to town, flying everywhere. | ||
| That is bananas. | ||
| Easily. | ||
| Easily eight years, 278s. | ||
| At the beginning of my career, in the early 90s with WWE, on the weekends, we'd do two shows a day. | ||
| Boo! | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Who works harder than pro wrestlers? | ||
| Like literally. | ||
| Honestly, obviously I'm biased, but a lot of people really don't get that. | ||
| Because they see Monday nights or they see the Friday night show and they don't know that we're doing live events. | ||
| And when I came up in the early 90s, We only did TV like every three weeks. | ||
| We would tape three weeks of TV and the rest of that time we're on the road. | ||
| It'd be like they're throwing darts. | ||
| One day I'd be in New York. | ||
| The next day I'd be in Denver. | ||
| Then I'd be in Miami. | ||
| Then I'd be in Toronto. | ||
| Then I'd be in LA. Then I'd be in Dallas. | ||
| You must have been in a constant state of jet lag. | ||
| I say fucked up, really. | ||
| Honestly. | ||
| We had a motto, we'll sleep when we're dead. | ||
| You're young. | ||
| When you're young, you've got that kind of energy and you can do all that. | ||
| You're going out and you're enjoying your nightlife too. | ||
| Well, no wonder why so many guys have a problem with pills, too, because you're in a constant state of pain. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Things have progressed in our industry so much. | ||
| Like, we're on the same standards now of Major League Baseball and the football. | ||
| I mean, our drug testing programs, wellness programs, concussions. | ||
| I mean, we are probably in some cases even, you know, better. | ||
| Why would they test you for drugs? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, so... | ||
| One, well, prescription drugs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just see if you've got a problem. | ||
| They started out early on. | ||
| So we're talking 90s, right? | ||
| So they didn't want people getting popped with... | ||
| getting pulled over and... | ||
| Cops finding weed in the car, whatnot. | ||
| So that would be a fine. | ||
| You'd get fined a little bit this time. | ||
| The second time, you get fined a little more. | ||
| The third time, you get fined and maybe have to go, you know, rehab. | ||
| But I think what they kind of figured out, I think they still do, but they didn't realize when they took that away, what are you going to do? | ||
| You're going to drink more. | ||
| And then you're going to take more pills. | ||
| Because you've got to cope with the pain somehow. | ||
| And so then you've got guys overdosing, right? | ||
| So everything's kind of led up to this drug protocol now. | ||
| We're talking about we didn't have doctors with us at the time. | ||
| We didn't even have trainers with us back then. | ||
| Now we travel with trainers, doctors. | ||
| You know, there's all kinds of protocols. | ||
| You get your head, you know, you get a dinger. | ||
| You used to, it was like, okay, well, fine. | ||
| You know, I gotta go make a living. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's the same with injuries. | ||
| Like, you don't work, you don't get paid. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, you know, in that sense, our industry's come a long way. | ||
| They really take good care of the athletes now. | ||
| When you think of drug tests, people think about steroids. | ||
| If I was Vince, I would tell people, I want to make sure you're on steroids. | ||
| I'd be testing everybody. | ||
| Well, we've had a few different... | ||
| Why are you not on steroids? | ||
| You're a pro wrestler. | ||
| Come on, bro. | ||
| You would think, right? | ||
| There was a time where everybody had to be... | ||
| You had to be clean? | ||
| No, you had to be big. | ||
| You had to be jacked, right? | ||
| Especially the guys, the 6'8", the big guys. | ||
| There was a stigma. | ||
| You've got to be 300 pounds. | ||
| It's in our head. | ||
| Nobody gives a shit. | ||
| They're interested in the characters and what you do on TV. But in our heads, fuck, I've got to be 330 pounds. | ||
| They're interested a little bit. | ||
| But if a guy like Brock Lesnar comes out and he looks skinny, people would be furious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even the guys that weren't huge had to do it to stay medium. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I was friends with Roddy Piper, and he was telling me about it, and he's like, well, yeah, I mean, you had to even keep, to even stay in the middle, to stay in the game, you had to be on steroids. | ||
| That was the wrestler's mindset, though. | ||
| Now, we're tested for everything. | ||
| They test for steroids now? | ||
| They test for steroids. | ||
| They have for a while. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Which I don't understand because there's some big motherfuckers out there and cut, and I don't know how they did it. | ||
| I couldn't get that way when I was on steroids. | ||
| Who's the biggest guy in the WWE right now? | ||
| I'm going to pull up a picture. | ||
| Braun Strowman passes the sniff test. | ||
| Braun, I think he's about my height. | ||
| He used to be a power lifter. | ||
| Let me see. | ||
| Here you go, Jamie. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| So, yeah, he's 330 pounds. | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| Look. | ||
| Are we trying to say that that guy doesn't do any steroids at all? | ||
| I'm just telling you. | ||
| Hey, I'm just telling you. | ||
| This is preposterous. | ||
| This is... | ||
| They test him. | ||
| They test him. | ||
| And then they give him a grade A. Good job. | ||
| I'm just saying. | ||
| Look, I can only say what... | ||
| What I've had to go through. | ||
| I mean, it's positive. | ||
| It's possible, right? | ||
| It has to be, because I'm telling you. | ||
| Before I switched my contracts, and now I'm not a talent. | ||
| Now I'm a legend, I guess, or whatever they call it. | ||
| I'd only worked two or three times a year. | ||
| This is at the end of my career. | ||
| But I was still under a regular contract. | ||
| So under a regular contract, you have to, this is if you've tested clean, you have to have four mandatory tests, four mandatory piss tests, and two blood tests every year. | ||
| Well, they'd get to the end of the year, like it'd be December, right, going into Christmas, and I'd get a call. | ||
| Like, you need to go to this such and such lab and do a piss test. | ||
| And I hadn't been in the ring in six, seven months, but they would look at their book, oh shit, we forgot about him. | ||
| And it's under, you know, you've got to have those piss tests done. | ||
| So then, okay, well, that's only three. | ||
| Sure enough, next day I get another phone call. | ||
| Go back to the lab. | ||
| So, you know, I'd have to go two days in a row to get tested to make sure that I had... | ||
| Everything that I was supposed to have. | ||
| Maybe that's how they do it. | ||
| Maybe they bang all their tests out early in the year, test four days in a row, and then just do steroids the rest of the year. | ||
| No, they're totally random. | ||
| They just show up. | ||
| The drug testing, you never know when they're going to show up. | ||
| I was home. | ||
| That's why I didn't get tested until the very end. | ||
| I just don't understand why they would test. | ||
| I mean, that's like testing The Rock. | ||
| Like if he's doing a movie. | ||
| You want to make sure you're not on steroids. | ||
| They'll be like, what? | ||
| Well, so, you know, obviously, you know, we've had some dark shit that... | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| I'm just saying, brother. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Well, he is the beef king. | ||
| Come on, look at the size of that fucker. | ||
| He used to be a lot thicker. | ||
| He used to be a power lifter. | ||
| Yeah, he was 400 pounds at one time, and he's my height. | ||
| It's possible to be that... | ||
| It's not bodybuilding size, right? | ||
| Bodybuilding size is impossible. | ||
| That's not possible. | ||
| If you look at Ronnie Coleman in his prime, not possible. | ||
| But that guy, maybe some Viking DNA in there. | ||
| He's a giant fucking dude. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I know what the protocol is, and I know if anybody was going to get out of it, it would have been me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I didn't get out of it, so I'm just saying. | ||
| Do they test Vince? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, I don't know. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, I wish whatever he's on, I wish I was on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that guy. | ||
| Yeah, he's 85,000 years old. | ||
| He's 75. Come on. | ||
| That's all he does. | ||
| Who the fuck has traps like that when they're 75? | ||
| If you didn't know that was his traps, you would say, he's going to die. | ||
| He has a tumor. | ||
| He's got a tumor on his back. | ||
| Look at the size of him. | ||
| Let me tell you, though. | ||
| That guy, that's what he does. | ||
| He's a fucking animal. | ||
| His love is working out. | ||
| Who the fuck has ever been that big at that age? | ||
| Ever. | ||
| He's phenomenal, man. | ||
| How old is he? | ||
| He's 75. He's older than my mom. | ||
| I'm going to send my mom a picture of him. | ||
| I don't want to hear any excuses. | ||
| Get it together, mom. | ||
| No excuses, mom. | ||
| His mom is 99. His mom's 99 and was still playing tennis in her 90s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I mean, he's just got some... | ||
| That's his trainer there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He's shooting them in the back right now. | ||
| As he's lifting. | ||
| It's just all day long. | ||
| Just keep hitting them. | ||
| He's the one guy I'll call. | ||
| He'll call me out of the clear blues. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| You work out today? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'm like, no, boss, I didn't. | ||
| What's wrong? | ||
| He's like, I don't feel like it. | ||
| He's like, well, you need to get your ass in the gym. | ||
| It's amazing his enthusiasm after all these years. | ||
| Look at that picture where it says related images right below that with him screaming. | ||
| Go to that one. | ||
| Amazing enthusiasm after all these years in the game. | ||
| It really is pretty incredible. | ||
| He is a workhorse. | ||
| His company and working out It's kind of crazy. | ||
| That's his love, man. | ||
| That's his passion. | ||
| That's what causes success. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
| It's consistency. | ||
| But look at him there. | ||
| He looks like he's about 30. And look at him on the right. | ||
| He's 150 years old. | ||
| And still jacked. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love people like that. | ||
| I do, too. | ||
| I wish I had a little bit of it right now. | ||
| Well, he's been lifting weights and occasionally wrestling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've been wrestling. | ||
| Well, what year did you start? | ||
| I started training in 86. Wow. | ||
| Had my first match in 87. Dude, I was just out of high school. | ||
| I mean, we don't need to know everything. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| It was tough for me. | ||
| I'm not a legacy. | ||
| I didn't have anybody in the business. | ||
| I didn't know anybody in the business. | ||
| Usually you need somebody to open that door for you. | ||
| In 86, were you thinking, I've got to figure out a way how to do this? | ||
| Did you start taking classes? | ||
| I was in college. | ||
| I was a basketball player. | ||
| My coach tells me, Mark, there's There's some European scouts that are interested in you. | ||
| Maybe after next year, they may want to give you a tryout. | ||
| European pro basketball, right? | ||
| But they all say they'd like for you to be a little bigger because of the style they played back then. | ||
| Okay, so I start lifting weights, trying, you know, I'm 6'8", 230, 240, which is, in the 80s, is huge for a basketball player, but still. | ||
| So I started training. | ||
| In the European League, were they just more physical? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, it was like... | ||
| Rick Mahorn and Bill Lambeer, you know, on the gas. | ||
| They were just monsters. | ||
| And so I started training and I'm trying to, you know, put on size and strength. | ||
| And I met this guy in the gym who was like, every day I'd come in, he goes, hey, he goes, man, I'm going to go and I'm going to get into this wrestling. | ||
| Why don't you do wrestling with me? | ||
| And I was a big wrestling fan as a kid. | ||
| But as I got into, you know, basketball and football and everything else, I kind of, you know, I kind of drifted away. | ||
| And I was just like, man, I think I'm going to go try to play some pro ball in Europe. | ||
| And he goes, man, you should really try and do this with me. | ||
| So I kind of started getting in touch with the product again. | ||
| I kind of started watching again, and I got no clue. | ||
| I kind of fall back into it again, right? | ||
| I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. | ||
| That's different. | ||
| I think one of the things that's helped me through my career is being a realist in what my talents are and what my talents aren't. | ||
| I started having these conversations with myself like, even if you do make a team, how long do you really have? | ||
| Being 21 and Sitting on the end of the bench in Lithuania just really wasn't that appealing. | ||
| You know, I'm trying to weigh it up against what I'm seeing on TV, right? | ||
| And I'm like, you know, because you got the Von Eriks and you got Hogan. | ||
| I'm like, well, shit, these guys are huge household names, you know? | ||
| So I'm thinking, maybe I ought to give it a try. | ||
| So we find this guy by the name of Buzz Sawyer to... | ||
| To train us, right? | ||
| And I got to come up with two grand, and I ain't got a pot or a window to throw it out of, right? | ||
| So I get my brother, my oldest brother, to co-sign a loan, hock everything I own, and come up with two grand to pay Buzz Sawyer to train me to wrestle. | ||
| Show up to his house. | ||
| First morning of training, right? | ||
| Buzz, he was a good amateur, really good amateur. | ||
| And show up at his house, knocking on the door. | ||
| There's about 10 of us standing out in the fucking front yard, knocking on the door. | ||
| Finally, fucking door swings open. | ||
| What the fuck you want, right? | ||
| And he's standing there butt-ass naked. | ||
| Woke him up. | ||
| He's just standing there naked. | ||
| And everybody's like, uh, we're here to train? | ||
| And he goes, oh fuck, is that today? | ||
| Yeah, you know, and so he gets another guy that was staying there with him. | ||
| His name was Perry Jackson, who I'm friends with to this day. | ||
| He says, go out there and warm them up, right? | ||
| So he goes out there and we run and do all, just, I mean, everything they can do to blow us up and run us off, right? | ||
| Totally gassed out, about two hours, just nothing but cardio shit, right? | ||
| Finally Buzz comes out. | ||
| Alright, everybody line up. | ||
| Alright, everybody get down. | ||
| Amateur position, right? | ||
| So, you know, everybody gets down. | ||
| Fucking, he just stretches the shit out of everybody, right? | ||
| Cross-faced. | ||
| Just fucking, you know, chicken wing and just hooking everybody and rolling them around in his front yard, right? | ||
| That was it, right? | ||
| Then he goes in the house. | ||
| Y'all come back, you know, a couple other days. | ||
| So this goes on for weeks. | ||
| And like every time I show up, there's like one less guy that shows up. | ||
| They just like fucking... | ||
| Until I was the last one there. | ||
| So I'm the last one there. | ||
| I knock on the door. | ||
| Knock on the door. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| He never answers, right? | ||
| So I start peering in the windows. | ||
| Fucking all the furniture's gone. | ||
| Everything's gone. | ||
| He's gone. | ||
| He's gone to a different territory to work. | ||
| He just left, right? | ||
| Never learned any pro wrestling. | ||
| Pfft. | ||
| He was just teaching you wrestling wrestling. | ||
| He was just teaching me. | ||
| Obviously, we signed up to teach us how to pro wrestling, but he just came out there. | ||
| And his whole goal, and this is the way it was back then, is they always try to take your money, and then they try to run you off. | ||
| Most of the guys in that era were all shooters. | ||
| They were all good amateurs. | ||
| And that was what they would do. | ||
| They would take your money, then they'd hurt you, twist you, try and get you to quit. | ||
| And they got your money, and they didn't have to worry about it. | ||
| There's some wrestling trainers that were famous for crazy physical training standards before they ever taught you anything, like Carl Gotch. | ||
| I'm sure you know who Carl Gotch is. | ||
| Carl Gotch, who is not just a wrestler, but he's like one of the legends of catch wrestling. | ||
| Catch wrestling is like... | ||
| It's a lot like submission wrestling that you see in the UFC or in Jiu Jitsu, but it's very wrestling oriented. | ||
| Whereas Jiu Jitsu maybe would be... | ||
| I don't want to say it's less technical, but it's more violent. | ||
| It's a lot of snapping people down and cross-facing. | ||
| Guillotines and 10-finger guillotines. | ||
| And there's still a lot of... | ||
| Like, Sakuraba, who's one of the legends of MMA, learned from another catch wrestler in Japan. | ||
| And a lot of guys who... | ||
| Like Josh Barnett is another one who's a big catch wrestling enthusiast. | ||
| His style is all, and he submitted a lot of really elite guys, but Carl Gotch was famous for making, you had to be able to do crazy shit. | ||
| I think you had to do 1,000 bodyweight squats. | ||
| You had to do all these things before he would even teach you anything. | ||
| You had to be fucking tip-top magoo before you would ever get into those ropes. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And the whole goal was to run you off. | ||
| Weed out the week. | ||
| Weed out the week. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then if you went through all of that and you were still there, okay, well, this kid, you know, let's see if we can teach him how to do this. | ||
| But there was that big weed-out process. | ||
| I think Buzz's whole deal, his whole deal was a scam from the start. | ||
| He wanted the money and he knew, you know, back then we had territories. | ||
| Before Vince kind of, you know, took it nationwide, you know, Texas had a territory. | ||
| California had a couple of territories. | ||
| Oregon, you know, and guys just went from... | ||
| And $2,000 in 86 is a lot of fucking money. | ||
| That's a lot of money for a kid in college on, you know, on a scholarship. | ||
| I didn't have shit. | ||
| I sold everything I owned. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you're fucked. | ||
| How do you go from there? | ||
| So, you know, I lived in my car for a little bit, you know, bounced in bars, collected a little money here and there. | ||
| I just did whatever I could just to, you know, keep eating and keep training and did what I could. | ||
| And I knew, so the Von Eriks ran Dallas. | ||
| That was their hub, world-class championship wrestling. | ||
| And I knew that they were in the office on Wednesday. | ||
| Like they would come in there and book the cards and the guys would come in, get their paychecks and shit on Wednesday. | ||
| So every Wednesday for about eight months, I would go down there and I'd sit in the lobby. | ||
| And fucking guys would come right, walk right by me, not even acknowledge my presence. | ||
| Every Wednesday? | ||
| Every Wednesday for eight months, I went and just sat there. | ||
| Did you ask to speak to anybody? | ||
| Yeah, so there was a referee back there. | ||
| His name was Bronco Lubich. | ||
| He was the only one that would speak to me, right? | ||
| And they would be kind of like, you're here again, huh, kid? | ||
| I was like, yes, sir, Mr. Lubich. | ||
| I was hoping maybe I'd get a chance to talk to somebody today. | ||
| All right, well, just good luck, you know. | ||
| And then I would sit there. | ||
| And, you know, I'd walk by and try to, like, you know, as somebody would come through, you know, I'd kind of start to stand. | ||
| Fuck, never stop. | ||
| Just blew right by me. | ||
| One day, like, I was right at the end of my ride. | ||
| I was like, fuck, this is not, I'm not getting anywhere here. | ||
| And Fritz von Erich, you know, the patriarch of the family, right? | ||
| The guy that owned the company came in. | ||
| And he walked in and he stopped. | ||
| And he looked at me. | ||
| Once again, I started to get up and introduce myself. | ||
| And he turned around and went into Bronco's office. | ||
| And he had a deep, gravelly voice and I could hear him. | ||
| And he's like, who's that kid out there? | ||
| And he's been coming here for months. | ||
| He's just trying to get booked. | ||
| And I heard Fritz go, book him. | ||
| Book him Friday night. | ||
| I want to see what he can do. | ||
| He looks just like David, one of his sons that he had lost. | ||
| I looked a lot like David, and that's how I got my first break. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because I was in the right place at the right time. | ||
| So had you ever practiced? | ||
| No, I was practicing. | ||
| But I'd never had a real match. | ||
| Every little outlaw, independent kind of deal that I could get, I was doing. | ||
| But I hadn't worked with top guys. | ||
| When you say outlaw, independent, so you were doing some matches? | ||
| I was doing some matches, but not professional. | ||
| Not televised, not for a real company. | ||
| It's just like some jackass. | ||
| Okay, I'm a wrestling promoter. | ||
| I'm going to go to the Knights of Columbus Hall and see if I can put 20 people in here. | ||
| That's the kind of shit you would do. | ||
| And then you have to go for no money. | ||
| And then, you know, you'd set up the ring, whatever you had to do. | ||
| But the time in the ring was what was so valuable at that point, is getting those reps and getting that stuff. | ||
| So they booked me. | ||
| And I don't know if you've heard of Bruiser Brody? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Tough guy. | ||
| Anybody's standards back then, especially. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's my first match, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| I'm a pretty respectful guy, and I'm sure in any industry, even when you're a new comic, you pay respect to the older guy. | ||
| I mean, it's just the way it should be and the way it really was back then, especially in our business. | ||
| You didn't say much when spoken to kind of deal. | ||
| Bruiser Brody is my first professional match. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm 20, 21 maybe. | ||
| I'm in the ring and I'm looking at him. | ||
| I'm like, fuck, I'm bigger than he is. | ||
| This is the shit that's going on in my head, right? | ||
| I'm so nervous. | ||
| Like, you couldn't have drove a nail up my ass with a sledgehammer. | ||
| I'm so nervous to start with. | ||
| But I'm looking, like, that stupid voice in the back of my head is like, you're fucking bigger than he is. | ||
| You know, because Bruiser Brody was bigger than life, man. | ||
| He had all that hair, and he was just... | ||
| He was an animal, right? | ||
| So, fucking, bell rings, and... | ||
| Boom! | ||
| I tie up with him, collar and elbow, and I jam him up into a corner. | ||
| He's like, hey kid, lighten up a little bit, kid. | ||
| You know, relax. | ||
| And I'm just like... | ||
| I mean, my body's like angle iron, right? | ||
| I'm so just... | ||
| Anyway, so I go to shove him, and my hands, you know, we're kind of hand fighting a little bit, and my hand slips off, and I kind of palm him in the face. | ||
| Temperature in the room changed a little bit at that moment. | ||
| So we tie up again, and I'm about to shoot him across the ring. | ||
| I shoot him across the ring, and I'm yelling, like, I'm going to hit him with a clothesline. | ||
| So as I tell him, clothesline, right? | ||
| He comes off the ropes like a bullet, like a six-foot-five, 300-pound bullet, and he kicks me square in my fucking jaw. | ||
| My eyes roll back in my head. | ||
| And the next thing I know, he's grabbing me. | ||
| He's like, let's go for a walk, right? | ||
| So he throws me out of the ring and throws me down on this table. | ||
| And there's a place called the Sportatorium in Dallas. | ||
| They've torn it down now. | ||
| But they had the folding chairs that had... | ||
| They were metal, but then they had the wood slats. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| He takes this chair as hard as he can. | ||
| We're not talking about the metal folding chairs, which hurt enough in their own right when you get hit enough times with them. | ||
| He swings as hard as he can. | ||
| This chair just fucking explodes. | ||
| Wood slats fly all over the place. | ||
| I'm thinking, I've never been hit so hard. | ||
| I've been hit, you know, but I've never been hit that hard by anything at that point. | ||
| He throws me back in the ring, ties me all up in the ropes, right? | ||
| I'm greener than shit, don't know what the hell I'm doing. | ||
| And he just starts hitting the other ropes and coming and just kicking me as hard as he can in the head. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And I deserved it, you know. | ||
| I mean, he was giving me a lesson that I needed to learn. | ||
| Anyway... | ||
| A couple of minutes later, boom, he pins me. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| We go back to the dressing room. | ||
| And I'm like, holy shit, I just got the shit kicked out of me. | ||
| And I went over to him. | ||
| I was like, Mr. Brody, thank you. | ||
| He said, all right, kid, just relax next time, will you? | ||
| I was like, yes, sir. | ||
| I just appreciate, you know, being in the ring with you. | ||
| And, you know, went back off from my corner to kind of gather where I was and, you know, and I overheard him telling the promoter, he's like, fuck, you ought to book this kid some more. | ||
| They were trying to find someplace else to send me. | ||
| He said, that kid, that kid's going to be something. | ||
| And, but, you know, at the time, I was too green. | ||
| I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, so I had to go somewhere else. | ||
| But, That was my first introduction into wrestling, and I got thumped pretty good. | ||
| Isn't it crazy when you think back of the days in the gym when you were getting ready to go play basketball, if you didn't meet that guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who knows where you would have gone? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would have probably tried to make a team somewhere, but I don't think that would have lasted. | ||
| I was limited. | ||
| My game was limited enough. | ||
| I would have probably ended up in the military, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Isn't it crazy how life just... | ||
| Do you ever think about that? | ||
| I think about it all the time. | ||
| That one dude was like your doorway to a different life, to becoming a superstar. | ||
| There's one guy. | ||
| You run into one guy in your life, it changes your direction, and then all of a sudden you become wildly successful at this other thing that you were not even really considering. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts. | ||
| And just the fact that I went and sat in that lobby for eight months. | ||
| And, you know, it was at the end. | ||
| I was like, fuck, this is getting me nowhere. | ||
| But see, that is what people need to hear, man. | ||
| In this day and age, everybody wants everything to happen right away. | ||
| Yeah, that is. | ||
| Everybody's got that sense, one, the sense of entitlement. | ||
| And figure they're owed something and aren't willing to put in the grind. | ||
| And I tell people, yeah, I was living in my car. | ||
| Sometimes I could stay with my brother, but there was a lot of nights I had to sleep in a Monte Carlo with fucking... | ||
| It's 6'8 and 315 pounds. | ||
| It's not real comfortable. | ||
| Is there more of a pathway, like an obvious pathway, for a guy to get into pro wrestling today? | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| So, we have in Orlando, it's called the Performance Center. | ||
| And... | ||
| They have, you know, they're still wrestling schools, legitimate wrestling schools around the country. | ||
| And then every once, I don't know how many times a year, then they'll have a call there at the PC, like, okay, you go in and they test you and see if you're, one, physically fit enough to do it. | ||
| And then two, you know, do you have some personality? | ||
| Do you have something that you can bring to the table that might be a draw? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then, if they book you, I mean, this is the crazy part right here. | ||
| If they feel like you might have, you know, a chance or something to offer, you get a contract right there. | ||
| And you get a contract to train. | ||
| All you have to do is train. | ||
| I can't, you know, that's how far we've come. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| From my story. | ||
| Eight months in the lobby. | ||
| Eight months in the lobby, getting, you know, people walking by to, all right, this is your contract. | ||
| All you have to, yeah, this is our place in Orlando right here. | ||
| Well, you know, it makes sense for them because, I mean, you need talent. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You constantly need new talent and why not just train them and groom them? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You train them and groom them in the way that you want. | ||
| We send guys to the combine now, the NFL combine. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They sit there and talk. | ||
| Who's going to make it? | ||
| Who's not going to make it? | ||
| We go all over the world now. | ||
| They recruit in China, the Middle East, everywhere we have TV programming, which makes sense as well. | ||
| They're looking for that hometown star, like when we go to Saudi or somewhere in Dubai or something like that. | ||
| If you've got somebody local, that's just great business. | ||
| How did you become The Undertaker? | ||
| So that's Vince's brainchild. | ||
| So I went to another company, WCW, where I was mean Mark Callis. | ||
| And right there, check that young stud out right there. | ||
| That's terrifying, isn't it? | ||
| You think an enormous hobbit. | ||
| Yeah, we can take that down anytime. | ||
| So I go there, and I was there about eight or nine months, and my contract was coming up. | ||
| And I go in to renegotiate my contract, and they were like, look, you're a great athlete, kid, but no one's ever going to pay money to watch you wrestle. | ||
| Like, I'm just looking for a little bit of bump, right? | ||
| A little bump in my paycheck. | ||
| I'm not looking for the mega deal. | ||
| I'm just looking for a little bit of bump. | ||
| No, we're going to give you the same deal for a year. | ||
| I mean, you just, you know, you do great things in the ring, but no one's ever going to pay money to see you wrestle. | ||
| Did they give you advice on how to get someone to pay you? | ||
| No. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| So I'm like, okay, I know where my ceiling is here, right? | ||
| So just through a few different people, I get connected with some people in the WWF at the time. | ||
| It's WWE now. | ||
| And I had a match coming up. | ||
| My hip was already bad at that point, even back then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It got much worse, but I was already limping. | ||
| And I just heard it. | ||
| When we'd got Vince, you know, they had said, all right, you know, they've got a pay-per-view, just watch him work, you know. | ||
| So Vince watches me work, and I'm talking to my buddy Bruce. | ||
| I'm like, Bruce, my hip is jacked. | ||
| He goes, just go out there. | ||
| Vince is going to be watching, right? | ||
| So I'm working with a guy by the name of Lex Luger. | ||
| Went out there and did what I could. | ||
| I sucked. | ||
| I mean, you know, I was physically, you know, I was physically not able really to go the way I could go, and Vince wasn't impressed. | ||
| You know, he's like, okay, he's, you know, he's running the mill. | ||
| Fortunately, guys like, you know, Paul Heyman and Bruce Pritchard, you know, they believed in me, and they kind of Kept pushing for me to get this meeting with Vince. | ||
| And finally I did. | ||
| And he calls me. | ||
| I got to go to his house, right? | ||
| So I go to his house. | ||
| What is Vince's house like? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| It's fucking nice. | ||
| Where is he living? | ||
| He's in Connecticut, man. | ||
| So you're in Connecticut. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm up in... | ||
| You get a call to the castle. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what I'm thinking, right? | ||
| Because most people go to the office, to the towers there in Stanford, right? | ||
| And I'm thinking, fuck, I'm going to the house. | ||
| I got this shit right. | ||
| So I go in and I have the meeting. | ||
| The meeting goes for about an hour and a half. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of... | ||
| Does he have a butler? | ||
| I know he had a housekeeper. | ||
| I can imagine there'd be a dude with a British accent answering the door. | ||
| I never saw him. | ||
| No sleeves, just ripped. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Everybody's jacked. | ||
| So I go there and, you know, Granted, we do some hokey shit. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| And they really, at that point, had some really, really fucking goofy characters. | ||
| And, you know, so we're having this, we're sitting in this living room, and he goes, well, Mark, do you have any hidden talents? | ||
| You know, wrestling, do you do anything? | ||
| And I'm trying to be funny and not nervous, and, well, you know, I sing in the shower pretty good. | ||
| And as soon as I said it, right, I'm like, oh, fuck, I shouldn't have said that. | ||
| I'm going to be fucking shower guy or something silly, right? | ||
| Shower gun! | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to have to sing. | ||
| I'm like, oh shit. | ||
| I should not have said that. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| I'm trying to clear the air right away. | ||
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| I can't sing. | ||
| He's got the look. | ||
| He can read people. | ||
| He's like, really? | ||
| No, I can't. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I got this long meeting. | ||
| At the end of the meeting, he goes, well, We don't have anything for you right now. | ||
| I'm thinking, oh, fuck. | ||
| I guess I overplayed my hand here because I'd already give WCW my notice that I was leaving. | ||
| I'm like, fuck. | ||
| This is what I'm thinking in my head, right? | ||
| I was like, he invited me to the house. | ||
| He's going to hire me. | ||
| So I see you guys down the road. | ||
| So now I'm sitting there like, fuck, I got no job. | ||
| Anyway, so one day... | ||
| It's getting close to Thanksgiving. | ||
| And they start doing this promotion where they've got this giant fucking egg. | ||
| Have you heard this story? | ||
| Oh yeah, the gobbledygook. | ||
| The gobbledygooker, right? | ||
| So we do a pay-per-view around Thanksgiving. | ||
| It's called Survivor Series. | ||
| So this year, this particular year, it's 1990. Yeah, there it is. | ||
| They've got this giant egg on the set, on the TV every week. | ||
| And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, holy fuck. | ||
| Now I've gone from shower guy, now I think I'm going to be Eggman, right? | ||
| Fuck, I'm going to have to... | ||
| I'm trying to grow my hair out. | ||
| Fuck, he's going to make me shave my head. | ||
| I'm going to shave my eyebrows. | ||
| I'm going to be fucking Eggman. | ||
| And I'm a nervous wreck, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So one day I'm sitting at home, phone rings. | ||
| I get up and go answer it because we didn't have cell phones back then, right? | ||
| So, hello? | ||
| He goes, is this The Undertaker? | ||
| I was like, Undertaker? | ||
| Undertaker? | ||
| Undertaker isn't Eggman? | ||
| Fuck, Undertaker. | ||
| That's pretty fucking cool. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, this is Undertaker, yeah. | ||
| And it was Vince, and that was how he introduced the character to me. | ||
| He called you up and asked you if you're the Undertaker. | ||
| Yeah, and I had no clue to what it was. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm the Undertaker, because I knew it wasn't Eggman, and everything had to be better than Eggman. | ||
| He wasn't singing the shower guy. | ||
| Yeah, he wasn't singing the shower guy, and it wasn't Eggman. | ||
| Flew me up to Connecticut the next day, showed me the storyboards, and the character, the original character, is based on an old Western Undertaker. | ||
| You know, the two guys in Main Street, they had the fucking shootout. | ||
| One guy loses, Undertaker comes out and measures him, does the box. | ||
| Well, that was the original likeness and the name, The Undertaker. | ||
| And he just never found the guy. | ||
| He had had it for years, I guess. | ||
| So why did he send you away the first time? | ||
| At the time, he didn't have a spot for me. | ||
| But he was thinking. | ||
| But he was thinking, and then it kind of dawned on him that he had that character, and he just needed a big guy with no personality. | ||
| You know, there was void of personality to do the deal, and he gave it to me, and there's my debut right there. | ||
| That's November of 1990. And I was six years old, and I was shitting my pants. | ||
| Were you? | ||
| This was the scariest thing you can imagine for a six-year-old. | ||
| You know, you're watching all these... | ||
| It was some guy in a chicken suit that came out of that egg to show you how silly things were back then. | ||
| So it had our attention. | ||
| And then all of a sudden this guy comes out and he's like half dead and you don't know what's going on and he's scary. | ||
| And dominant, more than anything. | ||
| Yeah, the thing was dominant. | ||
| But this is the era of everything... | ||
| I mean, you could tell. | ||
| This guy's in bright pink. | ||
| So that's Coco Beware. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he's wearing some hot yoga pants. | |
| That guy had a parrot on his shoulder when he came to the ring. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was it a parrot? | ||
| Yeah, Frankie. | ||
| How does one do a pile driver and not hurt your opponent? | ||
| This is the guy to ask. | ||
| I mean, it's a way you grab them. | ||
| You just got to be strong enough to support their body. | ||
| And the key for me is when my knees start, I'm kind of pulling them up. | ||
| So it's kind of like a shock absorber. | ||
| Ideally, The head never touches. | ||
| Between Bob Sapp and Minotaur Noguera and Pride. | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That ruined that guy for the rest of his career. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bob Sapp actually pile-drapped him. | ||
| And Bob Sapp was 375 with abs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was a freak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he pile-drapped Noguera, who was, at the time, the heavyweight champion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a crazy video. | ||
| Rampage suplexed some guys. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Arona. | ||
| Ricardo Arona. | ||
| Well, he suplexed a lot of guys. | ||
| He slammed a lot of guys. | ||
| But Ricardo Arona was the worst slam I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Ricardo Arona caught Rampage in a triangle. | ||
| And Rampage picked him up. | ||
| And instead of abandoning the triangle, he tried to hang on. | ||
| picked him up like a pillow. | ||
| Like, you know, like you would hit your little brother over the head with a pillow? | ||
| Like, you'd lift back like this, and then boom! | ||
| And he slams him into the mat, and then his head collides with Arona's head upon impact. | ||
| Yeah, that's the same way Rose lost to... | ||
| Similar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Similar way. | ||
| Yeah, she didn't let go. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Dropped on her head. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta let go. | ||
| When you get picked up in a triangle, you gotta let go. | ||
| Or you gotta hook a leg. | ||
| It's hard to... | ||
| I think for fighters... | ||
| Us, it's part of an everyday deal, but I think for a fighter, it has to screw up your whole perspective because you don't expect somebody to be able to do that to you. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Your instinct, I would imagine, is to squeeze tighter. | ||
| The issue is it's hard to get a secured triangle. | ||
| So if you get to the point where your leg is like that, you're literally locked in, you don't want to let that go, but you've got to. | ||
| Yeah, especially when you're looking over the top of the cage, something ain't right. | ||
| Especially when Rampage was so fucking strong. | ||
| That's a scary moment because Ricardo Arona was really never the same again. | ||
| Never the same again. | ||
| Because before that, he was a big contender. | ||
| He was an elite guy, built like a fucking Greek god. | ||
| He was a killer. | ||
| But that one slam changed his whole career. | ||
| He was never the same again. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| It was nasty. | ||
| It was really nasty. | ||
| Yeah, so in wrestling, the amount of trust that guy has to have in you is off the charts. | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| I mean, we've established at this point, I think everybody understands what wrestling is. | ||
| I mean, it's sports entertainment. | ||
| And I think everybody's kind of gotten over the fact that that's what we are. | ||
| We're entertainment. | ||
| But I don't think what people really realize is that in any given match, on any given day, you're two inches away from something catastrophic happening. | ||
| And it is. | ||
| I mean, it's that. | ||
| It's two inches from being... | ||
| But holy shit, that was really impressive to, holy shit, that guy ain't getting up. | ||
| And I think a lot of people that shit on wrestling, they don't understand that aspect. | ||
| And you're right, and it does take an enormous amount of trust. | ||
| And it's really hard to get in the ring with somebody that's hurt a few people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you have to be, you know, I mean, I've lost, you know, I've lost both eye sockets, but one was just because the guy was completely out of shape. | ||
| There's so many, there's a lot of similarities. | ||
| One's a sporting event, one's sports entertainment, talking about MMA, but, you know, There's conditioning is kind of, I think, the key to everything. | ||
| And, you know, a guy was out of shape. | ||
| He's 6'8", 500 pounds, and I ran straight into what was supposed to be a clothesline. | ||
| But he was so gassed and behind in the spot that instead of catching the meat of his forearm, I ran right dead into his fist. | ||
| With his momentum coming off of the ropes. | ||
| Oh, jeez. | ||
| Just blew my, you know, my eye socket completely apart. | ||
| And, you know, dumbass me, I didn't know it for three days. | ||
| But that's the kind of stuff that... | ||
| Did you have to get it operated on? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I've had them both rebuilt. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Is that when you had to wear the mask? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, so... | ||
| So you were just wrestling with a broken orbital bone? | ||
| Well, I'd already had the surgery at this point, but that was just... | ||
| So that happened. | ||
| That match happened. | ||
| And like I said, back then, we didn't have doctors with us and trainers. | ||
| So it's funny how I found out that my face was shattered. | ||
| So I wrestled three more days. | ||
| With a shattered face? | ||
| With my orbital socket blown out. | ||
| So I wrestled three more days, right? | ||
| And as stupid as it sounds, it's normal for our world back then. | ||
| You worked hurt. | ||
| It's just the way you did it. | ||
| If you could walk, you go to the ring. | ||
| And I think that was part of the mystique of the guys. | ||
| We're tough guys. | ||
| So I work, and me and the Godfather, he's another wrestler, great dude. | ||
| We were going to meet up after the show at some bar and hang out, right? | ||
| And we were in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Like, I'm looking for the bar, and I can't find it. | ||
| So finally I give up. | ||
| Once again, we don't have cell phones back then. | ||
| So I give up. | ||
| I'm going to go back to my hotel. | ||
| So I'm driving, and I pass this hospital. | ||
| I said, you know what? | ||
| Something just ain't right. | ||
| Because every time, you know, I just, like that, my face would just blow up. | ||
| And I'm going to go in and get this. | ||
| If there's nobody in there in the emergency room, I'm going to go in and get this thing checked out. | ||
| So sure enough, I drive through. | ||
| I don't see anybody in the emergency room, so I go in. | ||
| It's midnight. | ||
| I go in. | ||
| They do a CAT scan. | ||
| Doctor. | ||
| He comes out and he goes, he says, do you have an ophthalmologist? | ||
| And I was like, no. | ||
| He goes, well, you need to find one. | ||
| And you're going to need a surgeon too. | ||
| I'm like, what are you talking about? | ||
| He goes, you've lost 50% of your orbital floor is gone. | ||
| I'm like, really? | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| So I go home and I'll call and say, look, I got to go home. | ||
| I've had this injury. | ||
| So they go, I get home. | ||
| They do another scan, another CAT scan. | ||
| They said, no, you've lost more like 70% of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
| So, they end up doing the surgery, two surgeons, one to, you know, they go inside the eyelid, make the incision, one surgeon holds up the eye and the nerve, while the other one picks out all the pieces and puts in the mesh kind of thing that's going to be your eye socket. | ||
| Come to find out, I'd lost 90% of my orbital floor. | ||
| And my optic nerve was sitting right on top of a piece of jagged bone. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| If I'd have took another shot to that side of my head, I'd have probably lost the eye. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Or my sight. | ||
| And it's just because we didn't, you know. | ||
| So your eye was just hanging on. | ||
| It was just hanging. | ||
| It was just sitting on a piece of jagged bone. | ||
| And that would have been it. | ||
| You couldn't have. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I would have been... | ||
| Yeah, I'd have been done. | ||
| And, you know, so I had the surgery. | ||
| So the mask, I healed, I don't know, maybe six weeks. | ||
| Went and had the mask made and wrestled in that for a while and made it part of the story. | ||
| So what do they put back there? | ||
| The mesh. | ||
| It's a... | ||
| So my other eye that I did, it's titanium. | ||
| But this is... | ||
| It's a... | ||
| It's not titanium, but it's kind of a wire mesh that's screwed into the bone, and it works as my orbital floor. | ||
| So you don't have an orbital floor in that eye anymore. | ||
| You just have this wire mesh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is what it looks like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what it looks like right there. | ||
| Do you feel anything back there sometimes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Never. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| The second one, my right side, I had a blowout fracture, and funny enough, it was just a freak thing that happened. | ||
| The smallest guy in the company, little Ray Mysterio, who's, he's tiny, but he jumped off the top rope in his, I mean, I should know. | ||
| I should know what the move is, but I don't. | ||
| Like, right there. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| See that? | ||
| I set my nose, or I'm about to, because it broke my nose too. | ||
| You're good, man. | ||
| You're fucking good. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And you still fought your way out of it. | ||
| So that was me grabbing it. | ||
| I was straightening my nose out. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Right on your nose. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| So I grabbed my nose right away and I could feel that it was way over to the side. | ||
| So I squeezed it back straight. | ||
| But there was three of them. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So that one, it was just way back in the cone. | ||
| It blew out the back end of it. | ||
| It wasn't as severe as the first one. | ||
| But after the second one, it left me with double vision. | ||
| If I look peripherally, You become opaque. | ||
| Like I see two lights when I look like that. | ||
| Still to this day? | ||
| To this day. | ||
| And that's been over 10 years. | ||
| And what did they say is the cause of that? | ||
| It's just the way the nerve was pressed. | ||
| When the fracture happened, it pressed the nerve. | ||
| It never rewired itself. | ||
| There's nothing they can do about that? | ||
| Not that I know of. | ||
| I hadn't tried. | ||
| As long as I look straight, I'm good. | ||
| But what if you have to do a U-turn? | ||
| Or what if you're parallel parking? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's funny that you mention that. | ||
| I've got to literally... | ||
| Turn my body so that I can get my head straight. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I can see straight. | ||
| Because if you turn your eye too far. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Instead of that image, I got that image. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That had to certainly affect you in the ring a lot too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then I have no supraspinatus either. | ||
| None? | ||
| None. | ||
| It's completely severed. | ||
| When did that happen? | ||
| Well it was a progression of a lot of tears and the last tear I was working I think maybe around 2010 I was working with Kane who's a just big big dude and I was trying to I was trying to throw him up on my shoulder and I was going to try and give him a pile driver but he's 330 pounds and his weight kind of gets | ||
| stuck here and I'm too stupid to put him down and readjust so I'm trying to pop my hips and get him up there and finally I heard it pop and I was like holy shit. | ||
| Got through the match, flew to Nashville the next day And I said, Doc, I need a shot of cortisone. | ||
| And he's like, he goes, Mark, your shoulder really needs to be fixed. | ||
| I'm like, Doc, I'm right in the middle of something right now. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I said, let me get through mania. | ||
| I said, just give me the shot. | ||
| And after mania, I'll come and I'll get it fixed. | ||
| And reluctantly, he did. | ||
| And normally the shot would last four or five months, six months. | ||
| So he's in Nashville. | ||
| So I go, I get the shot. | ||
| I fly back to Austin. | ||
| By the time I get home, it's like I didn't get the shot at all. | ||
| So I call him back up and I was like, all right, Dr. Bird, you're a little smarter than I am. | ||
| He goes, he says, well, fact, Mark, it's so bad. | ||
| Like, I want you to go see somebody else. | ||
| I want you to see a shoulder specialist. | ||
| So I go see Dr. Andrews. | ||
| You know, Dr. Andrews is like the, you know, he's the guy that did Tommy John. | ||
| He's the athlete's doctor. | ||
| I go see him, and it's the first time this has ever happened to me. | ||
| I go into the examining room, and he's already there waiting. | ||
| I don't know if anybody else has ever been to the doctor's office and the doctor's. | ||
| He's sitting there, and he's looking at me. | ||
| And I'm looking at him because I'm a little taken back that he's already in the room, right? | ||
| And we're looking at each other. | ||
| Nobody says anything. | ||
| And he goes, son, I don't know if there's anything I can do for you. | ||
| He had obviously already seen my MRI and everything. | ||
| He says, can you lift your arm? | ||
| I was like, yes, sir. | ||
| Yeah, I can lift it. | ||
| He says, can I see you lift it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He said, can you lift to the side? | ||
| And I go, yeah, I can lift to the side. | ||
| He goes, there's no reasonable explanation why you're able to do that. | ||
| I'm like, he says, you've taught yourself how to use that arm with that severe injury. | ||
| He goes, so we talked for a while. | ||
| And he goes, he says, can we meet back in about an hour? | ||
| He goes, I need to think about this. | ||
| I'm like, well. | ||
| Yeah, I'm in Birmingham. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| I've got nothing else to do. | ||
| I've got to find out what's going on with his shoulder. | ||
| So we meet back in an hour, and he goes, I'm going to try. | ||
| He goes, I don't think I can fix it. | ||
| He says, but I feel like I owe it to you just to try. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And even with that, I'm thinking, well, that's James Andrews. | ||
| Surely he's going to fix it. | ||
| He's just being humble. | ||
| So I have the surgery, you know, I wake up out of surgery and my wife is, you know, she's right there and I could look on her face and I could tell like, you know, it wasn't good. | ||
| And I was like, babe. | ||
| And she goes, and about that time, Dr. Andrews comes in and he goes, he goes, well, we found it. | ||
| I was like, you found it? | ||
| He goes, yeah. | ||
| He said, the end of the supraspinate, it was about back here. | ||
| He says, we clamped on and we pulled, we tugged. | ||
| And he said, we might have been able to get it sewn back together. | ||
| He said, but the first time you try to use it, it was going to pop. | ||
| It was just so dead because it had been torn for so long. | ||
| How long was it torn before you went to talk to him? | ||
| Well, that last one was when it tore completely in half. | ||
| So it had already been damaged. | ||
| It had already been damaged, yeah. | ||
| And I was getting shots of cortisone to kind of mask the pain. | ||
| And then when it popped off, that was it. | ||
| And there wasn't enough left to attach it back. | ||
| He says, your biceps tendon had come out of its groove, too. | ||
| He said, we did put that back. | ||
| That should help you a little bit. | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| And so, you know, I go back to work. | ||
| But now, you know, now I'm getting older. | ||
| And so, you know, my physical skills are already starting to kind of diminish. | ||
| And you know when that happens. | ||
| But now, like when I'm in a match, now I've got to be cognizant all the time of where my shoulder is in relation to whatever it is I'm doing. | ||
| There was a lot of things like tombstones. | ||
| I had to change how I would pick people up because I couldn't get my arm out extended because I had no strength. | ||
| And I couldn't clothesline people. | ||
| I had to have my arm almost supported by my lat. | ||
| To do a lot of different moves. | ||
| And there's no other option? | ||
| Like they can't do a cadaver? | ||
| Well, in the shit that I do and we do, it would have tore. | ||
| He told me that. | ||
| He said, we could have tried a cadaver. | ||
| He says, it's not going to last if you want to wrestle. | ||
| And at that point, I had no... | ||
| I've been doing it this long with it hurt. | ||
| I'll figure out a way. | ||
| I wasn't ready to give it up yet. | ||
| And... | ||
| So I waited a couple years, and then I called Dr. Dugas. | ||
| And I said, Doc, because he assisted on the first one with Dr. Andrews. | ||
| I said, hey, you guys doing anything new with the shoulders? | ||
| And he says, yeah. | ||
| He said, like, come on down. | ||
| He said, I think I can hook you up. | ||
| I was like, oh, shit. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I wish somebody called me. | ||
| You know, let me know. | ||
| You know, let me know what's going on. | ||
| And so same kind of deal. | ||
| Have the surgery. | ||
| Wake up. | ||
| See, you know, Michelle's sitting there. | ||
| See her. | ||
| Didn't have quite the same disappointed look on her face, you know, about this time. | ||
| Here comes Dr. Dugas. | ||
| And he goes, well, he goes, plan A? No, that didn't work, which would have to retouch everything. | ||
| He said, plan B? I didn't work either. | ||
| He said, went to plan C. He says, which will help your, you know, your recovery time. | ||
| He says, well, what I did, they took the part of my infraspinatus, the one in the back, they detached part of it, stretched it over the top. | ||
| So my infraspinatus is doing double duty now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it works where I, if you were to look down before the surgery and Like if you had a tube that could see down in my shoulder, I was 100% exposed. | ||
| You could see the joint. | ||
| So now I'm about 50 to 70% covered by the infraspinatus that he stretched over the top and reattached it. | ||
| Once again, modern medicine. | ||
| And, you know, I'm not, my right side isn't as strong as my left side. | ||
| I'm right hand dominant. | ||
| But I'm Twice, three times as strong as I was before I had the surgery. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| I'm like a lab project. | ||
| That's an interesting one. | ||
| I know a fighter who's got no supraspinatus. | ||
| I think in both of his shoulders. | ||
| Yeah, it's done wonders. | ||
| I can bench. | ||
| Everything's got to be in tight. | ||
| Like if I do push-ups or anything like that, I need that lat and tricep help instead of getting in those funky angles like that. | ||
| I mean, is there anybody that gets through pro wrestling without a series of catastrophic injuries? | ||
| You know, there's one guy that's really not had many injuries. | ||
| His name's Chris Jericho. | ||
| I can't think of anything that's really, you know, bad that's happened to him. | ||
| But, I mean, Stone Cold Steve Austin. | ||
| Yeah, his neck is completely fused, right? | ||
| Yeah, his neck is completely fused. | ||
| From a pile driver. | ||
| From a pile driver. | ||
| But didn't he win the Olympics with a broken neck? | ||
| That's Kurt Angle. | ||
| Oh, Kurt Angle, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Kurt Angle won the heavyweight gold medal in wrestling. | ||
| With a broken neck. | ||
| And 190 pounds. | ||
| He was so undersized. | ||
| And to Stone Cold's credit, most of the big stuff that happened in his career happened after he broke his neck, right? | ||
| No, he was already the guy. | ||
| He was right in the middle of it. | ||
| Kurt Angle, they were talking about him fighting MMA at one point in time. | ||
| You know, I saw him. | ||
| It was strange. | ||
| I hadn't seen him for a while. | ||
| And then I saw him at Lesnar Mirror 1. He was there. | ||
| And he was acting really weird. | ||
| And I was like, Kurt, are you thinking about, you know? | ||
| And nothing ever came of it. | ||
| But he's got some miles on him, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it looks like he's got atrophy of his arms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And his neck's 23 inches. | ||
| His neck looks enormous. | ||
| But when I see a guy that I know has neck problems, you see his arms look smaller. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the things that happens to guys, like it happened to Bas Rutten. | ||
| He got his discs fused in his neck. | ||
| His arm atrophied. | ||
| He wasn't getting the nerve signals to his muscles. | ||
| So his right arm, he calls it baby arm. | ||
| It's smaller. | ||
| It's very weak. | ||
| I don't know how much it's recovered. | ||
| But at one point in time, he couldn't even hold out a jug of milk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I mean, the neck is... | ||
| There's so many of those nerves, and they get pinched or squeezed. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what does Kurt Angle do to make his neck that big? | ||
| I'm guessing a lot of bridges and, you know. | ||
|
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Jesus. | |
| I mean, his neck's always just... | ||
| Yeah, look at that neck. | ||
| He could go, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I really enjoyed... | ||
| That neck is preposterous. | ||
| I really enjoyed working with Kurt. | ||
| That's an extra waist. | ||
| It's a waist. | ||
| It's like his waist, right? | ||
| Look at the size of the muscles in that thing. | ||
| But I mean, obviously a lot of that is probably to compensate the fact that he's got a snap neck. | ||
| He could go, man, what an athlete. | ||
| Wow, yeah. | ||
| And Brock, too, both of them. | ||
| Phenomenal. | ||
| Angle in his prime as a wrestler was a fucking savage. | ||
| Yeah, he was a beast. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, as an amateur wrestler in the Olympics, he was a phenomenal talent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then he transitioned so well. | ||
| That's the deal. | ||
| He transitioned so well into pro wrestling. | ||
| And how did Steve Austin fuck up his neck? | ||
| Piledriver. | ||
| Not a piledriver like I'd give. | ||
| There's another kind where you're... | ||
| You grab somebody and you put their head in their crotch. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Look at his head. | ||
| His head's going to land. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| With all the weight of both people. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just seeing that makes me shiver. | ||
| Just seeing that image. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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|
Woo! | |
| Woo! | ||
| You know, for the sake of entertainment, man. | ||
| Crazy way to make a living. | ||
| It is a crazy way to make a living. | ||
| Now, take into account what you were talking about before when you were doing that 270 nights a year. | ||
| That is... | ||
| Year-round. | ||
| I mean, there's no off-season. | ||
| I mean, it just goes. | ||
| It's episodic TV now, especially. | ||
| We do live TV every Monday, every Friday. | ||
| The schedule, I don't think, is quite as bad now. | ||
| There were days where I would be out 45 days in a row. | ||
| And you didn't think anything about it. | ||
| You just thought it was... | ||
| Actually, when you get into that, you don't want to come off the road. | ||
|
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|
Really? | |
| Yeah, it just fucks everything up. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| More than four or five days. | ||
| Especially when you're back in the early 90s, you get hurt. | ||
| And you're home six, seven, eight weeks. | ||
| You're a raving lunatic because your body's just conditioned to go and just be out there and doing it. | ||
| It's tough on relationships. | ||
| And you're always worried about that next guy coming up too, right? | ||
| Like, fuck, I'm healing up here and this guy's coming up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't want anybody taking your spot. | ||
| You don't want anybody taking your spot. | ||
| Although it's not competition in the sense of MMA competition, it's competition. | ||
| You're competing to be the top guy, or you're competing for your place on the card, so it is in that sense a competition, an important one. | ||
| Tony, it's got to be wild seeing him when you were six years old for the first time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then hearing these stories now about how all that came to be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Did you have a lot to do with the creative side of things? | ||
| Because there was an urn that his manager would hold that would charge him, right? | ||
| It would summon superpowers. | ||
| Somebody who's not a fan. | ||
| He's listening to this shit like... | ||
| What have you been smoking? | ||
| He would put his opponents, after he beats them, he would put them in body bags. | ||
| At one point, he was... | ||
| Building a casket for an opponent for a casket match. | ||
| I think I told you at the Chappelle Show when I met you, I got in trouble when I was a kid because I was learning about death from this man. | ||
| I didn't know you went into a casket after you were dead. | ||
| You're seven years old. | ||
| You don't know that yet. | ||
| You don't know what a box is. | ||
| You're like, oh my god, you put your body in a box? | ||
| I got in trouble because I nailed my mom's piano bench shut because of the promos that you had for the Kamala casket match. | ||
| He was nailing a coffin shut, and it was so scary to see as a kid. | ||
| So I nailed my mom's piano bench. | ||
| You know how they open up? | ||
| I pretended like it was a coffin, and I destroyed it. | ||
| I got in so much trouble. | ||
| I once took one of those suit bags that zip up, and me and my buddies, we would have these Body bag matches? | ||
| Yeah, we would zip up the suit thing and pretend like we're dead afterwards. | ||
| All these things were a part of my childhood. | ||
| Was that some of you, some of Vince? | ||
| Yeah, so Vince had the original likeness. | ||
| And then after a couple years, it had kind of taken over. | ||
| I lived that life. | ||
| Everywhere I went, I was always dressed in black. | ||
| What people saw on TV, they pretty much saw in real life. | ||
| So if you went out to dinner... | ||
| I wouldn't dress quite like that, but I would be an all-black. | ||
| I didn't say much to people. | ||
| Because you had to stay in character? | ||
| I always stayed in character. | ||
| I always felt like I needed to be what they saw on TV, because if they saw me differently... | ||
| Like, if they saw this, and then they see that on TV, it's like, ah, fuck. | ||
| It's just acting. | ||
| It's just this, it's that. | ||
| So I tried to make that guy real. | ||
| And I did, for a long time. | ||
| Like, I didn't do, for years, I didn't do interviews. | ||
| I didn't do personal appearances. | ||
| You got very little of me, other than what you saw on TV. And that's what kept people captivated, like, I mean, everybody's like, fuck, I know he's not dead. | ||
|
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But he's fucked up. | |
| Something's wrong. | ||
| There's something. | ||
| And to stay, and I'm not patting myself on the back, but to stay relevant for 30 years in this industry where there's so much exposure, I mean, you have to... | ||
| I felt like that's the extreme that I had to go to to make that guy... | ||
| Continue to mean something. | ||
| Does it feel almost weird for you to be doing like a podcast like this? | ||
| Absolutely crazy. | ||
| So it started, you know, I did a docuseries kind of chronicling the last few years of my career. | ||
| It was actually me trying to come to grips with calling it a day, really. | ||
| Do you mind scooting this way, just into the microphone? | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| So we ended up calling it. | ||
| It had nothing to do with the Jordan deal, but it was called The Last Ride, which is one of my finishing moves. | ||
| So it kind of chronicled the last few years of my career and me kind of chasing the dragon for that one match that I could hang my hat on and say, that's it. | ||
| And as you get older and the injuries and all that. | ||
| I mean, I figure that in, but I still see in my head what I used to could do, and that's what I was striving. | ||
| I mean, you've seen it in the fight game all the time. | ||
| Guys are looking for that, you know, they can't come to grips with the fact that their skills have diminished, and there's a changing of the guard. | ||
| And it's kind of the same with what I was doing. | ||
| I was looking for that one match that I could say, motherfuckers, I still got it, and now I'm out. | ||
| Was there a conversation about this with Vince where you were trying to figure out when to close the door? | ||
| Yeah, there was lots. | ||
| There were lots of those conversations. | ||
| And there were people that I talked to along the way, you know, through my career. | ||
| I was like, look, if I get to a point where my skills have diminished and I can't recognize it, I want you to tell me, or at least bring the conversation up. | ||
| And it got to the point where nobody wants to have that conversation. | ||
| Nobody wants to have that, like, hey dude, your day? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's up. | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
| I put a big burden on people, and they just couldn't do it. | ||
| And now Vince, who I have an unbelievable relationship with, But also, that's a huge intellectual property for Vince. | ||
| 30 years. | ||
| I could go out for another few years and I could knock somebody on their ass or I could chokeslam somebody, but I can't do it, personally. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I know there's so many guys that are coming up that are trying to get that spot. | ||
| I can't go out there and say, okay, I got all this equity built up from all these years. | ||
| I'm just going to live off of that. | ||
| I remember when I was a kid in Boston, it was a local wrestling promotion, but Killer Kowalski was on. | ||
| And I don't know how old he was at the time, but he had to be way, way up in the years. | ||
| I mean, it looked like he was in his 50s. | ||
| And I remember thinking, even as a kid, how long can a guy do this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it varies. | ||
| Who's the longest? | ||
| Are you the longest reigning guy? | ||
| I think there's guys that are like flair, lasted. | ||
| At his level, yeah. | ||
| He's the longest by like a lot. | ||
| He's probably going to be humble about this right now. | ||
| But even then, the Kowalskis and all that, the styles were different, right? | ||
| It was more like arm drags and like little tosses. | ||
| We had the claw. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And he's throwing people off of 16-foot cells and getting thrown off of titantrons like ramps and all this crazy physical stuff. | ||
| It's a whole different game. | ||
| And he went 10, 15 years probably longer than most of his peers. | ||
| Well, the fact that I stayed 30 years with one company... | ||
| I think that's the one really big thing is once I started with Vince, I stayed with Vince. | ||
| Where a lot of guys, you know, they would jump from one promotion to the other. | ||
| And I stayed once I got there. | ||
| I was there and, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's been a hell of a ride. | ||
| 30 years is a crazy ride. | ||
| So what was your last match? | ||
| My last match was in, was it April? | ||
| The Boneyard was April? | ||
| April 2020. Yeah, right here. | ||
| It's a nice bike. | ||
| Yeah, that's a West Coast chopper right there. | ||
| The bike actually belonged to Garth Brooks' security guy. | ||
| But this was... | ||
| We got lucky because COVID had already shut everything down. | ||
| So everybody else... | ||
| This is WrestleMania. | ||
| So everybody else is doing their matches in an empty warehouse. | ||
| And we got to go off and do this kind of themed match. | ||
| They turned this whole area into like a cemetery and got to do a lot of theatrical stuff. | ||
| So that must have felt like I can hang my hat on this one. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| You know, we started filming that at about eight o'clock at night and we wrapped at about five in the morning. | ||
| And like, at the end of it, I was like, fuck, I can hardly stand up. | ||
| You know, everything was just locked up. | ||
| And I was, you know, cause I went into it and, you know, I started training for mania and obviously I thought I was going to be in a stadium in a ring. | ||
| And, uh, So I had really got a good head start on my training and, you know, my weight was coming down. | ||
| Everything was good. | ||
| And then fucking COVID hit. | ||
| And then it was just like the gyms shut down. | ||
| And then, you know, then I got to, you know, I had to get to Florida just to make sure, you know, that I was in Florida. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause you never knew like when they were going to shut all the airlines down. | ||
| So the training, you know, my training kind of went to shit and, uh, But I was really happy with how this turned out. | ||
| And I knew at the end of it, physically, your day's done, man. | ||
| And, you know, as much as I want to do it here, and I want to do it here, it's just the body just, it can't deliver. | ||
| So what do you do now? | ||
| I mean, that's a long career. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And I'm trying to figure that part out because I've dedicated my whole life to this business. | ||
| And, you know, there'll be times, you know, I help out and Maybe mentor some guys, but I've got to find out what I'm passionate about and still earn a living. | ||
| Right now, my goal is to be the best outdoorsman I can be at this point. | ||
| Is that what you're into now? | ||
| I've always loved hunting and fishing. | ||
| I just never had time. | ||
| Have you thought about doing a television show where you do that? | ||
| I've thought about it. | ||
| Undertaker Outdoors? | ||
| Undertaker Outdoors, right? | ||
| I think it'd be a hoot, actually. | ||
| It's just kind of... | ||
| I've thought about it, and I don't want it to be a job job. | ||
| I just enjoy it too much, and I'd hate to lose the fact, like, I don't want to go hunting. | ||
| I don't want to go, you know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, I mean, I'm open to whatever. | ||
| What kind of hunting do you do? | ||
| What is your thing? | ||
| Well, I've always been a rifle because I've had limited time. | ||
| So, you know, sit in a stand and, you know, wait for a whitetail to come take its head out. | ||
| This year, I just bought my first brand new bow this year. | ||
| I didn't get to shoot a deer. | ||
| Austin has a very good archery. | ||
| Archery country is fantastic. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| I had an issue with my bow just a few weeks before I went to Utah for an elk hunt. | ||
| It was shooting low, and it turned out that the strings had been stretched, and it had lost some of its poundage, so everything had to be readjusted. | ||
| It had to get tightened up again and get the poundage put back on it. | ||
| They did an amazing job. | ||
| Yeah, archery is, and I just found that out, that Austin's a real, you know, there's a lot of archery hunters here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Texas in general has a lot of hunters and a lot of archery hunters. | ||
| But that is a real good archery shop. | ||
| And it's hard to find. | ||
| In California, I used to have to go to San Diego. | ||
| All the way down to San Diego. | ||
| Yeah, I'd go to Performance Archery down in San Diego to find a real good archery shop anywhere near me. | ||
| The biggest issue with me was finding a bow that would get my draw. | ||
| Oh, I could help you with that. | ||
| John Dudley's pretty close to your size. | ||
| He's 6'5", I believe. | ||
| 6'5", 6'6", something like that. | ||
| What's his draw? | ||
| He's 32, I think. | ||
| Yeah, mine's 33, almost 33 and a half. | ||
| Oh, they make them for guys like you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you just have to get the right cams and have someone who... | ||
| A guy like John could set it up. | ||
| A guy who knows how to set up a bow. | ||
| I'm sure he'd be happy to do that for you, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I'm passionate about. | ||
| Because that's the one thing. | ||
| It's always been that carrot dangling. | ||
| Like, okay, once that career is over, you're free. | ||
| You're free. | ||
| You're going to do this, and you're going to do that. | ||
| But, I mean, that's not the way life works. | ||
| I mean, you still need to... | ||
| I still need to be productive and do different things. | ||
| I work with a lot of... | ||
| I love working with the veterans. | ||
| I work with these guys, Nine Line. | ||
| I do stuff with them. | ||
| I'm just really passionate about people that have served our country. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I think, like I said earlier, if I hadn't have made it here, that's probably what I would have done. | ||
| I think about it sometimes. | ||
| I think it may be my only regret. | ||
| I wish I had served. | ||
| I guess because I'm surrounded by so many of those guys now and getting to meet guys like Oz and Tig from Benghazi and Luttrell, all those guys. | ||
| It's just, man, that's... | ||
| I can sit and listen to stories all day long from those guys. | ||
| Yeah, Latrell and I have been talking about him coming on here. | ||
| He's a good dude, man. | ||
| He's a real good dude. | ||
| Those guys, he's so laid back, but you can tell, you can look at him, and you can tell he's been through some shit, right? | ||
| He's been through some shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, when they make a Marky Mark movie about your life, you know you've been through some shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, he's as nice as could be. | ||
| Yeah, real good dude. | ||
| I don't get real excited about meeting celebrities or people like that. | ||
| I just leave people alone for the most part. | ||
| He spoke at the church we go to and I called the pastor up while he was talking. | ||
| I was like, look, I need to be introduced to him before I leave here tonight. | ||
| And he's like, absolutely, come on back, you know. | ||
| But that's the kind of, you know, those are the kind of people, you know. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Yeah, I just, you know, I don't think we can do enough for people that put their lives. | ||
| I couldn't agree more. | ||
| You know, and just people like that that have been through so much, they're just, they're different kind of people. | ||
| They're exceptional in a way that it's hard to describe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It really is cool. | ||
| You've had Goggins on, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's a fucking maniac, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He'll send me text messages out of the blue. | ||
| Just stay hard. | ||
|
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I'm like, okay. | |
| I was going to go soft, but I'm going to stay hard. | ||
| I'm trading my ass off right now, but I enjoyed his book. | ||
| It was so good. | ||
| Yeah, he's a fascinating person. | ||
| Yeah, he's wired a little different, too. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| But he's got a great... | ||
| I love his story because Goggins was fat and he was lazy. | ||
| And he was, you know, eating, fucking drinking milkshakes and shit. | ||
| And he was way overweight and couldn't run at all and just decided... | ||
| He wanted to be in the SEALs and decided he wanted to lose weight and decided now's the time to do it and just forced himself to be this fucking barbarian man. | ||
| If you can't get inspired, if you don't read his book and can't get inspired by that, Watch everybody go to his Instagram page. | ||
| When I find a good one, I repost it on my page all the time. | ||
| He'll have some that literally will make me go up and work out. | ||
| Maybe I'm not even thinking about working out. | ||
| You already worked out once. | ||
| I'm going right now. | ||
| Time to go to war. | ||
| I always wonder who the guy is that gets no credit that's running alongside of him. | ||
| First of all, that's his wife, and she's driving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Yeah, and she's got the phone out the window, and she's driving. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot of motherfuckers will tell you! | |
| But no excuses, right? | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Give me some volume of this. | ||
| This guy makes me feel like a bitch every day. | ||
|
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|
2020 was a perfect example of that. | |
| A lot of people lost jobs. | ||
| Lost businesses. | ||
| Lost family members. | ||
| A lot of folks spent a lot of time in the hospital on ventilators. | ||
| That should have caused a lot of demons in your brain. | ||
| Folks see how much I work out. | ||
| And they think I'm running from demons. | ||
| It's not demons. | ||
| It's discipline. | ||
| And I'm a disciple of discipline. | ||
| You cannot run your demons. | ||
| They'll always find you. | ||
| Only way to beat them motherfuckers is to look at them eye to eye and make them your bitch. | ||
| My sister's the only thing that gets you through hard times. | ||
| Merry fucking Christmas! | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Fuck, that's just awesome, man. | ||
| No excuses. | ||
| He's a national treasure. | ||
| That man is a national treasure. | ||
| Yeah, that's just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Make him your bitch! | |
| Yeah, that's just good shit. | ||
| Yeah, but you know what? | ||
| There's a lot of people out there that their mind concentrates on stupid shit. | ||
| They complain too much. | ||
| They whine too much. | ||
| They're haters. | ||
| They're jealous. | ||
| They're weak. | ||
| You need a guy like that out there that is just all about performance and discipline. | ||
| And you realize, wow, there's a lot of different ways to live this life. | ||
| There's a lot of people that waste time. | ||
| They waste time on nonsense. | ||
| Their life is filled with nonsense. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And then you need a guy like David Goggins to go, oh my god, I'm a bitch. | ||
| I didn't even know. | ||
| I didn't even know. | ||
| I had no clue I was a bitch, but I'm definitely a bitch. | ||
| Appreciate that, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright. | |
| And you know, and his body gets beat the fuck up too, man. | ||
| He had a video he posted just a little while back. | ||
| See if you can find this of him draining his knee. | ||
| They drained his knee, and it's like a fucking coffee cup filled with pus and fluid and shit inside of his knee. | ||
| And he was on crutches for a couple of days, and then there's a video a few days after that where he's running. | ||
|
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|
A lot of you motherfuckers thought I was going to go soft! | |
| I bet you hoping! | ||
| Oh, Dave, you fucked up your knees! | ||
| You can't run no more! | ||
| Like, look at this thing they're pulling out of his knee. | ||
| Like, look at that thing. | ||
| Do you see that? | ||
| That's a syringe full of shit. | ||
| Look at the size of that fucking syringe. | ||
| They're pulling that out of his knee. | ||
| Look at the size of that fucking fluid. | ||
| That's a lot of shit they're pulling out of his knee. | ||
| They're getting another syringe. | ||
| They're getting another one to fill it up. | ||
| Because they're not done yet. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| They're screwing another one in there. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| This is how much pus and fluid is in his knee. | ||
| And he's still running. | ||
| So he's got two gigantic syringes. | ||
| Of fluid that are stuck inside of his knee. | ||
| I mean, what in the fuck? | ||
| First of all, if I had a quarter of that shit, I'd be like, well, no more running for me, son. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| It's full. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's full and they keep going. | ||
| That is a big, fat fucking syringe. | ||
| And then you go to, like, two days later, he's got a video of him with crutches, and a couple days after that, he's running again. | ||
| Ha ha ha, motherfuckers! | ||
| That's crazy, man. | ||
| That's a lost mindset, man. | ||
| He puts in miles, too. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what the fuck the inside of his knee looks like, but, you know. | ||
| Definitely need more people like that. | ||
| Less people, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You need to know. | |
| There's all kinds of people out there in this world, but you need to know there's dudes out there with bulletproof minds. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We need to know. | ||
| I mean, just the fact, no excuses. | ||
| Everybody wants excuses, like I was talking about earlier. | ||
| Everybody's entitled. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But those guys are valuable. | ||
| Oh, hell yeah. | ||
| Hey, if the shit goes down, I want him in my compound. | ||
| You know what he does sometimes? | ||
| Sometimes he takes time off and goes smoke jumping. | ||
| Like they just drop him out of fucking helicopters and he fights fires for like 12 bucks an hour. | ||
| He's rich! | ||
| But he just, he practiced what he preaches. | ||
| He stays hard. | ||
| He doesn't need to work for 12 bucks an hour. | ||
| He does it because it's hard. | ||
| When he was telling me that on the podcast, I'm like, what? | ||
| He goes, yeah, smoke jump! | ||
| He just jumps out of fucking helicopters with a parachute to fight fires with a shovel. | ||
| And camps out there. | ||
| Like, those guys, that's a hard gig. | ||
| That's a hard fucking job. | ||
| But he does it just to be, just to stay hard. | ||
| That's fucking awesome. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like shit. | ||
| I mean, he'll do that to you. | ||
| But the people like that, they're valuable. | ||
| They really are. | ||
| With all these weak people in this world, weak entitled people. | ||
| And this is, you know the old expression, hard men. | ||
| Hard times make hard men. | ||
| Hard men make easy times. | ||
| Easy times make soft men. | ||
| That's what we're going through right now. | ||
| The world got a little too easy. | ||
| There's too many soft people out there complaining. | ||
| That fact. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's weird how that cycle just keeps repeating itself over and over and over again. | ||
| It doesn't seem like human beings are ever going to learn. | ||
| It seems like we kind of have to go through that. | ||
| It's like, even though you know these cycles exist, like the Hindus, they wrote about it years ago. | ||
| They called them the Yugas, the different cycles of civilization. | ||
| And we're in Kali Yuga, which is like the age of confusion. | ||
| What is the exact term of Kali Yuga? | ||
| But it's chaos and everything's falling apart. | ||
| That's what we're in right now. | ||
| And people have been predicting that we're entering into Kali Yuga over the last 10 years or so. | ||
| And now it's pretty obvious. | ||
| We're full on in it. | ||
| Yeah, we're on the cusp. | ||
| Full on. | ||
| Tomorrow's the inauguration. | ||
| And I'm like, oh my god, I don't even want to fucking leave the house. | ||
| No. | ||
| I had to get everybody to land around the perimeter and just make sure. | ||
| Well, they said gun sales were at an all-time high yesterday. | ||
| People were just going crazy buying guns. | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| Yeah, the place I deal with, I mean, their shelves have been empty for... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you can't... | ||
| It doesn't matter what it is. | ||
| Like the toilet paper aisle in March. | ||
| That's what it's like. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it's like. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I walk in there and it's just like fucking tumbleweed rolling through. | ||
| Yeah, I'm lucky I know people that work in gun manufacture. | ||
| I can buy bullets off of them. | ||
| Because if you try to go to a regular store and just buy 9mm or something for an AR or a Win Mag... | ||
| You know, good luck. | ||
| I don't have one. | ||
| I thought they just handed you one when you moved to Texas. | ||
| I'll hand you one. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I'll give you one. | ||
| Alright, perfect. | ||
| Because right now all I have is a golf club. | ||
| I have to get within four feet of someone. | ||
| Well, I've been given eight guns since I got here. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| I'll give you one. | ||
| That's an excellent welcome. | ||
| That's a Texas welcome. | ||
| That's a Texas welcome. | ||
| But we'll have to take you to the range. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Take you to a place and, you know, you've shot a gun before? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How many times? | ||
| A lot when I was younger, but I mean, I don't know, maybe like 10, 15 times. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So you know which way to point it. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, we'll set you up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it'll be good for you, too. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| There's a great place out here called The Range. | ||
| It's an indoor place. | ||
| It's such a big place that they have a 100-yard indoor rifle range, which is just bananas. | ||
| Like, who the fuck has that? | ||
| Yeah, it's a nice place. | ||
| That's high-end shooting out there. | ||
| When I got there, they told me if you hear a helicopter, it's Tim Kennedy. | ||
| He helicopters in. | ||
| He flies his own helicopter. | ||
| He's another maniac. | ||
| I used to watch him train over here on it. | ||
| He's a psycho too. | ||
| Oh yeah, he's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| You need people like that. | ||
| But he's got a lot of varied interests too. | ||
| Tim is a fascinating guy. | ||
| Yeah, he's a good dude. | ||
| He was a great fighter too. | ||
| And really did a lot of his fighting while he was also still serving in the military. | ||
| You know, a lot of his early days... | ||
| So did Brian Stan. | ||
| You know, a lot of the elite guys that were in the military, they were in the military while they were fighting. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, I didn't know that about Stan. | ||
| I didn't know... | ||
| I know Tim was still... | ||
| Yeah, Stan, I believe, when he was in the WEC, the early days of his career, I think he was still serving. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| And, you know, and then he went from the WEC and transferred over to the UFC. And now, I forget what he's doing in business. | ||
| I think he's... | ||
| I don't want to say because I'm not exactly sure, but he's very successful in the corporate world now. | ||
| Oh, good for him. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| This guy transitions and he was a great commentator as well, but he just decided he didn't want to do it anymore and just decided to do things outside of fighting. | ||
| That's not an easy job either. | ||
| Commentator? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| When you hear a guy like Dominic Cruz or Daniel Cormier or something like that, just because you're a great fighter doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a great commentator. | ||
| There's a lot of things that they have to learn, but it is really nice that the UFC has that available to them so they can transfer from fighting right into commentary. | ||
| Yeah, DC does a good job. | ||
| I can't remember the fight, but y'all were doing it together, I think. | ||
| Y'all are like a couple of kids. | ||
| I'm always a kid with him. | ||
| I love him to death. | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| I wish I could remember who was fighting, man. | ||
| But you guys were fucking jumping on each other. | ||
| It was just like... | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| No, because... | ||
| It's good because you're obviously still a fan, right? | ||
| Obviously, you're doing your job. | ||
| I know the fight you're talking about. | ||
| It was Benil Dariush and Jakar close. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And Jakar had him hurt bad. | ||
| And then he abandoned his defense and started going after him. | ||
| And Benil wasn't as hurt as he thought he was. | ||
| And Benil cracked him back. | ||
| And then Benil wound up KOing him. | ||
| And it was such a wild exchange. | ||
| We were like, wow! | ||
| We're leaning back and DC's leaning on me and John Anik is like this. | ||
| That's us. | ||
| Yeah, that's it right there, man. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Look, he leans on me. | ||
| And you don't see in that small version of it, you don't see John Anik in it, but John Anik was freaking out too. | ||
| It was wild, man. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| I mean, it was just, here's the exchange. | ||
| Jakar, I mean, look, man, a lot of people would have been out. | ||
| It was incredible. | ||
| And then once he had Jakar closed, he hit him, or hurt rather, he hit him with that beautiful left hand and drops him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And we were just going apeshit. | ||
| But I just love working with DC, period, because that's the picture. | ||
| That's like a famous picture now. | ||
| Yeah, that's awesome. | ||
| There's one where we're all green, and they gave us alien antennas, and it's the aliens watching Earth 2020. The series finale of Earth 2020. DC's such a big kid. | ||
| My wife said it best. | ||
| She met him for the first time pretty recently. | ||
| She was like, he's so nice. | ||
| You would never believe that he is one of the baddest fucking people to ever compete in the sport. | ||
| Two-division world champion, heavyweight champion, light heavyweight champion, elite wrestler, fucking savage. | ||
| Literally, the only guy to ever beat him is Jon Jones and Steve Two other complete total savages. | ||
| He's such a cool guy. | ||
| I'm positive it was the first time I ever saw you guys commentate together. | ||
| You guys were getting ready or whatever. | ||
| He's like, hey man, such a cool guy. | ||
| He's like, you know how to tie a tie? | ||
| I'm like, yeah. | ||
| He's like, will you tie this for me? | ||
| I put it around my neck and tied BC's tie for him. | ||
| It was just such a... | ||
| Down-to-earth guy. | ||
| So normal. | ||
| And then you see him in the octagon at the highest level. | ||
| One of the smartest fighters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, knocked out Stipe Miocic. | ||
| I mean, what? | ||
| Didn't see that one coming. | ||
| He's a fucking tank of a man, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because he's only like 5'10", but he's like 5'10 wide. | ||
| And just couldn't be nicer. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of people that are really nice, but DC's like, he's exceptionally nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's hard to be funny when you're a fighter. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| You've got the stigma and you're already like, oh, okay, he's going to be a dick. | ||
| He's a badass. | ||
| He's got a great sense of humor. | ||
| He's always silly. | ||
| Him and Max Holloway were always fucking with each other. | ||
| It's really funny. | ||
| When he was the heavyweight champ, Max was saying, I'll fight you too, DC. They were talking about him going... | ||
| Did you see the Maxwellwood fight? | ||
| How good did he look the other night? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| It was insane. | ||
| He broke his own record. | ||
| He has number one, number two, and number three for the most strikes landed. | ||
| Most strikes landed and most strikes thrown. | ||
| Oh, it was ridiculous. | ||
| His volume is off the charts. | ||
| It's hard to imagine. | ||
| And didn't slow down one iota. | ||
| In the fifth and final round, he still... | ||
| Oh, it was amazing. | ||
| No problems with cardio at all. | ||
| I mean, that pace will cripple a person. | ||
| He's superhuman. | ||
| It was like a superhuman performance. | ||
| I really want to talk to him about what the fuck he does for cardio. | ||
| He should give seminars, because I just don't understand. | ||
| I don't understand how he can keep that volume up. | ||
| And Calvin Cater, the dude he fought, is one of the toughest men that's ever lived. | ||
| Because the beating that he took in that fight, the fact that he never stopped swinging, never gave up, never stopped trying to win, took some shots, was wobbled on multiple occasions, and covered up, and was still swinging, still trying to win. | ||
| God, what a fight. | ||
| That was great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I mean, what a performance. | ||
| Like, one of the greatest performances. | ||
| It might be the greatest single performance I've ever seen. | ||
| He was sharp, man. | ||
| I just, you know, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's coming off, what, two losses, too, right? | ||
| Yeah, but I don't think the last loss was really a loss. | ||
| The last loss was, you could make a real argument. | ||
| Yeah, it was a draw. | ||
| Real good fight, though, still. | ||
| It was still, yeah. | ||
| That just shows you how good Volkanovski is. | ||
| He could beat him in the first fight and then have such a close fight in the second fight. | ||
| But when you watch Holloway in this fight, he was different. | ||
| First of all, he was never in the same spot. | ||
| A lot of guys, they make this mistake. | ||
| They think, I want to hit this guy, so I'm going to go at him and hit him. | ||
| Holloway's thinking, I want him to think I'm going to hit him, and then I'm going to be over here, and now I'm going to hit you, and you're going to swing, but I'm not going to be there. | ||
| I'm over here now. | ||
| His footwork and movement and angles were off the chart. | ||
| And he never let Calvin set. | ||
| Guys like to set up and think, ready, now. | ||
| And you don't get a chance with Holloway. | ||
| There's always punches coming at you. | ||
| There's always a kick. | ||
| There's a side kick to the leg. | ||
| There's a leg kick coming. | ||
| There's a jab in your face. | ||
| It's all mixed up. | ||
| And then when you think you've got to figure it out, boom, spinning back kick. | ||
| Like, fuck! | ||
| It was a clinic. | ||
| It was an absolute clinic. | ||
| And you've always been a huge MMA fan, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I think you were... | ||
| You had to be one of the first people to really start bringing those elements into the WWE. Yeah, I started to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, Hell's Gate is what? | |
| A triangle? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's a go-go-plata. | ||
| I just changed the name. | ||
| Yeah, I've been a fan from way back in the day. | ||
| I'm trying to think. | ||
| The first one I went to was in Miami. | ||
| Might have been... | ||
| So Ice... | ||
| Liddell was on the way up. | ||
| I think Randy was the champ. | ||
| So this is like 2003 or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, early. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Changed the name to Hell's Gate. | ||
| So you would grab them by the back of the head and run your shin underneath their neck. | ||
| Without trying to actually do that. | ||
| Did you... | ||
| Have you trained much Jiu-Jitsu? | ||
| Like actual Jiu-Jitsu? | ||
| I used to... | ||
| We used to have a... | ||
| Funny enough, we used to have a ref that... | ||
| I'd get in and roll with him. | ||
| And I would get there early and just pick his brain. | ||
| And by the time it shows up, I'd just be exhausted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, you know... | |
| But I did it because I was such a fan of it. | ||
| I like to understand why things are done and why they're done and everything. | ||
| Boxing and wrestling and everything else. | ||
| That fight that you're talking about, I feel like that's 2003, the Miami one. | ||
| Because I think that was the first time that I ever did play-by-play. | ||
| Boy, was I fucking terrible at it. | ||
| But Phil Barone did color. | ||
| So it was me and Phil Barone did the commentary. | ||
| Because I think... | ||
| I think Mike Goldberg at the time had like a hockey game to call or something like that, and he couldn't get out of it, so they asked me to do it, but I didn't know what I was doing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Play-by-play is like what John Anik does is hard. | ||
| My role is pretty easy. | ||
| If you understand fighting, there's a lot going on. | ||
| You just have to know who's fighting, and I'm such a fan. | ||
| I'm watching everything, so I'm paying attention. | ||
| I remember the fight because Tank Abbott found me, and man... | ||
| He wasn't even sitting anywhere close to me, but he spent the fight with me. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, he talked to me the whole night. | ||
| What a character that guy was. | ||
| Oh my gosh, yeah. | ||
| I ran into him years later in LA at a bar. | ||
| It was the same thing, man. | ||
| He's lost a crazy amount of weight now. | ||
| Yeah, he was a lot slimmer when I had seen him in L.A. I think he had some issues, some health issues. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't doubt that. | ||
| Yeah, for all the boozing. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a big fighter. | ||
| I quit going to Lesnar's fight, so every time I'd go, he'd lose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sure enough. | ||
| It felt like you were a jinx? | ||
| Yeah, I was a jinx. | ||
| So I went to his fight with Mir, and he got caught in that knee bar. | ||
| And then he obviously came back and he won the next one. | ||
| Then I went to Velasquez fight when he came back from that fibro tickolitis thing. | ||
| That was not the Velasquez fight. | ||
| That was Alistair Overeem. | ||
| Alistair Overeem was the diverticulitis fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I was at the Vlaska's fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He had diverticulitis already when he fought Vlaska. | ||
| But he doesn't know when he had it or how long he had it for. | ||
| The scary one was him coming back from having, I think he had 12 inches of his intestines removed. | ||
| And then he fought Alistair Overeem not that long later. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Less than a year later, and Alistair kicked him in the body. | ||
| Yeah, right in the liver. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, Alistair at the time was, he was hopped up on all the Mexican supplements. | ||
| That was when they had, they had a silly drug testing program. | ||
| It was basically like an intelligence test. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They would just test you the day of, and if you knew what you were doing, you could pass. | ||
| And Alistair passed, and you looked at him, and you want to see someone not pass a sniff test? | ||
| It's Alistair Overeem when he was fighting Brock Lesnar. | ||
| It is the most preposterous physique in the history of the sport. | ||
| I mean, if you think like Yoel Romero has a ridiculous physique, Alistair Overeem, when they used to call him Uberim, and he was 260, shredded, full six-pack, and just a destroyer. | ||
| Like, no, no, no. | ||
| That one down right in the bottom. | ||
| Lower right-hand corner. | ||
| Right where it says related images? | ||
| Right below related images? | ||
| No, right below related images. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| You see the word related images? | ||
| It's right next to your cursor. | ||
| See where it says related? | ||
| Yeah, right there. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Son. | ||
| What is that about? | ||
| I mean, what are you fucking talking about? | ||
| Are you out of your mind? | ||
| That is a preposterous physique. | ||
| That's a... | ||
| So that's Alistair when he fought Brock. | ||
| I mean, he has small children living in his biceps. | ||
| He has these fucking biceps. | ||
| They're ridiculous. | ||
| And he just smashed Brock. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| Brock really shouldn't have been fighting... | ||
| After that. | ||
| Yeah, no, he came back way too late. | ||
| Major surgery. | ||
| And his trainers, they were concerned. | ||
| You know, you get kicked in the stomach after you've had literally a gigantic chunk of your intestines removed for a disease that who knows how long that was bothering him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, he really didn't know. | ||
| He got sick. | ||
| He almost died, man. | ||
| Diperticulitis is crazy. | ||
| Oh, it's, yeah, it's nasty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's just like something gets caught in your intestine and it gets infected and it jams up and clogs up. | ||
| And they don't totally understand it either. | ||
| I once saw a clip of Brock leaving the Octagon and you guys... | ||
| Yeah, you guys are staring at each other. | ||
| That's it right there. | ||
| Yeah, you guys have like a very serious moment. | ||
| What was that about? | ||
| Do you think he was trying to goad you into a fight? | ||
| I was there to pick a fight. | ||
| You were there to pick an MMA fight with him? | ||
| Fuck no. | ||
| What are you smoking? | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| What are you fucking crazy? | ||
| So you were there to pick a WWE fight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| My wife looks very confused. | ||
| You didn't let her in? | ||
| Huh? | ||
| You didn't let her in on it? | ||
| No, she knows what's going on, but she's still like... | ||
| Does she play it off? | ||
| Yeah, she's a worker too. | ||
| She gets it. | ||
| Yeah, I was on Ariel's show and he asked me about it, right? | ||
| Did anybody ever offer you an MMA fight? | ||
| Because when CM Punk had gone in and then Brock and a few other guys that were circling it. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| So... | ||
| Fuck, it's too late in the game for me. | ||
| If MMA and UFC had probably taken off sooner, it took a while for the UFC to come mainstream. | ||
| Really, 2005? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was when it really started happening with the first season of The Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But even still, that was for the people that were in it. | ||
| Not in it, but were fans of it. | ||
| Mainstream society was still kind of, you know... | ||
| And I think it was like Ronda Rousey? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those years? | ||
| Like the Ronda Rousey? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think when SportsCenter and everybody kind of started like... | ||
| Because they tried to stay away from it as long as they could. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And... | ||
| But once SportsCenter came in, ESPN and those guys, and it was like, oh, fuck. | ||
| Because I think, you know, there's some people in the MMA world, like all Ariel's fans, they just kill him when he interviews me. | ||
| Why do you got the fake-ass, bullshit wrestlers on there, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm like, hey, I do what I do. | |
| I don't make any bones about it. | ||
| But I think... | ||
| MMA people are a little more sensitive about it because I think they got looped in because they didn't understand. | ||
| Most people didn't understand what it was yet. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Early on. | ||
| Early on. | ||
| And I think there's that stigma that MMA was... | ||
| Is it like wrestling? | ||
| And everybody was like, fuck no, it's not like wrestling. | ||
| This is a fucking shoot. | ||
| So I think there's a... | ||
| If you get it, you get it. | ||
| What we do. | ||
| But I think that stigma of... | ||
| Is MMA pro-wrestling? | ||
| Fighters, they're like... | ||
| And it's not even so much the fighters as it is the fans. | ||
| Most of them ain't thrown a punch or got hit by a punch. | ||
| They get all up in arms. | ||
| Why you got that fake bullshit wrestler on there? | ||
| Yeah, you can't worry about those people. | ||
| No, I don't worry about them. | ||
| Don't judge me for what I do. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It's like, don't read the comments, but it's just like... | ||
| What do you think about what David Arquette's doing? | ||
| What's he doing? | ||
| I don't even know what the fuck he's doing. | ||
| You know what David Arquette is? | ||
| I know who he is. | ||
| He's in wrestling right now. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And they just did a documentary about him. | ||
| Yeah, and it's great. | ||
| I saw it. | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Oh, jeez. | ||
| Man, I can't remember it. | ||
| I can't remember the title of it, but I watched it. | ||
| I know he did some stuff. | ||
| What is it, Jamie? | ||
| You cannot kill David Arquette. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what it's called. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| It's really awesome. | ||
| I know he was a big wrestling fan and he did some stuff with WCW. Well, he's like really, really into it now. | ||
| I mean, that's mostly what he does these days. | ||
| He's doing a lot of pro wrestling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| And he's super dedicated to it, apparently. | ||
| I know that he... | ||
| Look, he gets busted the fuck up. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, and the wrestlers that he goes against all want to teach him a lesson. | ||
| Like, oh, you're not gonna, you know... | ||
| They're all extra tough on him and... | ||
| So it goes into that a lot. | ||
| They're like, oh, David Arquette thinks he's going to come and show us. | ||
| Show us, yeah. | ||
| That mentality's kind of going away, I think. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yeah, you know, back in the day... | ||
| Like, when I broke in and the guys before me, like, anybody, you know, fucking wrestling is bullshit. | ||
| It's fucking go time, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, it's like, because you had to defend... | ||
| Remember that famous video with John Stossel? | ||
| Oh, fuck, he got the shit slapped out of him. | ||
| Who was it that did that to him? | ||
| David Schultz. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Slapped the dog shit out of him. | ||
| Like, hard. | ||
| Was that fake? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was that fake? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that was the mentality back then. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Well, it was also the way he was talking about it was pretty disrespectful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And saying it in a way like he was immune to getting hurt. | ||
| Oh, he slaps the dog shit out of him. | ||
| Let me hear this. | ||
| Give me some fire. | ||
| I'm calling the camera reading he ain't in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Reading these rednecks out here ain't in it because it's a tough business. | |
| That's terrific. | ||
| Wait, is that all you got? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll ask you the standard question. | |
| You know? | ||
| Standard question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think this is fake. | |
| You think it's fake? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Is that fake? | ||
| Huh? | ||
| What the hell's wrong with you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's open-hand slap, huh? | |
| You think it's fake and talk? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| What do you mean? | ||
| He was not expecting that. | ||
| That was disrespectful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The way he communicated was disrespectful. | ||
| And he thought that he could just get away with being this hard-ass reporter to a guy that was clearly amped up. | ||
| That's called reading the situation incorrectly. | ||
| Incorrectly. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, you see how amped up he is? | ||
| David's looking him in the eyes all fucking jacked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, you don't say, I'll tell you what, I think it's fake. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't have to like it. | ||
| Not everybody likes all forms of entertainment. | ||
| Whatever happened to him? | ||
| Did he suffer because of this? | ||
| Yeah, I think he... | ||
| Yeah, he got blackballed from a few places. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, it wouldn't touch him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's unfortunate, because he was taken up for his business. | ||
| Well, not only that, I mean, what great publicity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the same thing with Kaufman. | ||
| You need to stop that, David. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Give him a little slap on the old wrist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And come on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, what are you... | |
| Listen, yeah, you shouldn't go around smacking reporters. | ||
| Also, reporters shouldn't talk so disrespectfully to a gigantic savage. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that era of guys, too. | ||
| Those were men. | ||
| You go into a dressing room nowadays, and it's a lot different. | ||
| I remember walking into my first real dressing room, and I also were some crusty men. | ||
| Half of them had guns and knives in their bags. | ||
| You know, shit got handled back then. | ||
| You know, now you walk in, you know, the guy's playing video games and fucking, you know, making sure they look pretty. | ||
| Hard times make hard men. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's evolution, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know what it is, but I just prefer, I don't know. | ||
| I just liked, I like those areas, man. | ||
| I like that when men were men and I get it. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's obviously how you came up. | ||
| You came through that era when you see people that have it easier. | ||
| You think about those days you spent rolling around on the grass in front of that dude's house while his face cranking you. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I think about that often. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Dodging piles of dog shit. | ||
| Look at what a rich, amazing story you have. | ||
| Like the eight months you spent in that lobby, going there every Wednesday. | ||
| All that stuff is what makes you you, and when it's all said and done, you're 30 plus years in the game, you can look back on that and go, I earned every fucking ounce of this. | ||
| Yeah, I can look back and, you know, I didn't cut any shortcuts and nothing was given to me. | ||
| I can be proud of that if nothing else. | ||
| Do you think it would feel the same way if you went through the grooming situation that they're going through now and when they get paid to train? | ||
| I'm sure they think they've got it hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's still not easy. | ||
| No, it's not easy. | ||
| But I'm sure they wake up certain days and they're like, fuck, I've got to go to the performance center and train. | ||
| You know? | ||
| They're like, fuck, I don't know where I'm going to sleep tonight. | ||
| Meanwhile, David Goggins is running with a fucking fluid in his knee. | ||
| He's running. | ||
| Stay hard! | ||
| Did you ever find the guy, your original coach, that just moved out? | ||
| Oh, that guy's dead. | ||
| He is dead. | ||
| Yeah, he's dead. | ||
| I ran into him a few years later. | ||
| I got in the business, and I left a really key point out of that story, what I did. | ||
| So I showed up at his house that day, right? | ||
| All the shit's gone. | ||
| All his furniture. | ||
| He'd moved on to another territory. | ||
| But I guess he had to leave so fast that he couldn't take his dogs. | ||
| He had two beautiful Rottweilers. | ||
| He left? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His dogs? | ||
| Just left them? | ||
| Just left them. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| They got good homes. | ||
| Well, you took them. | ||
| I took them. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Imagine if you didn't take them. | ||
| What the fuck was he going to do? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I would think he would have came back or had somebody come back for him, but I was like, I'm out two grand. | ||
| I hadn't learned anything but some amateur wrestling. | ||
| I was like, fuck that. | ||
| I'm taking these dogs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I couldn't eat myself. | ||
| I didn't have enough money to feed myself. | ||
| I didn't know how the fuck I was going to feed some dogs, but I knew I was getting something out of this. | ||
| I got the shit kicked out of me for six weeks. | ||
| I'm getting something out of this. | ||
| And I ran into him. | ||
| It was a few years later for a different company. | ||
| And we're sitting across... | ||
| And he had no clue. | ||
| He had no clue who I was. | ||
| And we're sitting across... | ||
| The dressing room, and I'm just fucking staring at him, right? | ||
| And he's like, you know, and he was, like I said, Buzz was, he was a tough guy. | ||
| He was, you know, a good amateur. | ||
| He said, fuck, why are you staring at me? | ||
| I said, you don't know who I am, do you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He goes, well, fuck, should I? I was like, yeah, you probably should. | |
| You took $2,000 with my money. | ||
| You should probably know who I am. | ||
| Yeah, and he's kind of fucking squinting at me like... | ||
| What do you want to fucking do? | ||
| I said, I don't need to do anything. | ||
| I got my money. | ||
| I said, how do you have your dogs? | ||
| Like, you took my dogs? | ||
| I was like, yeah, I took your fucking dogs. | ||
| You fucking left me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was like, well, fuck, what do you want to do? | |
| I'm good, man. | ||
| I'm all good. | ||
| At that point, I'm still a fucking greenhorn, right? | ||
| He's a veteran, and I'm like, fuck. | ||
| I'd have probably got my ass kicked. | ||
| He'd have probably took me down and fucking put me out, but I'm thinking like, hmm. | ||
| But, you know, there's always like, fuck, you know, here I am trying to get my foot in the door and, you know, do I fight this guy and get fucking fired right out of the get-go? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And I remember one night, I had a chance, and I don't know, sometimes I think about it, I should have took it. | ||
| I was looking out my hotel window, and this hotel, there was a Waffle House. | ||
| And I was looking out my window, and I could see in the Waffle, I could see him, and he was by himself, and he was all fucked up. | ||
| He was all peeled up. | ||
| You know, you can tell, you know, he's bobbing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm thinking, fuck. | |
| I could go hide behind a car right now and just fucking tee off on him. | ||
| One, no one would care, and no one would know. | ||
| So I'm having this battle with myself. | ||
| It's like three in the morning. | ||
| Like, fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think, fuck, no, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. | |
| Good thing you didn't do it. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't do it. | ||
| That's how people die. | ||
| Yeah, that's how people fucking really, you know. | ||
| And there would have been me on camera somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He owed me $2,000, but I did get his dogs, and now he's dead. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Everything worked out alright, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever tried Dallas Diamond Page's yoga? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I'm actually contemplating giving Dallas a call. | ||
| You should give them a call. | ||
| It's legit. | ||
| It's very legit. | ||
| It's legit for everybody. | ||
| But, I mean, he has a soft spot in his heart for wrestlers, obviously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's taking guys in. | ||
| He really helped Jake the Snake. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But his... | ||
| He doesn't even like calling it yoga. | ||
| He likes to call it just DDP. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is yoga. | ||
| I mean, he's doing yoga moves, but he adds some dynamic tension to them and a bunch of other things. | ||
| And I mean, that guy is fit as fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he's 60s. | |
| I think he's in his 60s. | ||
| He's in his 60s. | ||
| Super flexible. | ||
| And that's one of the secrets to Chris Jericho's not getting injured. | ||
| He's another one of those big yoga guys. | ||
| And when DDP came out with his, he switched over to that. | ||
| Listen, man, Hickson Gracie, the greatest jiu-jitsu player of all time, was a yogi. | ||
| He was really into yoga. | ||
| It was one of his big secrets early in his career, is that Hickson was super flexible and super strong. | ||
| I mean, yoga's amazing. | ||
| But Dallas, he can grab his foot, like right now at his age, and stretch it up to a full split standing. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| He did it in my fucking studio without even warming up. | ||
| Just grabs his foot and can do it. | ||
| Fuck, I'd tear something, you'd have to pull me out of here... | ||
| Well, he did it. | ||
| He learned yoga and did all this because his back was so fucked. | ||
| And his back to this day, it's like, you know, stenosis is off the charts. | ||
| He probably barely has any discs back there. | ||
| But he just strengthened all those muscles on his spinal column so strong through yoga to the point where, you know, he doesn't really have any pain anymore. | ||
| Never had to get everything fused. | ||
| A lot of guys wind up getting their shit fused. | ||
| He just really got into yoga and helps a lot of people with it too. | ||
| There's amazing success stories on his website. | ||
| There was this one guy in particular who was overweight and he had to walk around on crutches and at the end of the video the guy's running. | ||
| A couple of years of him training him and adjusting his diet and then this constant daily dedication to that yoga. | ||
| Yeah, my wife's been on me. | ||
| She said, you need to call him. | ||
| She said, you don't even have to call him. | ||
| I was like, well, if I want to do it, I need to talk to him. | ||
| I need to do it. | ||
| He's such a great guy, too. | ||
| He's such a great guy. | ||
| Yeah, he's another one of those guys that has positive energy and makes you feel better just being around him. | ||
| He's also, he does so much for other people. | ||
| He really does love helping other people. | ||
| He likes helping them get clean, clean their act up, and then get their body in shape and get fit. | ||
| He has a whole house in Dallas that's dedicated, or is he in Atlanta? | ||
| I think he's in Atlanta. | ||
| Yeah, he has a whole house in Atlanta where he keeps people that are trying to get their shit together. | ||
| He helps guys out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I should. | ||
| I got these guys. | ||
| A guy comes in once a week to my house, helps me stretch, and it does wonders. | ||
| I should probably do it three times a week. | ||
| Yeah, stretching is one of those things. | ||
| If you don't do it, you need it. | ||
| Yeah, these guys are good. | ||
| They used to be out on it, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know if you ever saw TK? Is that from Black Swan Yoga? | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| There's those guys? | ||
| TK Stretching, man. | ||
| It's his couple. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And Kimberly, she stretches my wife, and then Tim stretches me. | ||
| It's like one of the highlights. | ||
| Afterwards, it's like that two, three hours where I... I can still move. | ||
| Maybe I can still do this shit. | ||
| And then it goes away. | ||
| If you just did yoga every day, that's how you feel. | ||
| Legit. | ||
| That's how Dallas is. | ||
| It's really because of his yoga. | ||
| I've got to get that mindset. | ||
| When I was getting ready for an event, I'm a fucking animal. | ||
| It's like, okay, I've got to be ready on this date. | ||
| What would you do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's your training routine? | |
| It's kind of like a modified CrossFit strength training kind of deal, which is catered around my injuries. | ||
| There's a lot of things that I can't do. | ||
| Most of my concerns over the last few years, because I would sometimes only work once a year, is cardio. | ||
| I'm not so worried about being all yoked up. | ||
| A lot of times I need to lose weight because I feel better at this point in my career at 290 or 285 than I do at 305. First thing to do is assess where I'm at. | ||
| Okay, do I need to, you know, do I need to add weight, gain weight, or lose weight? | ||
| Whatever I need to do. | ||
| And then where's my cardio? | ||
| Um, you know, cause my cardio is good. | ||
| Then everything else is kind of like riding a bike. | ||
| You know, I mean, I'll need to get in spar a little bit just for timing of, of certain things, but it all begins and ends with cardio. | ||
| So I back out 16 weeks and have the, you know, this is the, this is the goal for this deal. | ||
| And, you know, um, I have to do some strength training just to keep my sanity. | ||
| I used to do five exercises, four sets, ten reps. | ||
| That's the school that I come from. | ||
| I had to break it down into pushing sleds and kettlebells and all of that. | ||
| Assault bike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Yeah, that's my favorite. | ||
| The assault bike? | ||
| Yeah, for torture. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Tabatas, you do Tabatas on it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 20 second sprints and then 10 seconds off. | ||
| Have you ever seen the assault bike? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It was at my studio. | ||
| I have it at home now, but it's got the handles. | ||
| I got an Echo bike from Rogue. | ||
| That's the best one. | ||
| That's the best one. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking phenomenal. | ||
| It's so hard to do. | ||
| You do sprints. | ||
| So for 20 seconds, you go all out, and then you rest for 10 seconds, and then 20 seconds all out, and you do a series of eight of those. | ||
| It takes four minutes. | ||
| And, dude, you just want to die. | ||
| After four minutes is over, you just fall down, you collapse. | ||
| You look down, there's a puddle of sweat. | ||
| You're like, what happened? | ||
| Four minutes, honestly. | ||
| Four minutes will crush you. | ||
| When I was getting ready for elk hunting season, because you know that's in the mountains and it's hard, I did 10 of those. | ||
| So I did 10 of those four minutes, so 40 minutes. | ||
| So I'd do one, I'd let my heart rate drop down below 130 beats per minute, and then I'd just do another one again. | ||
| And then I just kept doing it. | ||
| Just kept doing it. | ||
| And my legs never got tired in elk hunting season. | ||
| They would always get tired. | ||
| But it conditions your legs so much because you're pushing against the resistance of that thing. | ||
| It's just one of the best cardio exercises ever. | ||
| And fighters use it all the time. | ||
| They'll do all their drills and all their pad hitting work. | ||
| And then when they have to do some extra conditioning at the end, a lot of guys love that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Usually I would start up either on a wrong row, and then do my workout, and in the end, hit that Tabata. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so good. | |
| The whole time. | ||
| Bet it is. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You feel so good. | ||
| And I've actually done it, too, where you cut the oxygen off. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like wearing one of those masks? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Ugh. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's what I'm thinking while I'm doing it. | ||
| I feel like my lungs are like a dried out sponge. | ||
| I'm like, fuck, get this thing off of me. | ||
| But I have that date, and I've got four months, and I don't want to embarrass myself. | ||
| That's the key. | ||
| You're old. | ||
| You're putting yourself out there. | ||
| Nobody's making you do this. | ||
| You're doing this yourself, so you've got to be the best you can be. | ||
| Then it's easy for me. | ||
| But, like, right now, I'm in this transition period, COVID, like, I'm going to need a Goggins call here in a minute. | ||
| I'm about to puss out. | ||
| I'm going to need Goggins to call and just cuss me out like a bitch. | ||
| But, yeah, it's just trying to get that, you know, that workout. | ||
| I'll go upstairs and, you know, do some bench, see what I can, you know. | ||
| With your shoulder, I can't imagine that you still do benching. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's the thing that fucks shoulders up the most, really, is benching. | ||
| I tore my pec. | ||
| Benching in 1999. I used to train with this guy. | ||
| He passed away. | ||
| His name was Brian Adams' crush. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was one of my best friends. | ||
| He grew up in Hawaii. | ||
| He'd go down. | ||
| He's always in the ocean. | ||
| Just incredible. | ||
| Funny story about Brian. | ||
| So I met him when I first started with WWE. I met him in a gym. | ||
| And I don't know anybody there, really. | ||
| He's on a squat rack, and he's got 315 on it. | ||
| And he comes over, hey, you mind spotting me, right? | ||
| And I said, yeah, yeah, sure. | ||
| So he's moved up to the bar, and he's getting his hands on it. | ||
| So when you spot somebody, when you think they're about to squat, you grab them underneath, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I go and I grab him, right? | |
| And he goes, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| What are you, you know, I won't, I don't know how politically, you know, I won't use the expletives in the derogatory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes, you're following me, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I got you. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So he goes, I'm not going to squat this. | ||
| This would crush me. | ||
| I'm on a military president. | ||
| 315 behind the neck. | ||
| He did eight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom. | |
| Boom. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And racked it. | ||
| And he was 6'7", right? | ||
| Big upper body. | ||
| That's a lot of fucking weight to military press. | ||
| Yeah, and standing. | ||
| Not on a Smith machine. | ||
| He just did it, right? | ||
| Huge upper body, like pull cues for legs. | ||
| But anyway, that was my training partner, right? | ||
| So we're training one day, and... | ||
| I was rehabbing a groin injury, and I was just about to go back to work, and feeling really strong one day. | ||
| So I got 485 on, and Brian was a social butterfly, right? | ||
| So he's talking to the guy over here. | ||
| So he unracks it. | ||
| I go down. | ||
| One. | ||
| I'm like, oh, fuck. | ||
| That felt good. | ||
| Great. | ||
| So I come down for the second one. | ||
| And it felt like, you know when a fish starts to hit a line? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It starts tugging. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| That's what I feel. | ||
| It's like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| Brian's oblivious. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| So I'm sitting there with 485 on my chest like this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, Brian! | |
| Brian! | ||
| And he's like, and he comes up, come on, you got it! | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| And I'm like, look, I can already tell it was just, it was just fucking gone. | ||
| So he fucking upright rose the shit off of me. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Well, adrenaline and, you know, and I'm just like, oh shit. | ||
| I tore the, I tore the, I tore the muscle from the tendon. | ||
| Did you get it reattached? | ||
| Yeah, I got it reattached. | ||
| Another time, Dr. Bird tells me, he goes, I know you know a lot more about medicine than I do. | ||
| He goes, you tear it again, I'm not going to be able to fix it. | ||
| So you might want to do your rehab. | ||
| Back then, I'd do half-ass rehab and get back to work as soon as I could. | ||
| How long did it take to recover from that? | ||
| That took a while, and it was a long time. | ||
| That was about an eight-month rehab on that one. | ||
| And then I didn't bench again for years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was just scared. | ||
| Fuck, I don't want to tear it again. | ||
| Yeah, it's a scary one. | ||
| Yeah, it was... | ||
| Torn pecs are weird. | ||
| I had a friend who had a torn peck, and he never got it fixed. | ||
| So he had this weird, crazy divot. | ||
| Yeah, it was real odd. | ||
| It's like he had extra tit here, and this was like a hole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's crazy how tough wrestlers are. | ||
| I remember one of the Piper things that I remember the most is we were hanging out a lot. | ||
| He was doing stand-up at the comedy store in some of the last years of his life, hanging out there a lot late night with me, embarrassed. | ||
| Like, we would all just go to the diners afterwards, and he would drive a lot, and he was having trouble with his shoulder, sort of famously, for a month. | ||
| And he was like, oh, God, when he was turning his steering wheel, it was like, oh, you could tell... | ||
| Even though he obviously had a very high tolerance for pain. | ||
| Extremely high tolerance for pain. | ||
| He's like, ah, shoulder. | ||
| He's like, yeah, I'm going to a doctor in a couple weeks. | ||
| Next couple, a whole couple weeks, my shoulder. | ||
| Jeez Louise. | ||
| Then after that, he's like, yeah, I went to the doctor. | ||
| Turns out my neck's broken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He had a broken neck. | |
| I thought he had a sore shoulder. | ||
| How did he break his neck? | ||
| I mean, it's just like every injury is... | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So I wrestled after that, I think it was 2015, I wrestled Lesnar at WrestleMania in the Superdome. | ||
| Somewhere in the first five minutes or so of the match, I get concussed. | ||
| I can't tell you where it happened, when it happened, but I have no memory whatsoever of the match at all. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Like, my memory from that day... | ||
| The last memory that I have is about three o'clock in the afternoon. | ||
| This is crazy, right? | ||
| Three o'clock in the afternoon, I have a conversation with my wife. | ||
| So obviously I had all that time. | ||
| I think we went to the ring around 9, 930. The concussion happens somewhere within the first five minutes of the match. | ||
| And anyway, I go through the match. | ||
| The match goes for 30 minutes. | ||
| I couldn't tell you one thing about it. | ||
| I mean, I've seen it back now, but I mean, at the time, I got no recollection. | ||
| Couldn't tell you my name. | ||
| Couldn't tell you where I was at. | ||
| Had no clue. | ||
| Never lost consciousness, but had no clue. | ||
| Anyway, they take me to the hospital. | ||
| And, uh... | ||
| They take me back, and my wife and Vince are there in the waiting room. | ||
| They come out. | ||
| It's the same kind of deal. | ||
| They go, all right, he's broken his neck, and we're going to give him another scan. | ||
| Obviously, my wife is completely freaking out at this point. | ||
| Come to find out they had read the scans wrong. | ||
| It was an old break that I never knew I had. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So you had a break, you're just still wrestling with it. | ||
| And I never knew it. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Probably just assumed, like, was that pain in your shoulder too? | ||
| Like, that's what I'm noticing. | ||
| It's like a lot of these neck injuries go to the shoulder. | ||
| Well, you're talking about your neck injury. | ||
| Is that where it's bothering you? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| The whole back of my shoulder blade's messed up, and I just found out that my neck's messed up, disc on disc, whatever. | ||
| Bone on bone, yeah. | ||
| You have stenosis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You probably got that from wrestling. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They have me on steroids right now, can you tell? | ||
| They ain't got you on the right ones. | ||
| They probably have you on cortisone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Methylprednisone or something? | ||
| Yeah, prednisone. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't think you get jacked on prednisone. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| It's the wrong stuff. | ||
| I'd be huge if you did. | ||
| Yeah, I contacted that dude about stem cells. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, cool. | |
| Talked to him about that. | ||
| Have you had any stem cells? | ||
| I have. | ||
| I've had, you know, I did PRP and stem cells and didn't do much good for, like, I put them in my knee. | ||
| But I had all these guys, now they're going down to Columbia, and they swear by it. | ||
| I think they're getting more down there than the FDA will allow here. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Two guys that I know have gone down there and swear by it. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Yeah, I sent my mom down there. | ||
| I sent my mom to Panama. | ||
| Yeah, twice. | ||
| She had a really bad knee and it was in pain all the time. | ||
| And she went and then six months later, the pain went away. | ||
| It took a while. | ||
| But for six months, she was like, I'm not feeling anything. | ||
| It feels the same. | ||
| And then about six months later, because she's in her 70s, it took a little while before it kicked in. | ||
| But then it started feeling much better. | ||
| And then she went back again for a booster a while later. | ||
| It helped a lot. | ||
| I've heard nothing but I hadn't heard any bad for sure. | ||
| What's going on with your knees? | ||
| Arthritis. | ||
| I think once again going back to my hips and throwing my gait off, my walk off. | ||
| Well, it's just also the weight, you know, carrying that much weight around for anybody with your cartilage and your miscus and the kind of shit you're doing. | ||
| So these crazy explosive movements and, you know. | ||
| Yeah, when I was getting ready, I was getting ready three or four years ago. | ||
| I did a, I was training over here for that too. | ||
| Way too old, but did a 42-inch box jump. | ||
| And then did a 500-pound pull, which I was like, fuck, I couldn't believe it. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| I didn't even know, one, I could get down that low, you know, to even get to deadlift. | ||
| But it started, you know, then I started looking back through some of the footage of the training. | ||
| It started with me doing step-ups. | ||
| I mean, that was where I started my program at, just doing step-ups on a bench to end up... | ||
| 42-inch box shot. | ||
| That's impressive. | ||
| That's impressive. | ||
| I couldn't do it now. | ||
| But deadlifting. | ||
| You know Robert Oberst? | ||
| He's a strong man. | ||
| He doesn't even believe in deadlifts. | ||
| He's like, you shouldn't do deadlifts. | ||
| It's just the weight on your... | ||
| It's very controversial for him to say. | ||
| Some people disagree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's one of those things. | ||
| It's like, you can fuck your back up. | ||
| Easily. | ||
| Yeah, especially if you're doing heavy weights. | ||
| With poor technique. | ||
| Yeah, it's real easy to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't have any reason at this point to try a 500-pound deadlift. | ||
| I got nothing left to prove. | ||
| I got one. | ||
| I got one on film, bro. | ||
| I'm good, man. | ||
| We got to boost Tony up to that. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I've been telling you, if you want to get bigger, you got to lift heavy things. | ||
| Squats and deadlifts. | ||
| You got to tell your body that something's wrong. | ||
| Something's horribly wrong, and you have to lift heavy things now forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was going. | ||
| I was going to the gym, and then my neck got messed up. | ||
| He ain't sold on it. | ||
| We need a fucking Goggins hotline. | ||
| For Tony. | ||
| You just saw Goggins pull a quart of fucking fluid out of his knee. | ||
| And you're like, my neck's kind of bothering me. | ||
| I can't really do squats. | ||
| I was really getting into it, but now it's just uncomfortable, so I'm just going to sleep. | ||
| Sleep it off. | ||
| Do you still follow WWE now? | ||
| Are you still... | ||
| Yeah, because I think once things are starting to lighten up, hopefully... | ||
| Can you enjoy it as a fan, or are you too close to it? | ||
| I try. | ||
| It's tough right now for me, because the product has changed so much, and it's kind of soft. | ||
| Are you going to get in trouble for saying that? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| I probably piss a lot of people off, but they need to hear it. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| But to the young guys, he's a bitter old guy. | ||
| I'm not bitter. | ||
| I did my time. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I walked away when I wanted to walk away. | ||
| I just think the product is a little soft. | ||
| There's guys here and there that have an edge to them. | ||
| But there's too much pretty and not enough substance, I think, right now. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| You agree? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What bothers you? | ||
| I think they're playing for a billion-dollar market. | ||
| They want the kids. | ||
| They want the kids' merchandise to sell. | ||
| The parents will buy stuff for the kids. | ||
| The new t-shirts come out. | ||
| But really, it was... | ||
| I think that the peak of everything was the Attitude Era, right? | ||
| 99, early 2000s, and all your learning things. | ||
| It's like you're becoming... | ||
| Instead of playing to kids to be like, Hey, look at this silly character. | ||
| You're a kid. | ||
| You'll enjoy this. | ||
| The kids, like me, in grade school and high school, were watching because it was... | ||
| It was like, oh my god, it's darker, it's crazy sexual, like the stuff DX used to do. | ||
| They would just make fun of each other harsher. | ||
| The shit-talking was harder. | ||
| The storylines were tougher. | ||
| Now it's more of a big brand for a big network. | ||
| They don't have that edge that it used to have. | ||
| They're trying... | ||
| And it's always been this way, but they're trying... | ||
| Put something out for everybody. | ||
| Some guys are into the comedy shit, and then there's other guys that want to see the more hardcore-type fighting. | ||
| I think one of the big things that happened is that the generation before, we all got old at the same time. | ||
| And so there weren't enough guys to work with the young guys. | ||
| I mean, we can sit and talk and I can give you my theories on what you should do or you should do this or maybe you should try this. | ||
| But until you actually can get in the ring and actually do it, It doesn't really translate a lot of times. | ||
| And then you also have too many people that, well, they're on the internet. | ||
| These guys on the internet say, I'm pretty fucking good, you know? | ||
| Okay, well, you can listen to them or you can listen to somebody who's been there and done it, you know? | ||
| So I think there needed to, you can't help it, but there was just not enough merging of the young and the new talent. | ||
| Like when we had Stone Cold and Rock and Triple H, Sean, all these guys, we were all working together. | ||
| We were making money and we were drawing. | ||
| And then we all just kind of, we aged out. | ||
| I mean, I hung in there for a long time, but we kind of aged out. | ||
| And then it just left all these young guys to learn with more young guys. | ||
| And the product, you know, the product changed. | ||
| We have, you know, the PC, the training center is helping. | ||
| We got Triple H, you know, great wrestler. | ||
| You know, he heads that whole thing. | ||
| And he's trying to get some of the toothpaste back in the tube, you know. | ||
| Trying to move it back to kind of a, you know, take a step back to move forward. | ||
| Right. | ||
| To give the product a little more edge. | ||
| And I think that's what it's missing. | ||
| What is CM Punk doing? | ||
| Is he wrestling again? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think he went to AEW or anything now. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when he had his last fight, you just... | ||
| I've seen him a couple of times on... | ||
| One of Fox's shows. | ||
| Yeah, they had him on a few times. | ||
| I think they stopped doing that show. | ||
| They had him doing a little, like, here's what's happening this week in WWE on Fox. | ||
| And it was on Fox 1 or Fox Sports 1 or whatever. | ||
| But then that was it. | ||
| I think they canceled that show. | ||
| God, that was a crazy gamble for him to fight. | ||
| Yeah, I just, I don't, I'm not real close with him. | ||
| I mean, you know, we got along. | ||
| I didn't understand it. | ||
| I know, you know, he had an issue with the company. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and sometimes, you know, people just want to, you know, they need a new challenge. | ||
| But, I mean, he was a top dude. | ||
| He was, you know, he was a top guy for the company. | ||
| Sometimes, you know, like I said, I don't know enough because I wasn't around enough at that time. | ||
| But, you know, I don't know that he had enough background. | ||
| It was kind of late in the game, I think, for him to make that transition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it was easier for Brock. | ||
| Brock had that really strong wrestling pedigree. | ||
| Brock's also a crazy athlete. | ||
| He's a freak athlete. | ||
| Just crazy. | ||
| You see his combine numbers? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Bananas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's one of those guys that defy... | ||
| He was 260 pounds, but his shot was like a 160. You can't believe somebody his size can move the way he can move. | ||
| No, he was a freak. | ||
| He was a freak athlete. | ||
| I used to call him the vanilla gorilla. | ||
| He was just a freak dude. | ||
| So, you know, I just don't, you know, Punk, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, if he just wanted the challenge, I mean, good for him. | ||
| I mean, he tested it. | ||
| I think that's what it was, you know. | ||
| I mean, he had one, he fought Mickey Gall, and it didn't... | ||
| Mickey Gall's a good fighter, an up-and-coming guy, too, you know, so, you know. | ||
| And then he fought Michael Jackson, another guy afterwards, who was a pretty solid striker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you got kind of a tough draw. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Michael Jackson fight, I'm telling you, that was like as easy a fight. | ||
| No, I want to say easy a fight. | ||
| But that was commensurate to someone who is 0-1. | ||
| And Michael's much more experienced, but he wasn't terrifying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He didn't put him in there with some guy who was going to kick his head off into the fifth row. | ||
| It was a good fight for him, but not really. | ||
| The guy's good. | ||
| I don't know what CM Punk's ultimate motivation and goal was, but I think he wanted to test himself. | ||
| I think they paid him a lot of money. | ||
| I'm sure he did good buy numbers, I bet. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I'm sure he got a piece of the pay-per-view or a really good deal. | ||
| But, you know... | ||
| I feel like if somebody wants to do something like that, if you really want to do it, what you should do is start as an amateur. | ||
| I don't know if he has the time, because I believe he's deep in his 30s by the time he had his first fight. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| It was late in the game. | ||
| But if he wanted to do it, the right way is not just jump into the UFC. The right way is you do some amateur fights, maybe a Muay Thai smoker or two, really learn how to do it. | ||
| And it takes... | ||
| Long fucking time. | ||
| Long fucking time to get real legitimate martial arts skills. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| It takes a long time to be relevant with WWE. Anything you want to do and want to be good at, you don't do it in a couple of years. | ||
| You've got to take your lumps and you've got to learn your craft. | ||
| It is interesting how few guys have jumped into the water though of actually having a real MMA fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think, you know, now it's so specialized now. | ||
| Now everybody's so good at jiu-jitsu and everybody can stand up as good. | ||
| Everybody can wrestle, you know. | ||
| Not like in the early days, you know, where everybody had their specialty. | ||
| You know, you had your stand-up guys and, you know, and then, you know, Gracie came along and fucked everything up. | ||
| What happened with Cain Velasquez? | ||
| Cain Velasquez was working for the company for a little while. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| You know what? | ||
| I saw him one day at the Performance Center. | ||
| I was there working. | ||
| I think I was getting ready for Mania. | ||
| He had that match with Brock Lesnar. | ||
| Yeah, and I thought, okay. | ||
| They messed that one up on the creative side. | ||
| Is my... | ||
| Big guess here. | ||
| I mean, they had one sort of match, right? | ||
| Him and Brock, sort of. | ||
| And then they did this weird MMA thing where they tried to make the second one like MMA and it was just a debacle. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Yeah, it was really one of the saddest things I've ever seen. | ||
| Because they tried to make it like they were doing MMA in the wrestling ring. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It just didn't make sense. | |
| That's tough to do. | ||
| I mean, unless you go... | ||
| Unless you go half shoot or full shoot, it's just hard to do. | ||
| People don't know what you're saying. | ||
| Shoot, for folks who don't know, means a real fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Old school wrestler's terms. | ||
| I'm an old school dude, man. | ||
| That's all I got. | ||
| What's crazy is Kane is a big fan of pro wrestling and he's got moves. | ||
| There's a video of him, you see the way he does that flying scissors, catches a guy and wraps his legs around his head and then flips him. | ||
| And that's exactly what they should have done with him and Brock. | ||
| They should have had him learn a few cool moves like that. | ||
| Protect him and then let him come along. | ||
| It's funny, I remember going to a fight, it was in Vegas, and I run into Matt Hughes and his brother. | ||
| They were huge. | ||
| Wrestling fans. | ||
| They started showing me their moves. | ||
| I think Matt was putting a body scissor on his brother. | ||
| It's standing, right? | ||
| They were just like, what do you think about this? | ||
| What about this? | ||
| I was like, it's pretty good. | ||
| You've got to fight. | ||
| You've got to fight in about an hour. | ||
| You're worried about... | ||
| He's trying out pro wrestling moves. | ||
| And it wasn't my opinion on him. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, it was funny, but those were good dudes. | ||
| I remember... | ||
| You know, Pat Miller, he used to invite me out to his place all the time. | ||
| But that's when I was on the road all the time. | ||
| But all those guys, you know, Tim Sylvia, all those guys are big wrestling fans. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, Mark, thank you very much for being here, man. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| I've had a good time. | ||
| Thank you, Tony. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Thank you, guys. | ||
| You're the gap, brother. | ||
| Well, if there's ever a pro wrestling person on, I have to have Tony. | ||
| I was just hearing it lessen the testosterone in the room a little bit. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You needed to add some, what's it called? | ||
| Estrogen. | ||
| Let me extend it. | ||
| So we just announced for the next three years where our manias are at, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So this year is going to be in Raymond James. | ||
| Next year, 22 is going to be in Texas Stadium again. | ||
| Where's Raymond James? | ||
| That's in Tampa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That's going to be 21. But in 22... | ||
| It's going to be in Dallas at Texas Stadium. | ||
| You should come. | ||
| If I can? | ||
| I know you're not a wrestling fan. | ||
| I'll take acid and go. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| I guarantee you. | ||
| I guarantee you you'll have a good time. | ||
| I would go if I'm around. | ||
| I never know where I'm at, especially in 2022. I hope in 2022 you actually have real audiences. | ||
| Isn't that weird? | ||
| I would have imagined we would have real audiences by now. | ||
| You kind of can still in Tampa. | ||
| Is that why April it's in Tampa? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| They just announced these yesterday. | ||
| So we got the Royal Rumble coming up in two weeks. | ||
| That kind of sets off WrestleMania season. | ||
| But I promise you, fan or not a fan, you will have a good time. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sure. | |
| I've been telling him this for years. | ||
| Hopefully you get it through to him. | ||
| Can you pull up a live shot of Texas Stadium? | ||
| Just to give you a feel. | ||
| That's the one in Dallas, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's where the Cowboys play. | ||
| They wanted to do a UFC fight there. | ||
| That's where Conor wanted to fight... | ||
| I think he wanted to fight Khabib there. | ||
| Oh, that would have been awesome. | ||
| Yeah, I think he was trying... | ||
| They wanted to do a UFC fight there, which is just fucking bananas. | ||
| Oh my god, that is so crazy. | ||
| 100 and... | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| 5,000 people. | ||
| That's so many people. | ||
| Look at the size of that crowd. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| How big is fucking Wrestlemania? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| When you look at that many people there for that. | ||
| What a successful fucking event. | ||
| They come from 25 different countries. | ||
| Just people all over the world. | ||
| That's the big one. | ||
| This is our Super Bowl. | ||
| This is, yeah, that's amazing. | ||
| I was supposed to go to my first one this year. | ||
| I still have the ticket. | ||
| Never got to use it for Tampa Bay. | ||
| I was going to go in April. | ||
| I was going to do shows in Florida and then have the Sunday off. | ||
| I had it all planned out. | ||
| I tell you, we're alive. | ||
| We're alive. | ||
| We can keep going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Mark. | ||
| Thank you very much, man. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thank you, Tony. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you, Young Jamie, always. | ||
| Thank you, everybody. | ||
| Goodbye. |
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