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When you are as big and strong as Strowman, WWE notices you and basically pays you to go to school. He was paid to train, has a guaranteed contract, and gets paid whether he wrestles or not. He couldn't survive in the actual wrestling business. He never had to pay his dues.
Well, I don't want to say mad, but there was 'heated' exchanges back in the closing days of OVW when I said that I was running our own business there in OVW and they said, no, we are running their storage closet. They didn't actually say that, but that was how they treated it.
For the people who are offended about the fact that we have a bunch of criminals and criminal enablers and buffoons and scheisters and con men and frauds and real estate frauds running our country and our government, they like to hear that they're not the only ones that feel that way.
I grew up in a household with my mother, who was a Holocaust survivor. I very much understand the mentality that you cannot live in the past. You can't spend your entire life, or even portions of it, looking back and dwelling on things that have already happened. You have to move forward.
Probably the biggest-kept secret about 'Ring of Honor' is that when you go to see a live show - I've had people in their 60s from down in North Carolina that have seen a lot of wrestling tell me that it was the greatest live wrestling show they've ever been to. The atmosphere is off the charts.
The thing about Brock has always been, who can push Brock to a level where you actually get to see the best of Brock Lesnar, because very rarely have people ever gotten a chance to see that. I mean, really, who can keep up with him? This is not wrestling hype: he's a once-in-a-lifetime athlete.
Vince McMahon can end up in a federal lawsuit with you where there is mudslinging back and forth that makes the front page of 'The Wall Street Journal,' and if tomorrow he figures out a way where the company can benefit from your involvement, you will be at a negotiating table with him at lunch.
I haven't wanted to portray a manager since Paul E. Dangerously was with the Samoan Swat Team in 1989. I've always wanted to do some different presentation in that role. I don't consider myself a manager - I'm an advocate, and I truly believe that that is the description for the role that I play.
As far as the NWA tag-team wrestling of the '80s - and I know you're talking some heavy hitters there - the first thing people will always say is The Midnight and Rock 'N' Roll Express. We invented things as we went along that people had never seen. It was always different. And it was always good.
I think Sting would be denying his fans a great moment if Sting did not step into WWE competition at least once. I have always been a huge admirer of what Sting brings to the table and his relationship with his audience, and I would be dramatically disappointed if Sting does not wrestle a WWE match.
WrestleMania is an experience. It's an overall ride, its ups and its downs and its curves and its music. It's presentation, and it's emotion, and it's paying tribute to the past and progressing the product into the future. It's career-defining moments for people who live for career-defining moments.
I think women's wrestling has had a hard time because of GLOW. When GLOW came out, it looked like somebody was ripping off the male industry. Everybody made fun of it. WOW is a great product. It's produced right. It's got a little story line, and it's got good-looking girls who can work and can talk.
The Dangerous Alliance consists of the following - 'The Advocate' Paul Heyman and 'The Beast' Brock Lesnar. That Dangerous Alliance is the single most formidable faction in the history of sports entertainment. We don't need Four Horsemen. We don't need three Freebirds. We don't need a Legion of Doom.
Usually, people that I like to work with are people that I believe in more than they believe in themselves, and they just need that extra boost and the person to give them a little more time and understanding and introspection into their own character to find that box office that lives inside of them.
I can't tell you that it would be bad exposure for me to be associated with someone who has the global Q-rating of Ronda Rousey. She certainly knows how to attract attention and garner tons of publicity, and just to be in on the merchandising of Ronda Rousey, would love for her to be a Paul Heyman girl.
I think the fact that Brock Lesnar is not on the road 52 weeks a year, is not on 'Monday Night Raw' every episode, is not performing 300 matches per year... I think that dictates to the public, 'Brock Lesnar is special.' That an appearance by Brock Lesnar in an of itself is newsworthy. It's not commonplace.
People are willing to pay for the right to cheer or boo Roman Reigns. That is your job as a box office attraction. Your job and the manner in which you feed your family is not dependent upon whether the audience respects you or disrespects you. It's dependent on the audience's willingness to pay to see you.
The whole concept of ECW was that the biggest star of the promotion was the promotion itself. It didn't matter if a persona was designed to elicit cheers or boos. It didn't matter if someone was an antagonist or protagonist. The whole concept was to fight for the honor of the cause. The cause was ECW itself.
I never looked at ECW as wrestling. I always considered it more of a theology. I don't know whether I had or didn't have a messianic complex during that time. But I bought into the movement as much as, if not more than, anybody else. If I sold anyone on the religion of extreme, I was its number-one customer.
The key to WWE's success and longevity is that they are, as modern and as relevant as the company may be in modern social media and platforms and contemporary distribution, the company is still built around old-school promotion. Who are these two fighters? Why are they wrestling? And why should I pay to see it?
Who cares if the locker room would embrace Conor McGregor. If Conor McGregor can be a revenue driver for WWE, if he can sell network subscriptions, or if he can sell thousands and tens of thousands of tickets, if he can move millions of T-shirts, who cares if anybody in the locker room likes it or doesn't like it.
We live in a society that has ever-changing values and ever-changing standards and ever-changing criteria to determine who is a superstar or not. If you want to be a superstar, if you want to main event, if you want to profit in the entertainment business, you have to go with those trends and spearhead new trends.
Roles constantly have to be redefined in any form of entertainment. Look back at the gangster pics of the 1930s and 1940s and the way James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart would play the part. These roles were redefined in the 1970s by Al Pacino and Rober DeNiro. And again in the 1990s by Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins.
The Midnight Express and the Rock 'n' Roll Express were the greatest tag team rivalry of all time and drew more money than any other tag team rivalry probably in history, and I did manage the WWF champion and WWF Tag Team champion at different points in time but my phone hasn't rung and I haven't lost sleep over it.
Every wrestling show is now designed to be the greatest show ever. In contrast, the NWA show is different. It didn't tire people out to watch, something was allowed to register. It is the exact antithesis of planned, big budget, choreographed, scripted sports entertainment, and that is what makes the show so different.
Brock Lesnar and Roman Reigns are the main event of WrestleMania 34 because neither one is content, and both are ambitious enough to push the limits of what is now considered their greatest moment, and that's the point that neither one will ever accept. They will never accept the idea that they've peaked as individuals.
Everyone should have cancer one time - then you'd know that other things aren't important. The guy that gives you the finger at the stoplight don't mean nothing anymore. You come home and something's cold, or you didn't get something in the mail. Big deal. You want to get up every day and see your family and your friends.
The audience wants something that entertains them, and whether that entertainment is in the form of a physical match or in the form of a skit or video or promo, it's our job to deliver it to them, to the point where the audience becomes the biggest champion of our brand. And if we can't match that, then we're falling short.
I didn't get a chance to see Bruno Sammartino regularly because I didn't grow up in the northeast, but he came into Indianapolis in his in-between time of being the champion between '71 and '73 when he worked for Dick The Bruiser because he liked The Bruiser. I got to see him and the The Bruiser against the Valiant Brothers.
Johnny Valentine's the one who said, 'I can't make them believe that wrestling is real, but I can make them believe I'm real.' It would take him forever because he was just stinkingly boring for 30 minutes of the 40-minute match, but he would let people hit him as hard as they could, and he would hit people as hard as he could.
I approach my interviews with the mindset of, exactly what are we selling? How can I sell it the hardest and the most effectively in the fewest words possible? And how can I make each word that I say mean as much as it possibly can? And I bring that perspective to the table because I used to focus a lot on the character that I had to play.
If you look at who emerged on the horizon 12 to 18 months after ECW stopped running shows, I think it's very reasonable to believe that we would have picked up CM Punk and several of the other young stars that emerged in the independent scene in the early part of that decade. Punk obviously is the one that I would hope I would have noticed.
I thought the Rousey match was the best major league debut in the history of wrestling. They did the right thing at the right time at the right pace and took people on a roller coaster ride. That, to me, was a pro wrestling match. I couldn't find fault with it, except I wish that Ronda had come out with her game face on when she did her entrance.
I feel like there's no reason to put myself through what I put myself through for 20-something years on airplanes, especially these days. You don't know whether your pilot is going to drop dead over the ocean; you don't know when you try to land whether the wheels are going to come down; you can be searched and seized and detained and quarantined.
Unlike most heritages, Western civilization is not primarily a geographical place or a genetic bloodline. It is a state of mind. No matter where on earth one was born, to become heir to Western civilization's ancestry, one need only pledge allegiance to reason and individual liberty-the civilized, life-affirming values that represent the "West at its best."
You cannot achieve success without the risk of failure. And I learned a long time ago, you cannot achieve success, if you fear failure. If you're not afraid to fail, man, you have a chance to succeed. But you're never gonna get there unless you risk it, all the way. I'll risk failure. Sometimes, half the fun is failing. Learning from your mistakes, waking up the next morning, and saying 'Okay. Watch out. Here I come again. A little bit smarter, licking my wounds, and really not looking forward to getting my ass kicked the way I just did yesterday.' So now, I'm just a little more dangerous.