I don't know any real jiu-jitsu or judo or anything. I do movie kung fu. With that, you can fake a punch, but you can't really fake a judo throw. You can get help from the person who you're throwing because they can kind of launch themselves.
If anybody dared say wrestling was fake, you'd punch 'em. And you never used the word show. If you used the word show it was an insult.
You do take a beating in professional wrestling. But I love it.
If professional wrestling did not exist, could you come up with this idea? Could you envision the popularity of huge men in tiny bathing suits, pretending to fight?
I don't take much pride in fake fighting.
I would be a fool to tell you that there was no fixing. You ask if wrestling is for real? Well, I think my own body answers that question.
Pro wrestling is entertainment, but people get hurt all of the time.
I think the best wrestling always needs to pretend to be real, and Vince Russo's wrestling is so pathetically far-fetched and phony that I think he does a disservice to his wrestlers and the business.
There are no tough guys in wrestling.
I like acting very much because I don't get punched, and it's not real.
When you throw punches at actors, you stop, you pull it, and it looks like you pulled it. When you throw punches at cartoon characters, they are not there, so you can swing through. It looks like you really decked them.
In pro wrestling, it's fake. People always get offended by that word. 'No, we like to say it's pre-determined.' For whatever reason, people get angry at 'fake'; 'pre-determined' eases the blow? It's fake. At the end of the day, it doesn't really mean anything.
Wrestling has gotten so show-biz, it's to the point where people scoff at it.
Wrestling is the first reality show. With a reality show, you never what is real and what is not.
I'm telling you, there have been some great finishers in the world of pro wrestling or sports entertainment. Whatever you want to call it. Man, I enjoyed the Iron Claw back in the day. I believed it was real.
I can tell you this, and I'm 100 percent sure: 90 percent of the people working for WWE have never been in a real fight in their lives.
There's a misconception about wrestling, that it's really fake, but it's real, and you can really get hurt, even though a lot of it is performative.
I watch a lot of old-school wrestling, and one of my favourite matches is my dad vs my step-dad at Starrcade '85, Magnum TA vs Tully Blanchard. In that match everything looked so aggressive, everything was so real, and it looked like a brutal fight.
In wrestling, I don't consider it acting because it's improv.
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.
People think that we hired a bunch of actresses and taught them how to wrestle, and that couldn't be further from the truth.
I think most people, most rational people, most people that I would feel comfortable sitting in a room with, understand that wrestling is scripted entertainment. But they don't want you to remind them of that.
I'd never seen a professional wrestling match. First one I saw, I was in. It was just an accident.
Wrestling isn't real. The falls hurt, sometimes you get punches in the face, but it's not real. It's propaganda. Propaganda makes you the giant and me the small guy. Propaganda makes me the champion and makes you unworthy of a title shot.
If you do your history, pro wrestling is just the worked version of what MMA is.
