I think it's obvious when you're watching a movie, and there's people fighting or someone's slipping on the side of the building, that it's fake and it really removes you from it.
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 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.
Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.
Pro wrestling is entertainment, but people get hurt all of the time.
There are no tough guys in wrestling.
At the end of the day, whatever you're doing in the ring, you want it to look real, and genuine, and authentic.
I'm an artist, a performer... There's an art to what we do to the wrestling... I don't want to really fight anybody.
In many ways professional wrestling is a dance.
Had the WWE fights were artificial and pre-scripted, there would have been no need for wrestlers like The Great Khali and The Undertaker. You cannot fool thousands of people crammed into a stadium and sitting four to five feet away from you in the ring.
Wrestling has gotten so show-biz, it's to the point where people scoff at it.
For anyone to say that WWE is fake or anything like that, no sir! It's very physical, and the injuries are real; the blood is real.
Professional wrestlers are human beings like anybody else.
I complained about the gimmicks. All the nonsense and garbage. After a while I just said I would not wrestle with the guys wearing masks, or guys that had some get-up on. It was demeaning. I refuse to go onto the mat against a Christmas tree.
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.
Movie brawls tend to be bloodless and quick.
People think that we hired a bunch of actresses and taught them how to wrestle, and that couldn't be further from the truth.
The interesting thing about film fighting is that it's very different to the kind of fighting we do in pro wrestling.
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.
Pro wrestling is not fake; it's sports entertainment. We go out there and we perform, and a lot of what we do out there is real, but we're not going to insult anyone's intelligence - there is a predetermined winner. It's just the fans don't know who it is, and that's what makes it so intriguing.
I want my fights to be seen as plays that have a beginning, a middle and an end.
I was obsessed with it, and then I learned more about professional wrestling and how the beauty that does exist in it is truly an art form.
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.
