The Joe Rogan Experience - #1598 - Mark "The Undertaker" Calaway

Episode Date: January 20, 2021

World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Famer Mark "The Undertaker" Calaway is a thirty-year veteran of the sports entertainment industry, and widely considered one of the best professional wrestlers of all time. Now retired from the ring, his story is the subject of the wrestling retrospective "Undertaker: The Last Ride".

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan 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. It might be lactating. This is the highlight of my life. I don't know if I'm happy or sad about that.

But anyway, 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 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 And we'll all be good the 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. Like, what? And now that studies have come out, there was a new do that. Exactly. Yeah. No one expected them to shut down all the restaurants and shut down all the gyms. Like, and now that studies have come out,

there was a new study that came out. It was in fucking news week. I'm hoping that when Biden comes in, they're going to go, well, you know, we realized that lockdowns are not really good. It doesn't really help give people freedom and let them do.

I'm hoping that this was 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 thing, which is a terrible thing to hope for, that this was political. But 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. My buddy Brendan Schaub just went down to the comic 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 down to the comic 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 amazing how quick things can fall apart. Quick. Like that. Yeah. Like that. Everything changes. And the Sunset Strip's 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. 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. It's like, we can do what? We're good? Let's party. 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. uh you know i've done this for 33 years altogether 30 crazy yeah i mean it's just one of those deals like you're walking around like you're okay though like a lot of the guys that hit 30 years man you know like i hung out with the iron chic one night oh it's that poor guy yeah he's uh very Yeah, he's very entertaining. Hilarious. He's great. Hilarious. I love Sheiky. But you're right, you know.

He can barely walk. He can't, you know, his ankle's fused. He can't walk. And, you know, I've already got both my hips, you know, Birmingham resurface job. So I'm, you know,

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 cart and and arthritis it was filled it up um and they'd only been doing them for about 10 years at that point so they didn't have they didn't have a whole lot of uh you know scientific study on how long these were going to last. And then no one had put, you know, no one was going to put it to the test like I did. Right. You know, especially with the amount of weight you're carrying around and picking people up and slamming them and getting slammed and just all that, all that jarring.

So, uh, Dr. Sue, uh, out of the hospital for special surgeries, he was just phenomenal. And he was so gung ho. Cause like, you know, that was surgeries. He was just phenomenal. And he was so gung-ho because, like, you know, that was his baby. And, you know, 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. You know, it was just, you know, I had that searing down the leg pain. And you just dealt with it. I just dealt with it. You know, it's part of the game. And I just, thankfully, I've got a high threshold, you know, 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 a whole new lease on life re-motivated me to do 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, 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 it's called oh there yeah there it is right there that's it jamie's on the motherfucking ball but that's money right there pull that up like that birmingham hip follow-up so that is uh what yours looks like so this thing yeah so the thing with the stem on the right side there that goes right

into the head of the femur and And then the porous piece of metal that goes over the top of it goes into the acetabulum. And no restrictions. Wow. No restrictions. Yeah, I had to walk. I was walking.

On the left is the old way to do it, right? So they see A and B over there on the right hand side? Yeah, and they still do it that way and if i 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'd have 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, uh, the, the resurfacing that way I have absolutely no restrictions. 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 uh you know no one had

gotten a wrestling ring and get thrown around 270 days a year on it to 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. 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. There's no warranty. But, you know, I just keep holding off and medicine keeps getting better and better. 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. 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 years of... You know, from dragging the leg and everything. So I had to to what they had

me do is weird strange enough and start walking backwards huh to on a treadmill to correct my gate yeah because i weird because yeah because you know you you compensate when you have an injury right you know you you start to compensate and 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? Yeah, I didn't really have.

It was kind of weird how it happened. my left hip was bad for years and years I finally you know I said okay I'm gonna call it a day and uh my normal my normal orthopedic surgeon he's you know I said okay doc I'm gonna call it a day and he's a 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. And, uh, I was like, well, and, uh, so, you know, I'd come to grips with, you know, my career was going to be over. And so I cut my hair off, you know, I'd say, oh shit, I'm not going to need this long shit anymore. So I cut my hair off and, you know, I'm kind of sitting at home, phone rings. It was 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? You know, he'll go in orthoscopically, clean the bone off, clean the spurs out, clean, you know, he just, anytime there's, you know, what starts to happen is you start getting that arthritis and then the spurs. And it just, what happens is every time that you're walking, it's just chewing that up. 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're a perfect candidate. Your bone density is really great. He says, I think you'll do good with it. I was like, well, fuck, let's go for it. I got nothing to lose at that point. I wake up. I'm pain-free. I'm like, holy shit. I'm walking that day.

That day? Yeah. No crutches, no nothing? I started out on crutches because i had uh 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 two uh 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 i got it oh wham did they catch you they got me they got i landed on

the bed so i you know the last thing i remember is getting up to go take this walk and the next thing you know i'm laying in bed and 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 was like, fine. I feel good. I'm just so happy that they could do that for you, that they could resurface both of them when you're walking.

I mean, because you walk, you would never know. Yeah, it is crazy. I feel I'm really blessed. You know, now, if I could'd still be i'd still be going full steam ahead but i just physically can't i can't perform at the level you know and that's the thing with you know with when you use your body for you know athletic purpose yeah you know 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 yeah he has over a hundred fights he's he's like he was

trying to get a hundred wins but they robbed him on his last decision is uh on his 100th win but uh he just got his hip redone and uh he's throwing kicks again it's great 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 is 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 John Codd Van Damme, the kickboxer. He's being... 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. There's a video of him throwing kicks. No, no, no. 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 pulled. holding the pads for him, which is just... Yeah, it's insane. And that's that leg. That leg he's throwing right there. That was the one that he pulled. 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, they don't tell you when these guys are getting surgery and things like that. You know what I mean? What do you think 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're watching The Undertaker, right? Who's already been doing it years longer than all of his peers and all that. 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 different than obviously headlining an hour-long WrestleMania match. I think you just dissed me. I'm not sure. No. I think you did. I felt it. 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, stronger right yeah for a while there that was the yeah that was the template i would uh 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 they don't get that part of what we do live events, town to town, flying everywhere.

That is bananas. Easily eight years, 278. 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? Literally. Honestly, obviously I'm biased, you know. Who works harder than pro wrestlers? I know. Like, literally.

Honestly, you know, I mean, obviously I'm biased, but a lot of people really, they don't get that. Right. Because they see Monday nights or they see the Friday night show, and they don't know that we're doing live events. You know, and when I came up in the early 90s, we only did TV like every three weeks. We would tape three weeks of TV tv and the rest of that time

we're on the road we're and it'd be like they're throwing darts like one day i'd be in new york the next day i'd be in denver then i'd be in miami then 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. Oh, well, I say fucked up, really, honestly. I mean, we had a motto. We'll sleep when we're dead, right? Because, I mean, you're young. When you're young, you've got that kind of energy, and you can do all that. And, you know, 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. We are on the same standards now of Major League Baseball and 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. You know. Just see if you've got a problem. They started out early on, you know. So we're talking 90s, right?

So they didn't want people getting popped with you know 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 was i still i think they still do but they didn't realize when they took that away, what's good. What are you going to do? You're going to drink more. And then you're going to take more pills because you gotta, you gotta cope with, you gotta cope with the pain somehow.

And so then you've, you got guys overdosing, right? So everything's kind of led up to this drug protocol now we we have i mean we're 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 kind of protocols you get you get your head you know you get a dinger it used to it was like okay well fine i'm like you know i gotta go i gotta go make a living right you know it's the same with injuries like you don your head you know you get a dinger it used to it was like okay well you know i gotta go 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 industries come a long way they really take good care of the athletes now but when you think of drug tests people think about steroids yeah

that's you know which is if i was vince i would tell people like like i want to make sure you're on steroids i'd be like testing everybody well we've had a few different we've had a few different not on steroids yeah pro wrestler come on bro you would think right and you know there there was a time where everybody had to be like you had to be clean no you had to be you had to be big you had to be jacked right yeah and especially the guys you know the six foot eight the big guys like there was a stigma you gotta be 300 pounds right it's in our head you know nobody gives a they're interested in the characters and what you do on tv but in our heads like i gotta be 330 pounds interested a little bit like but if a guy like brocknar 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? 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 that was the wrestler's mindset though now that we're tested for everything they test for steroids they test for steroids they have for a while really yeah and which i don't understand because there's some big motherfuckers out there yeah and cut and i don't know how they did it i couldn't get that way when i was on steroids like who's the biggest guy in the WWE right now? I'm going to pull up a picture. Braun Strowman.

Passes the sniff test. Yeah. Braun, I think he's about my height. He used to be a power lifter. Let me see. Here you go, Jeremy. Oh, Jesus. So, yeah, he's 330 pounds.

Are we trying to say that that guy doesn't do any steroids at all? 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 I've had to go through. I mean, it's possible. It has to be because I'm telling you. So 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 to the end of the year like it'd be december right going into christmas and i'd get a call like uh you need to go to this such and such lab and and do a piss test and i hadn't been in a 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 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 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 so i just don't understand why they would test i mean that's like testing the rock like like if he's doing a movie want to make sure you're not on steroids be like what well so obviously you know we've had some we've had some dark we've had some dark shit. 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. Yeah.

That's not possible. No, yeah. Yeah. If you look at Ronnie Coleman in his prime, not possible. Not possible. But that guy, maybe some Viking DNA in there. I don't know. He's a giant fucking dude.

Maybe. I know what the protocol is. Right. And I know, like, if anybody was going to get out of it, it would have been me. Right. And I didn't get out of it. Wow. So I'm just saying. Did they test Vince?

Look, I don't know. Yeah. Hey, I wish. Whatever he's on, I wish I was on. Look at that guy. Yeah, he's 85,000 years old. He's 75. Come on. who the fuck has traps like that when they're 75 like if you didn't know that was his traps you would say he's gonna die he has a tumor

he's got a tumor on his back what size that man let me tell you though that guy that's what he does that's his animal that's his love is is working out Who the fuck has ever been that big at that age? Ever He's phenomenal man He's How old is he? He is He's 75 He's older than my mom

I'm gonna send my mom a picture of him And go I don't wanna hear any excuses His mother Get it together mom No excuses mom His mom is 99 His mom's 99 And was still playing tennis in her 90s

Wow Jesus Christ I mean he's just got some He's got some That's his trainer there Wow his mom's 99 and was still playing tennis in her 90s. 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 with toe-wraps. 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 blue and say, 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, 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.

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. Probably. 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.

Yeah, it's been a long time. And, you know, it was tough for me. Like, I didn't have, I'm not a legacy. I didn't have anybody in the business. I didn't know anybody in the business. And, like, so, you know, usually you need somebody to open that door for you right so when in 86 were you thinking like i've got to figure out a way how to do this and you just started did you how did you did you start taking like classes like how did you so i was i

was in college i was a basketball player right and my coach tells tells me hey mark there's there's some european scouts 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. I'm 6'8", 230, 240, which 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 Lambert, you know, on the gas. They were just monsters. And so I start 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, I'm going to go and I'm going to,

I'm going to get into this wrestling. I want you to do wrestling with me. And I was a big wrestling fan as a kid. But as I got into, into you know basketball and football and everything else I kind of you know I kind of drifted away you know I was just like man I think I'm gonna go try to play some pro ball in Europe and he goes man you should really try and do this with me you know so I kind of started getting in touch with the product again you know I kind of started watching again and I got no clue uh I think you know know, I'm kind of get, fall back into it again. Right. I'm like, Oh, that's kind of cool. That's different. And I think one of the things that's helped me through my career is, is being a realist in

what my talents are and what my talents aren't. And, you know, I was like, you know, I kind of started having these conversations with myself, like, even if you do make a team, you know, I was like, you know, I kind of started having these conversations with myself, like, even if you do make a team, you know, I mean, how long do you really have? And 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've got the Von Erics and you've got Hogan. I'm like, well, shit, these? And I'm like, you know, because you got the Von Erics 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 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 was a good amateur, really good amateur. And show up at his house house knocking on the door, knocking on,

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?

He's standing there butt ass naked. Woke him up out of a, he's just standing there naked and everybody's like, uh, we're here to train and he goes oh is that today

yeah you know and uh so he he gets a another guy that was staying there with him his name was perry jackson who i'm friends with to this day uh he says go out there and warm him up all 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. Totally gassed out about two hours, just nothing but cardio shit. Finally, Buzz comes out. All right, everybody line up. All right, everybody get down.

Amateur position, right? So everybody gets down. He right so you know everybody gets down fucking he just stretches the shit out of everybody right like cross-faced just fucking you know chicken wing and just just hooking everybody and rolling them around in the in his front yard right that was it right then he goes in the house. Y'all come back a couple other days. So this goes on for weeks. And every time I show up, there's one less guy that shows up. Until I was the last one there. So I'm the last one there.

I knock on the door. Knock on the door. 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. He was just teaching you wrestling. He was just teaching me. Yeah, obviously we signed up for, you know, to get to teach us how to pro wrestle. But he just came out there and his whole goal,

and this is the way it was back then, is they always tried 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, and 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 there's some wrestling trainers that were famous for like crazy physical training standards before they ever taught you anything like carl gotch oh yeah you know carl gotch is carl gotch who is uh not just a wrestler but one of the he's like one of the legends of catch wrestling catch wrestling is like uh so it's a lot like submission wrestling that you see in the u in the ufc or in jiu jitsu but it's a very like wrestling oriented so instead of like whereas jiu jitsu maybe would be i don't want to say it's less technical but it's more violent like it's a lot of snapping people down and cross-facing and guillotines and ten-finger guillotines and there's still a lot of like um sakuraba was like one of the

legends of mma learned yeah from uh another catch wrestler in japan and a lot of guys who like josh barnett is another one who's a big uh catch wrestling uh 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 be able to do, 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 that was the whole goal was to run you off, you know, weed out the weak. Weed out the weak. Yeah. And then if you went through all of that and you were still there, okay, well this kid, you know, let's see what he, you know,

let's see if we can teach him how to do this. But there was that big weed out process and that was, you know, I think Buzz's whole deal, his whole deal was a scam from the start. He wanted the money, and he knew. Back then, we had territories. Before Vince kind of took it nationwide, Texas had a territory. California had a couple of territories.

Oregon. And guys just went for it. $2,000 in 86 is a lot of fucking money. That's a lot of money for a kid in college on a scholarship. I didn't have shit. I sold everything I owned. So you're fucked. How do you go from there?

So I lived in my car for a little bit, bounced in bars, collected a little money here and there. I just did whatever I could just to keep you know, keep eating and, and keep training and, and, and did what I did, what I could. And I knew, so the Von Erichs ran Dallas. That was their, that was their, their hub world, 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. And eight months... Did you and just sat there. And eight months.

Did you ask to speak to anybody? Yeah, so there was a referee back there. His name was Bronco Lubitsch, who's 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. Lubitsch. I was hoping maybe I'd get a chance to talk to somebody today. All right, well, just good luck. And I would sit there. And 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, they ever stopped. 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. And I started to, once again, I started to get up and introduce myself. And he turned around, and he went into Bronco's office. And he had a deep, gravelly voice and I could hear him.

And he's like, he's like, who's that kid out there? And he's, he's been coming here for months. He's just trying to get booked. And I heard, 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, 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. Practicing. Yeah, but I'd never had a real match. Right. I mean, I'm just, you know, every little little outlaw independent kind of deal that i could get i was doing but i hadn't worked with top guys or you know when you say like outlaw independent like

so you were doing some matches i was doing some matches but not not professional like not televised not for for a real company right like it's just like some jackass, like, 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'd have to go for no money, and then you'd set up the ring, whatever you had to do. But the wrestling, the time in the ring was what was so valuable at that point

is getting those reps and getting that stuff. So, and then, so they booked me and, uh, I don't know if you've heard of bruiser Brody. Yes. Yes. Tough guy. Uh, anybody's standards back then especially is my first match. Right. So I'm a pretty respectful guy, and I'm sure in any industry, even 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. business. You know, you just, you didn't say much. You spoke when spoken to kind of deal. And, uh, so I, I'm bruiser Brody bruiser Brody's my first professional match. Right. So I don't know. I'm 20, 21 maybe. And, uh, I'm, you know, 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 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 at that stupid voice in the back of my head. It's 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 a man. He was an animal, right? So, fucking bell rings and i flew my tie up with him collar and elbow and you know i jam him up into a corner you know hey kid lighten up a little bit kid you know relax but 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, you know, 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, and 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 6'5", 300-pound bullet, and he kicks me square in my fucking jaw. My eyes roll back in my head, 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 this 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, you know, that was it. We go back, you know, 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 being in the ring with you. And I went back off in my corner to kind of gather where I was. 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's going to be something. But 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. 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, who knows where you would have gone?

Yeah, I would have probably tried to make a team somewhere but i don't you know i don't think that would have lasted because i wasn't real you know i mean i was limited i mean i wasn't you know 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 i mean do you ever think about that i think about it all the time one dude was like your doorway yeah 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 to and sat in that lobby for eight months. Eight months. And it was at the end. I was like, fuck, this is getting me nowhere. And then just one day. That is what people need to hear, man.

In this day and age, everybody wants everything to happen right away. Yeah. You know? 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 yeah and you know i tell people you know yeah i was i was living in my car yeah you know sometimes i could stay with my brother but there was a lot of nights i had to sleep in a in

a in a monte carlo with fucking you know it's six foot eight and 315 pounds is not real comfortable but 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, there's 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? 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. Really? 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 our place in orlando right here well you, 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. I mean, we send guys to

the combine now, the NFL combine. Really? And, you know, they sit there and talk. Who's going to make it? Who's not going to make it? And we get, yeah, we send, we go all over the world now. They went, they recruit in China, the Middle East, everywhere. You know, everywhere we have TV programming, which makes sense as well.

They're looking for that hometown star. Like when we go to, like if we go to Saudi or somewhere in Dubai or someplace 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 look like an enormous hobbit. Yeah. Yeah, we can take that down anytime. So, so i go there and uh i was about i was there about eight or nine months and uh my contract was coming up and i go i go in to renegotiate my contract and they were like look you're a great athlete kid but no one's ever gonna pay money to watch you wrestle like i look, you're a great athlete, kid, but no one's ever going to pay money to watch you wrestle. 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. Now we're going to give you the same deal for a year. I mean, 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 WW in the W that was WWF at the times, WWE now. And, um, I had a match coming up and my hip was already bad at that point, even back then. Yeah. It got much worse, but I was already limping. And, uh, 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 watching work, you know.

So Vince watches me work, and I'm calm. Like, I'm, you know, 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's Vince's house like?

Fuck, are you kidding me? It's nice. It's fucking nice. Where does he live in? He's in Connecticut, man. So you're in Connecticut. Yeah, Greenwich. 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. And this is...

There's a lot of... Does he have a butler? Butler? I know there's a lot of. Does he have a butler? Butler? I know he had a housekeeper. I would imagine there'd be a dude with a British accent in front of the door. I never saw him. His sleeves are just ripped. Yeah, right.

You had to be. Everybody's jacked. It works for rips. But 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 his living room, and he goes, well, Mark, you got any hidden talents?

You know, other than wrestling, do you do anything know and i'm trying to be funny and not nervous and oh well you know i was sitting in the shower pretty good and as soon as i said it right i'm like oh i shouldn't have said that i'm gonna be i'm gonna be shower guys you know something something silly right shower yeah i'm gonna have to say you know and i'm thinking and i'm like oh i should not have said that right and then i'm like i'm kidding you know i'm gonna have to say you know and i'm thinking and i'm like oh i should not have said that right and then i'm like i'm kidding you know i'm trying to clear the air right away i'm just kidding i can't sing not you know and you know he's got the look right and he knows how you know he can read people and he's like really no i can't i can't so i got this long meeting and

i 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 and uh anyway so one day uh it's getting it's getting close to thanksgiving and uh they start doing this promotion where they've got this giant fucking egg have you? Oh, yeah, the gobbledygook. The gobbledygooker, right? What? So we do a pay-per-view around Thanksgiving. It's called Survivor Series. So this year, this particular year, it's 1990.

They're going to... 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. I'm going to be, now I've gone from shower guy.

Now I think I'm going to be Eggman, right? Fuck, I'm going to have to, you know, I'm trying to grow my hair out. And I said, fuck, he's going to make me shave my head. I might shave my eyebrows. I'm going to be fucking Eggman. Oh, and I'm a nervous wreck, right?

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 and Eggman. Fuck, Undertaker. That in 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

and wow and uh I said yeah yeah I'm the Undertaker because I knew it wasn't Eggman and everything had to be better than Eggman. It wasn't Singing the Shower Guy.

Yeah, it 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 had just never found the guy. He had had it for years, I guess. So why did he send you away the first time? When you went to his house? Well, he didn't have, 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. He needed a guy that 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, you know, 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. Yeah, he's wearing some hot yoga pants yes you know i mean you know that guy had a parrot on his shoulder when he came to the ring did he yeah right was it a parrot yeah yeah frankie how does one do a pile driver and not hurt your opponent this is the guy to ask

yeah um you i mean you gotta it's a way you grab me you got to be actually you just got to be strong enough to support their body to support their body and and the the key for me is when my knees start i'm i'm kind of pulling them up uh so it's kind of like a shock absorber. Ideally, the head never touches. Did you ever see the fight between Bob Sapp and Minotaur Noguera in Pride? Yeah, I did. Ruined that guy for the rest of his career. Bob Sapp actually pile-drived him. Bob Sapp was 375 with abs.

Yeah, he was a freak. Yeah, and he pile-drived Noguera, who was at the time the heavyweight champion. Yeah. It's crazy. Rampage suplexed some guys. Oh, my God. Arona. Ricardo Arona.

Oh, my gosh. 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. And Rampage picked him up like a pillow. You know, like you would hit your little brother over the head with a pillow?

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. Yeah. Similar way. Yeah, she didn't let go. Yeah, exactly.

Dropped on her head. Yeah, you got to let go. When you get picked up in a triangle, you got to let go. Or you got to hook a leg. It's hard to... I think for fighters, us, I mean, it's part of 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 secure triangle. 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. Right. But you got to. Yeah, especially when you're looking over the top of the cage, something ain't right. Especially when the rampage was so fucking strong.

Yeah. 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 greek god he was a killer yeah but that one slam changed his whole career he was never the same again yeah it's it was nasty that was really nasty yeah so in when in wrestling like the amount of trust that guy has to have in you is off the charts. Yeah, it really is. You know, 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, you know, 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 day you're two inches away from something catastrophic happening in it and it is I mean it just

it's that 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 right and I think I think a lot of people that you know that 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'm sure.

I mean, you have to be, you know. I mean, I've lost both eye sockets. But one was just because the guy was completely out of shape. There's a lot of similarities. One's a sporting event and 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, the guy was out of shape. He was 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, Jesus.

Just blew 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 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. Wow. Yeah. 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 like so i wrestled three more days but every time shattered face with my my orbital socket blown out so i wrestled three more days right and uh and it's as stupid as it sounds it's just it's 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. They were tough guys. And I think so I work, and me and the Godfather, he's another wrestler, great dude. We were going to meet up after the showfather, 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 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 just 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 he goes uh he says do you have an ophthalmologist and i was like no he goes well you need to find one and uh you're gonna need a surgeon too i'm like we talking about he goes one and uh you're gonna need a surgeon too i'm like what are you talking about he goes you've lost 50 of your orbital floor is gone like really i'm like okay so i go home i'll call and say look i gotta 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 percent of it jesus so they end up doing the surgery two surgeons one two so they 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 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 if i took another shot to that side of my head i'd have probably lost the eye 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. And so what do they put back there? The mesh? It's a, it's a, so my other eye that I did, they have, it's titanium, but this is, it's, it's a, it's a, it's not titanium, but it's kind of a wire mesh that's just 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?

Nothing? Never. Holy shit. The second one, my right side 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 yeah but uh he jumped off the top rope and his i don't know i mean i should know i should know what the move is but I don't know. 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. Oh, wow. But you're good, man. Jamie, you're fucking good.

Wow. And you still fought your way out of it. So that was me grabbing it I was I was I was straightening my nose out oh yeah and oh yeah run on your nose oh Jesus Christ so I grabbed my nose right away I could feel that it was way over to the side so I squeezed it back straight but there was three of him oh and uh so that one it was just way back in the cone it it blew out the back end of it it wasn't as severe as the first one but after the second one left me with double vision. Like if I try to, like if I look peripherally, like you become opaque. Like I see two, 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? Just the way the nerve was pressed. When the fracture happened, it pressed the nerve for too long, and it never kind of 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 it because that's, I mean, I've got to literally turn my body so that I can get my head straight, you know. Wow.

So I can see straight. Because if you turn your eye too far. Yeah, everything, it just kind of, instead of that image, I got that image that image wow that had to certainly affect you in the ring a lot too after yeah yeah that and then you know then i have no uh super spinatus either none none it's completely severed when did that happen well it was a progression of a lot of tears. The last tear I was working, I think, maybe around 2010, I was working with Kane, who's just a big, big dude. 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. 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, he goes, 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, you know, let me get through mania. I said, just, you know, give me the shot. And then 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, 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 says, well, fact, Mark, it's so bad, I want you to go see somebody else. I want you to see a shoulder specialist. So I go see Dr. Andrews. I want you to go see somebody else. I want you to see a shoulder specialist. So I go see Dr. Andrews. Yeah, you know, Dr. Andrews is like the, you know, he's the guy that 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 doctors, he's sitting there and he's looking at me and I'm looking at him like, cause I'm, I'm a little taken back that he's already in the room.

Right. And I, you know, and we're looking at each other. Nobody says anything. And he goes, son, he goes, I don't know if there's anything I can do for you. He had obviously already seen my MRI and everything. He goes, 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? Yeah. He said, can you lift to the side? No. Yeah, I can lift to the side.

He goes, there's no reasonable explanation why you're able to do that. 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, I need to think about this. I'm like, well, yeah, I'm in Birmingham. Like, you know, what am I going to do? I got nothing else to do. You know, I got to find out what I, you know, what's going on with his shoulder. So we meet back in an hour and he goes, 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. Wow. And even with that, I'm thinking, well, that's James Andrews, right? Surely he's going to fix it. You know, he's just being humble. So I have the surgery. I wake up out of surgery, and my wife is, you know, she's right there. I can look on her face, I could tell it wasn't good.

I was like, babe. About that time, Dr. Andrews comes in. He goes, well, we found it. I was like, you found it? He goes, yeah. The end of the supraspinatus was about back here. He says, we clamped on and we pulled, we tugged. And he said, we might've 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 did it, was it torn before you went to talk to him? Well, that was when it, 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 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 in relation to whatever it is i'm doing like i had there was a lot of things like tombstones like

i had to i had to change how you know 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 mean i had to you know 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 mean I had to you know I need that I had to have like my my arm almost supported by my lat to to do a lot of different moves and there's no other option like they can't do a cadaver well it would and what what you know and the that I do and we do it would have tore and that's he told me that he said we could have tried a cadaver well it was and what what you know and the shit that i do and we do it would have tore and that's he told me that he said we could have tried a cadaver he says it's not gonna it's not gonna last if you want to wrestle and at that point i had no i like i've been doing it this

long with it hurt i'll figure out a way you know i wasn't ready to i wasn't ready to give it up yet and uh so i waited a couple years and then I call, uh, uh, I called Dr. Dugas and I said, doc, cause he assisted on, 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's. 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 well he goes plan a no that didn't work which would have to re-touch 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, 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,

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, uh,

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 as three times as strong as i was before i had the surgery wow yeah it's crazy yeah i'm like a lab project that's an interesting one i know a fighter who's got no super spinatus i think in both of his shoulders. Yeah, it's done wonders. I mean, I can bench. I mean, everything's got to be in tight.

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. And 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 or was it no he he had he was already the i mean he was the guy yeah yeah he was right right in the middle of it yeah i mean it was they were talking about him fighting in 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 One. 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. Yeah. Well, it looks like he's got atrophy of his arms. Yeah. His neck. Yeah, his neck. And his neck's 23 inches.

His neck looks enormous. Yeah. But when I see a guy that I know has neck problems, you see his arms look smaller. One of the things that happens to guys like it happened to boss rutin uh he got his discs fused in his neck um his arm atrophied like he wasn't getting the nerve signals to his muscles so he has his right arm he calls it baby arm yeah so it's smaller it's like it's very weak like i don't know how much it's recovered but at one point in time like

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 you 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 and you know jesus i mean his neck's always just yeah look at that neck he could go man yeah i really 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 that. The muscles in that thing. But, I mean, obviously a lot of that is probably to compensate the fact that he's got a snapped neck. He could go, man. What an athlete. Wow. Oh, yeah.

And Brock, too. Both of them. Phenomenal. Angle in his prime as a wrestler. He was a fucking savage. Yeah, he was a beast. Yeah, I mean, as an amateur wrestler in the Olympics. I mean, he was a phenomenal talent.

Yeah. Yeah, he was. And then he transitioned so well. Mm-hmm. Yeah. 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 give. There's another kind where you grab somebody and you put their head like a – you put your head in their crotch. There it is right there. Oh, my God. Look at his head. See where his head's going to land. like uh you put your your head in their crotch there it is right there oh my god his head's gonna land oh my god with all the weight of both people jesus christ yeah just seeing that makes me shiver just seeing that image you know for the sake of entertainment man crazy way to make a living it is a crazy way to make a

living now uh take into account what you were talking about before when you were doing that 270 nights a year yeah that is year round i mean there's no off season there's no i mean it just goes it's episodic tv now especially we do live tv every monday every friday um 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 just you know and you didn't think anything about it you just thought it was actually when you get into that you don't want come, you don't want to come off the road. Really? Yeah. It just fucks everything up. You know, it's just like more than like four or five days. Like, especially when you back in the early night, you get hurt and you're home, you know, six, seven, eight weeks, you're, 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. 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 yeah you know you're you're competing to be the top guy or you're competing for your place on the card so it is and and you know in that sense of competition and an important one tony it's gotta 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 take a lot of – 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 get – it would summon like 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,

uh, he was, uh, 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, you know, I was like learning about death from this man. Like, I didn't know you went into a casket after you were dead you're seven years old you don't know that yet like 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 like a 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 a uh one of those suit bags

that zip up and like me and my buddies we would have these fake wrestling matches as kids and then we would body bag matches we would yeah we would zip up the suit thing and pretend like we're dead afterwards like it was like all these things was were a part of my childhood like was that you some of you some of vince like yeah so vince vince had the original likeness and then you know after a couple years i mean it it had kind of taken over. I lived that. 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 in all black. I didn't say much to people. Because you had to stay in character? I always stayed in character. much to people um because you had to stay in character i always stayed in character i always felt like i had i always felt like that i needed to be what they saw on tv because if they saw me differently like if they saw this right and then they see that on tv it's like oh 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. But he's fucked up. Something's wrong. There's something's wrong. There's something. Right. And it captivated,

you know, to stay and I pat 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, um, you know,

to, to make that guy continue to mean something does it feel almost weird for you to be doing like a podcast crazy absolutely crazy so it started you know i i did a i did a docuseries kind of chronicling the the last few years of my career it was actually me trying to come to grips with calling it a day really it? It's called come on scooting this way into the microphone. 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 like the last few years of my career and the, and me kind of chasing the dragon for that, that one match that I could hang my hat on and say, that's it.

That's it. You know, and it, and as you get older and the injuries and all that, I don't, I don't, I mean, I, I, 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 said, 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 there was lots there were 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 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 but also that's a that's a huge intellectual property for vince 30 years you know so he didn't you know i could go out for another few years and you know i could knock somebody on their ass or i could choke slam somebody, but I can't do it personally. Right. I can't because I know there's so many guys that are coming up that are trying to get that spot. And, you know, I can't go out there and, okay, I got all this equity built up from all these years. I'm just going to, you know, I'm 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, he looked like he was in his 50s. Yeah. 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 the claw right yeah yeah and he's i mean 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 with vince i stayed with vince where a lot of guys you know they would they would jump from one promotion to the other and i stayed once i got there. I was there. And, you know. 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 April. The Boneyard was April. April 2020. Yeah, right here. There it is.

It's a nice bike. Yeah, that's a West Coast chopper right there. It's a nice bike. Yeah, that's a West Coast chopper right there. The bike actually belonged to Garth Brooks' security guy. But 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 uh kind of themed match they turned this whole area into like a

cemetery and uh got to do a lot of theatrical stuff and so that must have felt like i can hang my hat on this one 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 because 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 had to get to Florida just to make sure, you know, that I was in Florida. Right. Yeah, because 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. 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 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.

Maybe mentor some guys, but, you know, I haven't, I got to find out what I'm passionate about, you know, and still, you know, earn a living. Like, I want to, right now my goal is like 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 and doing all that. 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, you know, I've thought about it, and I don't want it to be a job job. I understand. I just enjoy it too much, and I'd hate to lose the fact, like, I don't want it to be a job job i understand i i just i enjoy it too much and i'd hate to lose like the fact like i don't want to go hunting i don't want to go you know right so but i mean i'm open to whatever um but uh what kind of hunting do you do what is your thing well i've always been i've always been a rifle because i've had limited time so you know

setting a stand and you know wait for a white tail to come stick its head out uh this year i bought uh i just bought my first brand new bow uh this year i didn't get to i didn't get to shoot a deer austin has a very good archery yeah archery country is fantastic yeah really good yeah i uh had an issue with uh my bow uh just a few weeks before uh i went to 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. So I had to get it tightened up again and get the poundage put back on. Yeah.

They did an amazing job. Yeah. Archery is, and I just found that out, that Austin's a real, 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 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 you know would get my draw oh i could help you with that yeah john dudley's pretty close to your size he's six five i believe yeah six five six six something what's his draw mine mine is 32 i think yeah mine's 33 almost 33 and a half oh they make them for guys like you yeah i mean it's just uh you just have to get the right cams and, you know, have someone who like 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, that's, that's where my, I think that's what I'm passionate about. Cause that's the one thing,

like it's always been that carrot dangling. Like, okay, once that career is over, right. You know, you're, you're,

you're, you're, 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 you know you're you're you're you're free you're free you're gonna do this and you're gonna do that but i mean that's not the way life works i mean you still need to you know i still need to be productive and do different things you know i work with a lot of uh yeah i love working with the veterans um you know i work with these guys nine line i do stuff with them um it kind of, I'm just really passionate about people that have served our country. Um, yeah, yeah. I think, like I said earlier, like if I

hadn't have made it here, that's probably what I would have done. And like, I think about it sometimes, like, I think it may be my only regret. Like I wish I had served, you know? Um, because I guess, cause I'm surrounded by so many of those guys now and getting to meet guys like, you know, Oz and Tig from Benghazi and Latrell, all those guys. You know, it's just, man, I'm just, I can sit and listen to listen to stories you know all day long from those guys yeah Latrell and I have been talking about him coming on here he's a good dude

he's a real good dude he's one of those guys like he's so laid back but you can tell you can look at him and you can tell like 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 you know yeah he been through some shit.

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. But that's the kind of people.

I appreciate that. Yeah, I don't think we can do enough for people that put their life. 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.

Yeah, he's a fucking maniac, right? I love him. Yeah, he'll send me text messages out of the blue. Just stay hard. I'm like, okay. I was going to go soft, out of the blue just stay hard okay i was gonna go soft i'm trading i'm trading my ass off right now but i i enjoyed his book so it was so good yeah he's a 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 eating fucking, drinking milkshakes and shit. And he was way overweight and couldn't run at all and just decided that 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, you're going to fuck. Why don't everybody go to his Instagram page? I find a good one. I repost it on my page all the time. Yeah, it's good shit.

He'll have some that literally will make me go up and work out. Like maybe I'm not even thinking about working out. Or 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.

That's his wife and she's driving. She's got the phone out the window and she's driving. A lot of motherfuckers will tell you! But no excuses, right? There there he is give me some volume of this this guy makes me feel like a bitch every day was the 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 look at them eye to eye and make them your bitch. Mindset's the only thing that gets you through hard times. Merry fucking Christmas. That's awesome. That's awesome, man. No excuses. He's a national treasure that man that man is a national

treasure yeah that's make him your bitch okay yeah this shit that's this good shit yeah but well 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 like 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. Okay. Appreciate that, Dave. All right. And his body gets beat the fuck up too man he 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 a lot of you motherfuckers thought i was gonna go soft i bet you hoping oh dave you fucked up your knees you can't run no more like look at this look at this thing they're pulling out of his his knee like look at that thing do you see that that's a syringe full of 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 a different one they're getting another syringe

another one to fill it up because it's 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, 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 of days after that, he's running again. Ha, ha, ha, motherfuckers. That's crazy, man. 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. More warriors. There's you know you need to know like 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 you need to know you know there's no 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 preaches. He stays hard. He doesn't need to work for 12 bucks an hour. He does it cause it's hard. Yeah. When he was telling me that on the podcast, I'm like, what?

Cause yeah, smoke jump. He just, he just, he just jumps out of fucking helicopters with a parachute to fight fires with a, with a shovel and camps out there. Like those guys, that's a hard,

that's a hard fucking job. And and but he does it just to be just to stay hard that's fucking awesome man i feel like shit i mean he'll do that too but the people like that are they're valuable they really are with all these weak people in this world a weak entitled people and this is the you know this is 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. It was just a little too, there's too many soft people out there complaining. That's a 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 like seems like we kind of have to go through that it's like even though you know

these cycles exist you know like the hindus they they wrote about it like years ago like it's they called them the yugas the different cycles of civilization and we're we're in kali yuga which is like the age of confusion is that what like what is the the exact term of kali yuga but it's chaos and and everything's falling apart that's what we're in right now and people have been predicting that we were 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 of it. Full on. Tomorrow's the inauguration. And I'm like, oh, my God, I don't even want to fucking leave the house. No. You have to get a buddy to land around the perimeter and just make sure well they said gun sales were all-time high yesterday people were just going crazy buying guns you can't yeah 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 i mean i that's what it's like yeah absolutely yeah that's what it's like it's crazy i walk in there it's just like fucking tumbleweed rolling through yeah i'm lucky i know people that like work uh in gun manufacture i can buy gun uh bullets off of them because if you try to go to a regular store and just buy like nine millimeter or something for an ar or a wind mag like 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. All right, 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. That's an excellent welcome. That's a Texas welcome right there. But we'll have to take you to the range. Yeah. Take you to a place. You've shot a gun before? Yeah.

How many times? A lot when I was younger, but I mean, I don't know, maybe like 10, 15 times. Oh, okay. Yeah. So you know which way to point it. Yeah, for sure. All right. Yeah.

We'll set you up. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be good for you, too. It's fun. Yeah. 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 a hell of a maniac.

Yeah. I used to watch him train over here at Onnit. He's a psycho, too. Oh, yeah. He's a bad motherfucker. Again, 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 uh early days so did brian stan you know a lot of the uh 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 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. Yeah.

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? Yeah. No, it's not. It's, you know, like when you hear a guy like Dominic Cruz or Daniel Cormier or something like that, I mean, just because you're a great fighter,

it doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a great commentator. Like 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. 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 don't know. I'm trying to think. Oh, he's fighting them all. 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 trying to think what fight it was.

Oh, 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? Yeah.

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 Benil – and 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, wah! We're leaning back and DC's leaning on 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 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 was it was wild man it was wild i mean it was just here's the exchange jakar like i mean look man a lot of people would have been out it was incredible and then once he had your car closed he hit him or hurt rather he hit him with that beautiful left hand and drops him and we were just going ape shit but i just love working with dc period because he's that's the picture that's like a famous picture that's awesome there's uh there's one where we're all green and they gave

us like alien antennas and it's the aliens watching earth 2020 like the series finale of earth 2020 like you know dc's he's such a big kid. Like, you would never believe, like my wife said it best, like, she met him for the first time pretty recently and she was like,

he's so nice. Yeah. You would never believe that he is like one of the baddest fucking people to ever compete in the sport.

Two division world champion, heavyweight champion, light heavyweight champion, elite wrestler. Yeah. Fucking savage. Literally the only guy to ever beat him is john jones and stipe two other complete total savages yeah he's such a cool guy i remember

i was i'm positive it was the first time i ever saw you guys commentate together and you know you guys were like getting ready or whatever and uh he's like hey man you know 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 yeah just like such a down-to-earth guy and then you see him in the octagon at the highest level one of the smartest fighters yeah i mean i mean knocked out steep amy otridge i mean what i mean he didn't see that one coming he's a fucking tank of a man too. You know because he's only like 5'10 but he's like 5'10 wide you know just

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. And funny. It's hard to be funny when you're a fighter. You got the stigma on you already like okay he's gonna be a dick. It's hard to be funny when you're a fighter. It just is. You get the stigma on you 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. Like, 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 Max Holloway 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...

That was amazing. No problems with his cardio at all. I mean, that pace will cripple a person. It's just, he's superhuman. It was like a superhuman performance. I really want to talk to him about what the fuck he does for cardio. Yeah. He should give seminars.

Because I just don't understand. I don't understand how he can keep that volume up. And you could see, like, 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, I mean, was wobbled on multiple occasions and covered up and was still swinging,

was still trying to win. God, what a fight. That was great. What, I mean, what a fight. That was great. 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. Yeah. It was a real good fight, though, still. It was still, yeah. That just shows you how 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. Yeah. Because, you know, that he could beat him in the first fight and then, you know, 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. Like, a lot of guys that make this mistake, they think, I want to hit this guy, so I'm going to go at him and hit him. Straight in.

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.

You never, it'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 got him figured out, boom, spinning back kick. Like, fuck.

It was a clinic. It was absolute clinic. And you've always been a huge MMAma fan right oh yeah i i think you're you were you had to be one of the first people to really start bringing those elements into the ww yeah i started to yeah i used uh i mean hell's gate is what a triangle no no no it's a uh a goga plata yeah I just changed the name. Yeah. 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 Liddell was on the way up. I think Randy was the champ. So this is like 2003 or something. Early. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Go-go-plata. something. Early, yeah. There you go. There you go.

Goa Plata. 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. Yeah.

Have you trained much jiu-jitsu? Like actual jiu-jitsu? I used to. We like actual jujitsu i used to we used to have a funny enough we used to have a ref that uh he i'd get in and roll with him and uh man i would i would get there early and just pick his brain and by the time it was shows i'd be i'd just be exhausted but you know um but i was but then you know and i did it because, you know. But then, you know, and I did it because I was such a fan of it. I like to understand. 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 playing boy was i terrible at it um but phil baroni did color so it was me and phil baroni 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 and 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. What I, my role is pretty easy. Like,

if you understand fighting, there's a lot going on. Yeah. You just have to know who's fighting, and, you know, I'm such a fan, I'm watching everything,

so I'm paying attention. I remember the fight because Tank, Tank Abbott, found me, and, man, he wasn't even

sitting anywhere close to me, but he spent the, he spent the fight with me. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, 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 L.A. at a bar. 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 issues some health issues yeah i wouldn't doubt that yeah for all the the booze and yeah but uh yeah yeah big fight went to uh i quit going to lesnar's fight so every time i'd go he'd get it he'd lose but uh sure yeah i was a jinx right 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's fight.

Oh. When he came back from that fibroticulitis thing. That was not the Velasquez fight. That was Alistair Overeem. Alistair Overeem was the diverticulitis fight yeah okay yeah but so yeah so i was at the i was at the velasquez fight yeah yeah so he had diverticulitis already when he fought but he doesn't know like when he had it or how long he had it for the the scary one was him coming back from having i mean i think he had like 12

inches of his intestines removed and then he fought alistair over him like not that long later like less than a year later and alistair kicked him in the body right in the liver yeah 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 over him when he was fighting go to the the weigh-in with alistair over him when he's fighting brock lesnar it is the most preposterous physique in the history of the sport i I mean, if you think like Yoel Romero has a ridiculous physique,

Alistair Overeem, when they used to call him Uber Eem, 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 right there they see the word related images 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 what are you fucking talking about are you out of your mind that is a preposterous physique that's uh yeah so

that's Alistair when he fought Brock and just he mean he has small children living in his biceps this size he's fucking biceps and he just smashed Brock it was just Brock really shouldn't have been fighting yeah no he came back way too major surgery and you know his trainers they they were concerned you know like 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 yeah you know diverticulitis 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 jams up and clogs up. Yeah. And they don't totally understand it either. No. Mm-hmm.

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 not a fuck no what are you smoking never mind what are you fucking crazy so you were there to pick a wwe yeah yeah um yeah that's this is my wife you didn't let her in huh you didn't let her in on it no she she knows what's

going on but she's still like does she play it off yeah she's she's a worker too she knows she gets it yeah i was on ariel's show and he asked me about it right but uh did anybody ever off you in an mma fight because like when cm punk had gone in and then you know alistair and or excuse me uh brock and there's a few other guys that were circling it yeah no so fuck i'm it's too late in the game for me. If MMA and UFC had probably taken off sooner, I might have. But fuck, it took a while for the UFC to come mainstream. Right.

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. I think it was like Ronda Rousey.

Yeah. Those years, like the Ronda Rousey. Yeah. Those years, like the Ronda Rousey. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think it went SportsCenter and everybody kind of started like, because they tried to stay away from it as long as they could. Yeah. And, you know, but once SportsCenter came in, ESPN and those guys, and it was like, oh, fuck.

Yeah. Because I think, you know, there's some people, like, in the MMA world, like all Ariel's fans, they just kill him. Like when he interviews me, why you got the fake-ass bullshit wrestlers on there, right? And I'm like, you know, 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 like because they didn't understand most people didn't understand what it was yet so really early on like early on i and i think i think there's that stigma that that mma was was it kind of is it like wrestling you know and everybody's like fuck no it's not like wrestling it's you know this is a fucking shoot so i think there's a you, you know, if you get it, you get it, you know, what we do. But I think that stigma of, like, is MMA pro wrestling? And it's not even so much the fighters as it is the fans, you know. Most of them ain't thrown a punch or got hit by a punch.

They get all up in arms. Why you get that fake wrestler on there I dude yeah you can't worry about those people no I don't worry about them I mean don't judge me for what I do you know yeah I know yeah you know it's like don't read it don't read the comments but it's just like what do you think about uh what uh David Arquette's doing what's he doing I don't know David Arquette is like I know he is I don't in wrestling right now oh yeah and they just did a documentary about him yeah and it's great I saw what is it called oh geez man I can't remember it I can't remember the title of it but I watched it he did some stuff but is it Jamie you cannot kill David Arquette 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 really, really into it now. I mean, that's mostly what he does these days. He's doing a lot of pro wrestling. Really? And he's super dedicated to it, apparently.

I know that he... Look, he gets busted the fuck up. Jesus Christ. 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 them and so it goes into that a lot they're like oh david arquette thinks he's gonna come come and show us. Show us, yeah. That mentality is kind of going away, I think. Is it? Yeah. Back in the day, when I broke in and the guys before me, fucking wrestling is bullshit.

It's fucking go time, right? Right. Yeah, it's like, because you had to defend. Remember that famous excuse me famous video with John Stossel oh you got the slapped out of who was it uh uh David Schultz right slapped the dog out of him like hard and was that fake yeah was that fake yeah yeah uh yeah but that was the mentality back then like well it was also the way he was talking about it was pretty disrespectful yeah saying it in a way like he was immune to getting hurt oh he slaps the dog

out of him let me hear this give me some more in the camera reading he ain't in it reading these rednecks out here ain't in it because it's a tough business that's terrific wait is that all you got i'll ask you the standard question. Standard question. I think this is fake. You think it's fake? What's that? Is that fake? Huh?

What the hell's wrong with you? That's open hand slap, huh? You think it's fake? You're talking... 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. Like, you don't say, I'll tell you what, I think it's fake. Yeah. You don't have to, you know, you don't have, 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 got blackballed from a few places, I think.

Yeah? Yeah, it wouldn't touch him. Because of that? It's unfortunate, because he was taken up for his business. Well, not only that i mean what great publicity yeah yeah i mean the same thing with you need to stop that david right give him a little slap on the old wrist yeah yeah and come on i mean what do you listen yeah you shouldn't go around smacking reporters also reporters shouldn't talk so disrespectfully to a gigantic savage yeah

exactly you know yeah and that and that era guys too you know those were men yeah you go into a dressing room nowadays and you it's it's it's a lot different i remember walking into my first real dressing room and i also were some crusty men? Like half of them had guns and knives in their bags. And, 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. I don't know what it is but i just prefer i don't know i just 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 when you came through that era when you see people that have it easier you go like when you know you think about those days you spent rolling around on the grass in front of that dude's house with his face cranking you. I do. I think about that often.

I was like, fuck. 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 it. You know, I didn't give me shortcuts and nothing was given to me.

Yeah. You know, I can be proud of that if, you know, nothing else. Do you think it would feel the same way if you went through, like, 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 are like, fuck, I've got to go to the performance center and train. 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. 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 his dogs? He just left them? Just left them. Oh, my God. They got good homes. Well, you took them. I left them. Oh, my God. They got good homes. Well, you took them. I took them.

Oh, that's great. Yeah. I was like... I mean, 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, fuck, I'm out two grand.

I hadn't learned anything but some amateur wrestling. I was like, fuck that. I'm taking these dogs. I hadn't learned anything but some amateur wrestling. I was like, fuck that. I'm taking these dogs. 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 like I said, Buzz, he was a tough guy.

He was a good amateur. He said, fuck, why are you staring at me? I said, you don't know who I am, do you? He goes, who the fuck should i i was like yeah you probably should you took two thousand dollars it was my money you should probably know who i am yeah he's kind of fucking squinting at me like what do you want to fucking do so i don't need to do anything i got my money so how do you have your dogs? Like, the fight is like, you took my dogs? I was like, yeah, I took your fucking dogs.

You fucking left me. He was like, well, fuck, what do you want to do? I'm good, man. I'm all good. At that point, you know, I'm still a fucking greenhorn, right? He's a veteran. And I'm like yeah i'd probably got my ass kicked you know he'd probably took me down and

you know put me out but i'm thinking like hmm but there you know there's always like you know here i am trying to get my foot in the door and you know do i fight this guy and get fired right out of the get-go right right and I remember one night I had a chance and I, I don't know. Sometimes I think about, I should have took it. I was looking out my hotel window and this, this hotel,

there was a waffle house and I was looking out my window and I could, 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 could tell, you know, he's bobbing and fucking i'm thinking fuck i could go hide behind a car right now and just fucking tee off on him no one no one would care right and no one would know so i'm having this battle with myself it's like three in the morning like fuck yeah i think

fuck no don't do it don't do it don't do it good fucking do it yeah I didn't do it because I that's how people die yeah it's how people fucking really you know and there'd have been me on camera somewhere and he yeah he owed me 2,000 bucks but I did get his dogs and now he's dead I'm sorry everything worked out all right I guess yeah um have you ever tried Dallasallas diamond pages uh yoga i have not and you know what i'm actually contemplating giving dallas a call you should give him a call because 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 and he really

helped jake the snake yeah but his his whole system his DDP yoga, he doesn't even like calling it yoga. He likes to call it just DDP. Yeah. Because it is yoga. I mean, he's doing yoga moves, but he adds some dynamic tension to them and a bunch of other things. I mean, that guy is fit as fuck. Yeah, in his 60s. He's in his 60s? I think he's in his 60s fuck. Yeah, he's 60.

He's in his 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, like, 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 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 like a lot of guys wind up getting their shit fused he just really got into yoga and and helps a lot of

people with it too and there's amazing uh success stories on his website where you see there was this one guy in particular who was overweight and he was he had to walk around on crutches and at the end of the video the guy's running you know like a couple of years of him training him and and adjusting his diet and then you know this constant daily dedication to that yoga yeah my wife's been on me she says you need to call him or you know she don't even have to call him I was like well if I want to do it I need to I need to you know I need to talk to him just how to do it I need to do it because he's such a great guy, too. He's such a great guy.

Yeah, he's another one of those guys that, you know, positive energy. Yes. Makes you feel better just being around him. He's also, he, like, does so much for other people. Like, he really does love helping other people. Likes helping them get clean, clean their act up, and then get their body in shape and get fit you know he has a whole house in dallas that's dedicated or it's was he in atlanta i think he's in atlanta yeah yeah he has a whole house in atlanta where he keeps people that you know like that are trying to get their shit together he helps guys out yeah i should i

get me i got 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. I don't know if you ever saw TK.

Is that from Black Swan Yoga? Noan yoga no no no there's those guys tk stretching man it's this couple oh okay and uh uh kimberly she she stretches my wife and then tim stretches me and it's like it's like one of the highlights it's like afterwards it's like that two three hours where i i can still move. I could 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 got to get that mindset. When I was getting ready for an event, I'm a fucking animal. It's like, okay, I got to be ready on this date. What would you do? 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,

but 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. And so, you know, 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? You know, because if 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 certain things, but it all begins and ends with cardio. So I back out 16 weeks and have the, you know, this is the goal for this deal. And, you know, a fair amount of, you know, strength. I have to do some strength training just to keep my sanity

you know because i'm a you know a muscle head from you know used to do what five five exercises four sets 10 reps you know that's the school that i come from right right so i had to break it down into you know pushing sleds and and kettlebells and all of that and assault bike fuck yeah that's my favorite the assault bike yeah for torture oh my gosh that's the tabatas you do tabatas yeah yeah 20 second sprints and then 10 seconds off have you ever uh seen the assault bike no it was at my studio i have it at home now but it's uh you know it's like got the handles and i got an echo bike from rogue that's the best one that's the best one yeah it's fucking phenomenal it's uh you know it's like got the handles and 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 and you do i still do a series of eight of those it takes four minutes and dude you just want to just want to die after four minutes is over over, you just fall down. You collapse. You look down. There's a puddle of sweat. You're like, what happened? Yeah, four minutes. Honestly, yeah.

Yeah, four minutes will crush you. Yeah, and I do. When I was getting ready for elk hunting season, because you know that's in the mountains and it's hard. Altitude, yeah. 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 at El Conte 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 then the end if i can hit that tabata it's amazing because the whole time but it is you're right you feel so good

and i've actually done it too with with uh uh where you cut the oxygen off and oh jesus oh yeah like we're wearing those masks why yeah exactly that's what i'm thinking that while i'm doing it but i feel like my lungs my my lungs are like a dried out sponge i'm like get this thing off of me yeah uh but uh yeah but when i'm when i have that like that date right and i have've got four months, and I don't want to embarrass myself. Right. 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. So then it's easy for me. But right now, I'm in this transition period and covet like i'm gonna need a goggins call here in a minute i'm about to i'm about to

puss out i'm gonna need goggins to call and just cuss me out like a bitch but uh yeah it's just trying to get that that you know that workout i'll go upstairs and you know do some bench see what i can you know okay yeah i would with your shoulder i can't imagine that you still do benching it's crazy yeah because that's the thing and i never shoulders up the most exactly benching i tore i tore my pec benching early or 99. I used to train with this guy. He passed away. His name was Brian Adams crush. Oh yeah. Yeah. It was one of my best friends and he grew up in Hawaii and, uh, you know, he'd go down, he's always in the ocean and just incredible.

Funny story about Brian. So I met him when I first started with WWE. I met him in a gym. And, you know, I don't know anybody there really. And 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, you know, he's moved up to the, you know, he's up on 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. So I go and I grab him, right? And he goes, what the fuck are you doing? What are you – I don't know how politically correct – I won't use the expletives in the uh in the derogatory uh yes you're following me right okay so he goes i'm not gonna squat this so this would crush me i'm on a military president 315 behind the neck he did eight boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Wow.

And racked it. I was like, and he was six foot seven, right? Big upper body. That's a lot of fucking weight to military class. It's standing. No, not on a Smith machine. He just did it, right? Huge upper body, like pool 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 go down one i'm like oh fuck that felt good right 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 that's what my that's what i feel it's like oh no brian's oblivious oh no so i'm sitting there with 485 on my chest like this and he's like and he comes up come on you got it you got it and i'm like look i could already tell

it was just it was just fucking gone so he fucking upright rose this shit off of me oh my god yeah well adrenaline and you know and i'm just like oh shit i tore the i tore the uh i tore the muscle from the tendon and uh yeah that's you get it reattached yeah i got it reattached and you know another time dr bird tells me he goes and i look he goes i know you know a lot more about medicine than i do i just he goes you tear it again i'm not gonna be able to fix it so you might want to do your rehab and you know back then i would i do half-ass rehab and get back to work as soon as i could but 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 pec and he never got it fixed, so he had this weird, crazy divot yeah yeah it was real odd it's like that extra tit here and this was like a whole it's crazy how tough wrestlers are i remember one of my 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's like oh god when he was turning his steering wheel oh you could tell even though he was had obviously had a very high tolerance for extremely high tolerance for pain he's's like, ah, shoulder. He's like,

yeah, I'm going to a doctor in a couple of weeks. Next couple of the whole couple of weeks, my shoulder, geez, Louise. Then after that, he's like,

yeah, I went to the doctor. It turns out my neck's broken. Broken neck. How do you get a sore shoulder? But yeah. How did he break his neck? I mean,

it's this, it's just like every injuries it's crazy so i wrestled after that i think it was 2015 i wrestled lesnar at wrestlemania and uh to super dome 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. Oh. Crazy. My memory from that day, the last memory that I have is at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

This is crazy, right? 3 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 nine, nine 30. The concussion happens somewhere within the first five minutes of the match. And, um, 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 in the waiting room they come out it's the same kind of deal they 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 yeah yeah so you had a break you just i never knew still wrestling with it and i never knew it oh my god yeah probably just assumed like it was that pain in your shoulder too like that 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 yeah and that 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. And 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. methyl prednisone yeah prednisone yes yeah i don't think you get jacked on prednisone damn it's the wrong stuff i'd be huge if you did yeah um i i contacted that dude about stem cells. Oh, cool. I talked to him about that. Have you had any stem cells? I have. I did PRP and stem cells and didn't do much good. I put them in my knee. Then I had all these guys.

Now they're going down to Columbia and Panama. Yeah. And they swear by it. Yeah. I think because they're getting more down there than they they'll yeah fda will allow here exactly but two guys down there yeah 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 and she um she had uh 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 i'm

not feeling it doesn't it feels the same and then about six months later because you know she's in her 70s right it took a little while before it kicked in but then it started uh feeling much better and then she went back again for a booster a while later. It helped a lot. It really stopped all the pain. I've heard nothing, but I hadn't heard any bad for sure. What's going on with your knees? Arthritis.

Arthritis, yeah. 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 meniscus and the kind of shit you're doing so these crazy explosive movements and yeah i when i was getting i was getting ready uh three or four years ago i i did a uh i was training 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 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. Yeah. But it started, you know, then I started looking back through some of the footage of the training. Like, it started with me doing step-ups. Hmm. I mean, that was where I started my my program at just doing step ups on a bench to end up 42 inch 40 yeah that's 50 plus yeah that's that's impressive yeah I couldn't do it

now but deadlifting yeah 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 back. It's very controversial for him to say. Some people disagree. 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. I mean, I don't have any reason at this point to try a 500 pound deadlift i got nothing left to i got nothing left to prove i got one yeah i got one on film but i'm good man we gotta boost tony up to that that's it that's the i've been telling you if like you want to get bigger you gotta lift heavy things squats and deadlifts you gotta 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

we need a fucking goggins hotline for tony he just saw goggins pull a quart of fucking fluid out of his knee and you're like well my neck's kind of bother me yeah I can't really do squat I was really getting into it but you know now it's just uncomfortable so I'm just gonna sleep do you still follow WWE now he's still yeah yeah cuz I think you know once things kind of 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 i mean you know i mean it it is what it is um but to the young guys oh he's you know he's a bitter old guy right 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 uh a little soft there's guys there's obviously there's guys here and there that that have an edge to them uh but there's there's there's too much pretty not enough substance i think right now 100 you agree yeah what bothers you and i think they're uh you know 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, I think that the peak of everything was the Attitude Era, right? 1999, early 2000s, and all the, you're learning things. Like, 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, you know, in grade school and high school were watching because it was wrong.

It was like, oh, my God. You know, it's dark or it's a crazy sexual like the stuff dx used to do you learned you just they would just make fun of each other harsher it was there was the shit talking was harder the the storylines were tougher now it's like more of a big brand for a big network and they don't have that edge that it used to have they're they're trying there i mean and it's always been this way but i mean they're trying to put something out for everybody you know what they're just like you know some guys you know are into into the comedy shit and then there's other guys that want to see the hardcore you you know, 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. You know, I mean, we can sit and talk and, you know, I can give you my theories on what you should do or you know 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 you can listen to them or you can listen to somebody who's

who's been there and done it uh you know i so i think that there was there was there needed to you can't help it but there was just not enough uh 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 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 um we have you know the the pc the 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. He's trying to move it back to kind of take a step back to move forward 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. I don't think he went to AEW or anything, no. I don't think so. Yeah. So when he had his last fight, he 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 uh wwe on fox and it was on like fox one or fox sports one or whatever um 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 i don't i don't i'm not real close with him i mean you know we got along uh i didn't understand it. Um, I know he, you know, he had, he had an issue with the company. Um, 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. Um, sometimes, you know, like I said, I don't know enough because I wasn't around enough at that time. But 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. 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 also a crazy athlete. He's a freak athlete. Just crazy. I mean, you see his combine numbers? Oh, my God. It's ridiculous. They're bananas. Yeah. He's one of those guys that defy, you know, he was 260 pounds, but his shot was like a 160. I mean, he was just, you can't believe somebody his size can move

the way he can move. No, he was a freak. He was a freak athlete. You know, I used to call him the vanilla gorilla. Yeah. I mean, and he was, he was just a freak, freak dude. And 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 he was making he was making he's a good very good fighter and up and coming guy too you know so you know and then he fought michael jackson another guy afterwards who was uh like a pretty pretty solid striker yeah so you got kind of a tough draw yeah the michael jackson fight i'm telling you that was like is the is easy a fight no i want to say easy a fight but that was a commensurate to someone who is oh and one like i mean and michael's much more like much more experienced but he wasn't

terrifying right it wasn't like he didn't put him in there with some guy who's going to kick his head off into the fifth row right it was a it was a good fight for him but not really yeah you know it wasn't um the guy's good you know and he's just i think i don't know what cm punk's uh 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 i'm sure he did good buy numbers i bet i'm sure i'm sure i'm sure you got a piece of the pay-per-view or or a really good deal but uh you know i 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 yeah like like i don't know if he has the time because i believe he's in his 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 to really learn how to do it. And it takes a 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, it takes a... You don't do it in a couple 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 now it's so specialized now. Now everybody's so good at jiu-jitsu and everybody can stand up as good. Everybody can wrestle. Not like in the early days you know where you had you know 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 kane velasquez kane velasquez was working for the company i don't know wow i i 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 a match with brocknar. 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. They tried to make it like they were doing MMA in the wrestling ring. That's tough to do. I mean, unless you go half shoot or full shoot, it's hard. People don't know what you're saying. Shoot, for folks who don't know, means a real fight.

Yeah. Old school wrestler's terms. yeah yeah yeah it's so old school wrestlers turn oh yeah i'm old school that's all i got kane what's crazy is kane like 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 in the 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. And they started showing me their moves. I think Matt was putting a body scissor on his brother. I think it's standing, right? Right. They were just like, what do you think about this? What about this?

And I was like, yeah, it's pretty good. You've got to fight. 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 they weren't my opinion on it. That's hilarious.

Yeah, it was funny. But out pro wrestling dudes. And they want my opinion on them. That's hilarious. Yeah, it was funny. But those were good dudes. I remember Pat Millich, 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, Tim Sylvia, all those guys are big wrestling fans. Huge, yeah. 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 boss.

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. Lessen it a little bit? 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? Okay.

So this year it's 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. 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 know, but. I'll take acid and go. How about that? Brother, I guarantee you. I guarantee you, you'll have a good time. I would go if I'm home, if I'm around.

I just, I never know where I'm at, especially in 2022. I hope 2022, you actually have like real audiences. 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 is 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. 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 yeah they wanted to do a ufc look at that which is just fucking bananas oh my god that is so crazy hundred and jesus christ 5 000 people oh that's

so many people look at the size of that crowd oh my god How big is fucking Wrestlemania That's crazy 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 Superbowl This is I was supposed to go to my first one this year I still have the ticket That's the big one. That's the big event. 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. It 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. Yep. Well, thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thank you very much, man. Thanks're alive. We can keep going. 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. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.