Did you consider becoming a professional wrestler?
“Yeah, when I was in college, I didn’t graduate college until 2001, I became an All-American in 1998 and right after that I went out to the WCW, what they had at that time was called a Power Plant and there was a try out, it was an extremely difficult tryout, it was three days and boy it was hard, only two of us made it, me and a gentleman from Jamaica. And we got invited to comeback and I said, “Well, look, I’m going to go finish college,” and they said, “Well, you only have to do tryout, once you get invited the invite’s good for life essentially.’ So, I was going to return after I graduated in 2001, well by then they had shut down, the WCW had folded up and no longer was in existence.”
After that failed, did you consider WWE or was MMA the thing you focused on?
“Well, you know, I always wanted to do MMA. I was going to do MMA, you know even if I was going to a wrestling route, I was going to do MMA.”
“I was 20 years old and wrestling seemed like a fun thing to do but I didn’t get any more serious about wrestling than just going to a 3-day tryout. That’s where my career started and stopped.”
Is your conversational style during interviews influenced at all by watching pro-wrestling?
“Yeah, I did watch pro-wrestling growing up, I’ve heard that about myself but I don’t think that I have a pro-wrestling style. You know, pro wrestling, you don’t have to touch on realms of reality. You can just say whatever you want. I’ve never done an interview where I didn’t just answer questions in an honest fashion, I’ve never created anything. So, every now and then I hear that about myself, ‘Ah, you sound like a pro-wrestler,’ and I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult, I never know how to take it.”