Quotes About Adversity

I honestly was supposed to always be a wrestler. I was never hired into any business as an announcer. That was just something I ended up falling into.

I lost as amateur, I lost a bunch of times as a wrestler, and you always come back.

I noticed when I started wrestling that I was a defensive wrestler and that people make mistakes.

If a guy's a very good wrestler or a really good boxer or has a really good high kick, you prepare for that. It's the same when you're going to fight someone who talks a lot of crap.

As wrestlers, we're not trying to hurt or damage physically our opponent. All we're trying to do is score points and get our hands raised, so I think that's where we differ from the UFC, but I think that also the way in which we could address each other could be cool from a competitive spirit.

Just because I haven't fought wrestlers doesn't mean I'm not wrestling in every camp.

When I was four or five, I had an older brother who got paralyzed from the neck down in junior high school. Some kid did a wrestling fall on him and hit his spine. We had to take care of him. I went from being the baby to not really being the baby anymore.

Extreme rules, hardcore wrestling - whatever they want to call it - was born out of a necessity to survive.

Wrestling was the hardest thing I've ever done.

Well, I'm wrestling alligators.

I left home when I was 13. When I was 15, I was living in a youth hostel, and I was the 167-pound amateur wrestling champion.

I always equate wrestling to having been in the Marine Corps.

I've done bingo halls and tents in front of 10 people with a cow mooing in the background. Doing that and then going to WrestleMania and the Superdome and wrestling in front of 80,000 people is night and day.

I had been wrestling with a fracture in my elbow and a slight tear in my triceps for quite some time, but it was continuing to get worse. As I worked through it, I ended up dislocating my shoulder and tearing my labrum. All of these injuries were on the same arm, so things like working out or even sleeping became increasingly difficult.

Life is like a wrestling match: a lot of times, things are looking good, and then something happens, and you're fighting from underneath.

In wrestling, I was always competing against bigger guys.

I think sports and bodybuilding were the only things that saved me from getting beat up. People are not pleased, for whatever reason, when you can answer all the questions in class. If not for the respect I got from track, cross-country, wrestling and bodybuilding, it would have been a disaster.

I learned to associate discomfort with getting better. And that transcended wrestling and applied to a lot of other things in life.

Regardless of who leaves and who stays, Ring of Honor is going to continue to be a healthy, growing, successful pro wrestling promotion.

I'd been told countless times, even before I got into pro wrestling, that I would never amount to anything and that I'd never achieve this dream.

I had a particular affinity for wrestling, and it did have a lot to do with being small and being combative - and being angry. And when you're small and you don't back down, you get in a lot of fights.

I lost in the 1988 Olympics, and I was pretty depressed for about eight years. I quit wrestling, and I got into Brazilian jujitsu in 1991.

I didn't pick wrestling over football. My coaches picked that for me. I never wanted to wrestle in college. I always wanted to play football. They thought I was too small, but I had a lot of heart.

I'll do anything. That has proven problematic - you may remember my broken leg in a dirt bike accident - but that is also the ingredient that has allowed me to elevate myself in pro wrestling.