By Jason Powell, Prowrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Chasing Glory podcast with Lilian Garcia
Guest: Sting
Available at LilianGarcia.com
Growing up with his dysfunctional family: “My mom tried to get us to go to church on Sundays and my Dad didn’t want to have anything to do with it and we didn’t want to go to church. We wanted to go to the lake, we wanted to go to the beach, we didn’t want to live by a set of rules, so we thought. We kind of rebelled against the whole church thing and it was just a few pocket of times that I can remember being in Sunday school as a kid with my brother and my sister was really small, Mark was probably an infant at the time. We just rebelled against it. We turned into young adults and got through high school and part way through junior colleges and big universities, but no one ever got any degree or anything like that. We all loved each other, we were all very close, but very dysfunctional. It’s like you couldn’t be around each other for very long.”
Meeting Hulk Hogan without knowing about his star power: “When I grew up, where I grew up in Southern California, we did not have pro wrestling on TV. I didn’t know what it was. I ended up in my early young adult years co-owning a Gold’s Gym in San Fernando Valley with a guy named Ed Connors who was the treasurer of Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach. I managed the gym and I ended up being partners with him and this big big dude with blonde hair would come in and work out and the gym would freak out and say, ‘Oh my gosh, don’t you know who that is? It’s the guy from the Rocky movie! That’s Hulk Hogan!’ I go, ‘Okay, I know the Rocky movie and I know that guy, but I don’t know who Hulk Hogan is!'”
Confessing his infidelity to his wife and finding God in the process: “I confessed everything to my ex-wife. I was honest and truthful. It was horrendous, it was one of the worst moments of my life watching her life blood just come out of her almost, it was just horrendous. God at that point, I said, ‘Okay, I have given God lip service,’ I literally said this prayer, ‘I’ve given you lip service, oh Lord.’ And I had, nothing was real to me. It was like, wave your magic wand and fix everything. He doesn’t care about working with people like that, not from the outside in, but from the inside out. First he wanted my heart, and he never had my heart because it was only lip service until finally August of 1998 when I realized there’s no amount of money, no amount of power, no drug, no woman, no man, no doctor, nothing, nothing is going to fix this horrendous deep dark despair and I have messed lives up everywhere and I cannot fix this on my own. I need some supernatural and I said, ‘God, I surrender my life to you. Jesus Christ come and live inside my heart.’ So that’s what happened to me in August of 1998 when I was at the very peak of my career. Muscle relaxers, pain relievers, alcohol, women, a lifestyle, even language that comes out of my mouth, everything changed radically overnight, and I was watching friends die from this kind of lifestyle over the years.”
What made him not go to WWE at first: “Number one, WCW would always give me what I asked for. I knew that the commitment that I would have to make with Vince [McMahon] was being gone a lot more, a lot more time on the road, a lot more time away. With WCW at the time, I was able to kind of tailor make my schedule to something that I could tolerate and something that was easier for my family at the time. Financially they always gave me what I wanted, but I was really close to leaving on a few different occasions and I was ready. If WCW didn’t give me what I wanted, then I was willing to take that risk and go to WWE. One of the other reasons why I never did, I always talked about this as well, I at the time-and I still don’t know if it’s accurate or not, but I thought that Vince wanted me as a talent to undermine WCW more than he wanted me as a talent working for him.”
His reaction when he finally came to WWE: “I was shocked at how everyone treated me. I met the entire PR department up there in the big building in Connecticut. I went up there and met everybody and everyone-it wasn’t false, it was real. The enthusiasm, I mean everybody was just pumped to have me there and I felt pretty secure about it. They treated me well and Vince has been nothing but respectful and good to me all these years. By the time I ended up coming up there, he was the same way. When I went up there the first time, he wanted me to come in and say hello to him. He even wanted to produce and direct a lot of my spots that I did.”
If he is done wrestling or not: “Yeah, I’m really done. I mean my neck doesn’t bother me at all. For the first couple of months after the match, I had an ache that would go down to the left side of my neck and down into my left trap. It was like a dull ache that was just there all the time and it was hard to sleep. I don’t have any side effects, any trouble so all I know is the neurosurgeon said, ‘You are so lucky there wasn’t a catastrophe that happened.’ I got to be careful and it’s sad too because even at my age I feel like I could still go, I could still have a real good Undertaker match for example. We could tell an incredible story with both the chemics and the mystique of both of them. I’ve had these ideas for 20 years, some of the ideas I have in my head. It would be something that people would talk about for a long time, but I’m satisfied. I’m happy with the way things turned out. I did have my WWE run, it was short, but I had one. I did WrestleMania, I wrestled Seth Rollins, I wrestled for the WWE World Title, so I can’t complain.”
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