By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Maven
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
Can you put into words how much YouTube has changed your life and your career? “I promise, not more than you love you guys. Here’s why. I get emotional about this. Years ago, five years ago, I was getting up every morning at 6 am, rushing to take my dogs out, getting on a 6:36 train, two hours to work, working all day, two hours to get home, getting home at 7:30. I knew I had something, but I just didn’t know how to get that something out. When we started the YouTube channel, there were no promises. Zach didn’t tell me, ‘Yeah, this is going to be X amount, and we’re going to make X amount of dollars, or this is going to get this many views.’ He just said, ‘Let’s take a chance.’ And now, man, I don’t do a damn thing during the day, I don’t want to do now, and that is because of you guys. Thank you. I don’t know if I deserve it, but I’ll damn take it.”
Do you feel like because of the way you came in? You’re the guy on the MTV show. You win Tough Enough. Is it just ribs for the first six months? Is it ribs for the first year? You have to win over the boys? “Here’s what I think it was. I think it was, we’re going to see if we can run you out. We’re going to find out do you love the business, do you respect the business, or are you going to easily be ran out of the business? Because wrestling is tough. It’s hard to be on the road, it’s hard to be in pain, it’s hard to be away from your family, and if you don’t have just something on the inside that makes you be able to be okay with living uncomfortable, be okay with pain, you’re not gonna last. It’s just the WWE’s way and wrestlers’ way of just mixing out the people that think they want to be there, as opposed to the people who truly want to make a go of it. There were countless, muscled-up guys that would come in, roided-out freaks, look phenomenal, that thought they wanted to wrestle, and they would put them in the ring. You find out really quickly, when someone’s in there for six minutes, you’re making them just move, then they’re gasping for air, you find out really quickly who wants to wrestle and who doesn’t.”
So after winning Tough Enough, what’s the match where you felt like, I finally feel like a wrestler. “It was years. It wasn’t immediate. I did a couple of house shows, a couple of weeks of house shows with Bob Holly. I did three weeks, Orton did eight, and after every match with Bob, he’s back behind the curtain waiting for me to bitch, and every time I went back there, [I said] ‘Thank you. Is there anything I can do better?’ That’s the way to get the respect of the boys. Because I have no doubt in my mind, they sent him out, ‘See what the kid’s got.’ And if you complain, that’s not the job for you. If you can get through Bob Holly, okay, that’s one rung of the ladder that you’ve climbed. That’s one step of just not being the Tough Enough kid. Okay, maybe that was when I saw okay, I belong.”
You taking the thumbtacks is your most viewed video. It has almost 6 million views. I gotta ask you, you took the thumbtack bump at the end of the video. Why’d you do it with a shirt on? “You want the honest answer? Because I’m about 15 years too old to be going on a bunch of cycles to be taking my shirt off for anybody anymore. But I knew, and when we were talking about the thumbtacks, Zach said it kind of as a joke. He was like, ‘Yeah, the video would just do better if you took the thumbtack bump.’ I said, ‘Well, if you can find a ring, I’ll do it.’ I’m thinking there’s no way he’s gonna find a ring. 30 minutes later, text me, ‘I got a ring. I got people that are gonna let us do it.’ And at that point, I’m like, sh*t. But that’s another one that it wasn’t as bad as I [thought]. I built it up into my head. I mean, it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was gonna be.”
How did the thumbtacks compare to the staple in the head? You took a staple gun right to the forehead: “The thumbtacks hurt worse in the shower later that night, because I went back to our Airbnb, I took a thing of alcohol in my shower, and I dumped it down my back, and I felt every thumbtack. Whereas the staple was just [once]. So the thumbtacks hurt worse later.”
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