Excerpts from WWE Unscripted
I was going to a small school in Toronto, Humber College, and I took some of my money from my student loan and paid for Wrestling School. It was $2,000 or $2,500. I'm sure I was breaking some law, but I was desperate to get some training. My best friend, Adam Copeland, He's Edge now, had gotten free lessons because he won an essay contest on "Why I want to be a wrestler." We had always said we were going to do it together. I moved to Adam's town in the sixth grade, and we found out we both [were] both huge wresting fans and became instant friends. A the time, wrestling was in a huge boom; it seemed like everybody in our school was into wrestling. But as we gre older, there were only a few of us that stayed fans. We'd wrestle around the neighborhood; little kids would know to go and hide somewhere whenever they saw us coming, because we probably would grab then and practice our finishing moves on them.
It wasn't really until I got into the business that I realized how tough of a road it is to actually make a living doing it. I had to take second jobs. I worked at a wood mill, one of those jobs where you were there at 7 in the morning and didn't leave until 4 in the afternoon. I was pushing wood through saws, stacking wood and strapping it to skids, bar-coding the wood, swabbing the floors, everything. I would sit in the lunchroom and look at guys that had been working there 20, 25 years and were doing the same job as I was. It was a reality check for me; it made me realize I really had to go for what I wanted. I didn't want to end up like one of those guys. I was two or three years into wrestling before I didn't have to have another job, but it wasn't really a case of being financially able to quit everything else. It was because my parents let me stay at their house, so I didn't have to pay rent. I was wresting every weekend and sometimes going on tours for two, three weeks at a time. So I was making enough to get by on my own, but if I had had a car payment or rent to pay, I would have had to have another job. I never really questioned myself about being able to make it in wrestling. When I got three to four years into it, it was like, :Man, I've come to far to look back." It added even more fuel to the fire because, "If I don't' make it, I'm really gonna be in trouble because I haven't made a Plan B." So, I didn't look at it like there was any other option. I had to make it, it was the only thing I had going for myself.
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The biggest scare I had was when Edge and I were wrestling together a the Conquistadors under the masks. I bit a dive on the floor on Jeff Hardy and landed on the side of my head and felt a shock go all the way up my side, and my right arm went completely numb. When I got up, my arm was hanging there like a we noodle. It took me a good couple minutes just to get some tingling back in my arm. It was [a] big scare. It's weird, because you're out there in front of the crowd and your adrenaline is pumping, and the first thing that crossed my mind was "I have to finish this match. How am I going to get through this match?" because we were on pay-per-view. Luckily, it was just a pinched nerve; I had a bit of a stinger that cause the arm to go numb.
Wrestlers are a different breed. If you get hurt in the ring, not finishing your match is not an option, unless you're unconscious. It's all about performing and giving the fans everything that you have. The match is always first. You're out there in front of a lot of fans, and millions more are watching on TV, so you've got a job to do, and you're got to do that first and worry about yourself second. Plus, I think our threshold for pain is a little higher than the average person's. We put our bodies on the line four or five nights a week, so our bodies seem to build up some kind of tolerance for pain.
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