As noted, Bobby Lashley appeared on Lilian Garcia’s Chasing Glory podcast on Monday afternoon to promote this Sunday’s WWE SummerSlam pay-per-view in Brooklyn, New York. Featured below are some of the highlights.
On debuting on SmackDown and getting mentored by Paul Heyman: “The first time when I debuted on Smackdown, I was not supposed to debut. There was nothing going on, I was just one of the OVW guys that were on the road. So they let me go on the road, do a couple house shows and that was it, I was not supposed to be brought up. And then it goes to TV and I was in catering because there was no way I was doing anything and then someone says, ‘Hey, you have a match tonight’. Immediately my heart starts racing, I was like, ‘Huh? What? What are you talking about?! Me? I’m not supposed to do it!’ But then when I went over there I kind of stepped back in the back and you know what? The person that got me was Paul, Paul Heyman. As crazy as this is, he came and talked to me because he mentored me back in OVW when I was in OVW, he was a writer there and he was the one that talked to me and got to know me. He just walked over to me with that smug little grin that he always has on his face and looked at me and goes, ‘You nervous?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah I’m nervous, what are you talking about? There’s 17,000 people here! I just started wrestling!’ And he goes, ‘The only thing you’re really nervous about is and the only thing that messes you up is this whole anticipation act. When they call your name, you’re going to have to go out and I know you’re going to do great and you’re going to be excited and you’re going to come back and be like, man why did I kill myself before?’ he said, ‘If you can handle this stuff now, the rest is easy.'”
On making the transition to MMA: “MMA for me, it was something that I needed to challenge myself. I need to challenge myself at all points in time and when I came out of the WWE, that was such a high that to challenge myself at something so low wouldn’t work for me. I needed something that was really going to challenge me in an uncomfortable situation and fighting definitely puts you in an uncomfortable situation. You go through and you’ve never boxed before and you have to go to a boxing coach and he’s sitting there teaching you how to move your feet. It kind of humbles you and makes you hungry to learn and after you learn, you can actually test your learning on a main stage. It was a lot of different things for me.”
On the reason why he loves pro wrestling: “I have a fanbase and I have a large fanbase and there’s a lot of people that like me, and there’s a lot of people that support me, and there’s a lot of people that can relate to me. I can’t even begin to entertain another wrestler’s perception of me if they don’t understand what my fans look for in me. I’m different, I’m different. That’s why I love wrestling because there’s so many different people. I love everybody from Hornswoggle, to the Great Khali, to Seth Rollins, to The Bludgeon Brothers. I love everything about wrestling because of that. You’re going to relate to someone and that’s what wrestling is about. It’s not about saying, ‘I’m better than you or you’re better than me’, because that’s the arrogant, ignorant attitude. Everybody has a voice, everybody has the person that they like and that’s what wrestling is all about.”
Check out the complete Bobby Lashley interview at LilianGarcia.com.