Seth Rollins Talks Growing Up on Wrestling, Indy Wrestling vs. WWE, Is WWE Fake?

WWE Superstar Seth Rollins recently chatted with the Arkansas Times to promote next Tuesday’s “Smackdown” tapings in the area. Rollins went in-depth on several topics.

On growing up watching wrestling:

“I was always a wrestling fan growing up and I pretty much knew this was what I was going to try to do since I was about fifteen or sixteen. My friends were all really into it at that time. Late 1990s, early 2000s, the industry was just really booming then. You had guys like The Rock, Steve Austin, all those guys.

I watched WCW a little bit but I was mostly a WWF fan. I loved Hulk Hogan. Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, The British Bulldogs, The Legion of Doom. I just resonated with those guys really well. I liked guys who thought about style. It was a cool time to be a fan, and for whatever reason I just didn’t want to do anything else after high school.

I always enjoyed wrestling as an art form, even at an early age, whether I knew it or not. The pageantry of professional wrestling. People think it’s just entertainment, but we always call it sports entertainment: it’s a welding of those two things. Until you’re on the inside of it, it’s really hard to appreciate how much actually goes into a wrestling match or a storyline, mentally and physically. There are so many elements to it as a live performance, I don’t think people really grasp how much of an art it really is. I get called “The Architect of the Shield” because I take a cerebral approach to the tactical side of what we do. I come up with the blueprints.”

Explaining the differences between what he did on the independent circuit to what he is doing in WWE now:

“I mean I started training in a shipping warehouse, and I’m in Wrestlemania XXX this year, in front of millions of people worldwide, you know? I spent a few years cutting my teeth in the Midwest, I worked for Ring of Honor, then I went down to Florida and relearned everything there. It wasn’t different, but the crowds are bigger now. The paychecks are nicer, but that’s not really why I do it, so it doesn’t make much of a difference for me.

Getting to share the ring with guys I idolized is never going to stop being surreal for me. Getting to share the ring with guys like The Rock or The Undertaker or CM Punk or John Cena, guys I grew up watching. To have them appreciate what I do is just humbling.

The fans are awesome too. With social media now, everybody’s faceless, but I assume these kids sending me pictures of myself of Instagram are twelve, thirteen years old. But I don’t know. We’ve all got twitter handles and aliases, and so I don’t really even know what my fan base is like. But everyone’s very kind. I don’t have any crazy people or stalkers or anything like that.”

Occasionally, Rollins gets asked whether wrestling is fake.  

Fake is like the worst word you could possibly use to describe anything, you know? What are you talking about? What is fake? It’s a television show, and a live performance. Nothing’s fake about it. We’re not telling you we’re out their fighting each other. We’re going out there to entertain you. I consider myself an athlete. I train like an athlete, I eat like an athlete, I recover and get sore just like any other athlete. We’re not lying to anybody. People just don’t understand the art form of what we do. It’s a mental and physical grind. You can’t be a dolt in this industry. On the opposite end of that, you can be the smartest guy in the world and not understand what it is to have a presence on stage. Being a character, executing a live performance, understanding what it is to connect with a crowd and elicit a specific response at a specific time using moves and body language and emotions. What we do is very complex. It’s underappreciated.”

The entire article can be found here.