WWE World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins recently appeared as a guest on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast/YouTube show for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, Rollins commented on if he feels he is now in the peak of his wrestling career:
“I’m kind of just starting my prime. I’m just starting to get into it. I’ve been wrestling since I was roughly 16 or 17 years old, so 20 years now. So in our industry, there are some exceptions, you know, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, you know, he’s kind of an exception. Obviously, he was sort of a part of the business his entire life because his family was in it, but like his real run was only like four years, like it was tiny. But for the most part, historically, you need years and years of experience, thousands of matches. You’ve got to build equity with your audience, and so I’m at the point now where I’m 37. I’ve got probably maybe a six to ten year window, depending on my health, where like, I’m going to be in the sweet spot where like, my body can still go, but my brain has also finally caught up to where I am physically. So like, mentally and physically, I haven’t deteriorated. I’m in that perfect zone where I’m not quite athletically what I was when I was your age, athletically, but I’m still pushing it, and mentally, I can read the room when we go out there. It’s like cake for me. So I’m in that zone for like, I’d say six to ten years depending on how my body holds up and then who knows? Then I’ll turn into The Undertaker and come once a year for WrestleMania, but yeah, I’m feeling really good right now. I’m in a sweet spot.”
What is he doing to preserve his body:
“Honestly, I just do my same thing. I try to just change my training up based on how I feel and like, there’s constant injuries. My knees have been bugging me since before WrestleMania. I was having issues with that. My neck is acting up. My lower back has been at me for like, since 2019. Probably should get some surgery on that, but trying to just, you know, do whatever I can to make sure I don’t need it because I have a couple of stress fractures back there. So I tried some stem cells. I’ve done a couple of stem cell treatments and I found that they were temporarily helpful and I wasn’t taking time off so I wasn’t just idling while I was on the stem cells. I was still working pretty much a full time schedule with WWE. So I found them temporarily helpful, but long term, it kind of had faded off a little bit. So I’d say I got about maybe four or five months of like, okay.”
Getting attacked by a fan on RAW:
“So first of all, this guy, I feel, I want to preface it by saying, when I found out about everything, I felt very bad for this guy. This guy, you know, there’s some mental disability going on there. Connection from reality is not all there. He was catfished online by somebody pretending to be me, I believe. There was some amount of money exchanged for whatever he was, you know, being asked for.”
“This is not a new phenomenon that people will do this with. It happens a lot with our girls, right? So people will catfish as our female superstars and they’ll just prey on these people who are a little a little slower and they’ll prey on them. They’ll be like, ‘Oh, my brother is sick in the hospital. Could you send money’, but they don’t ask for money. They ask for it in gift cards. It’s insane.”
“There was one with Becky actually. This person finally figured out that they were being catfished or something and they showed up in the front row of a show and brought this Ziploc bag of gift cards that they had sent. They’ll buy them and they’ll scratch the codes off and then just send the codes via whatever, you know, via text so the person gets all the cash from the gift card. I added it all up and we are talking thousands of dollars that they had given to Becky for her brother in the hospital or something like that. It was wild.”
“So basically, this guy had been catfished by somebody pretending to be me asking for money for whatever crises they were going through and this guy had given some money and he had reached his breaking point. So we’re in Brooklyn, and he jumps, I finished a match with Finn Balor and I’m coming to the back and I’m walking up the ramp. Our floor camera was there in the aisles. His name is Stewie and he’s just following me like he always does. It happened instantly because I’m not even thinking like, Oh, somebody’s going to come out of the audience. I should be ready for this. That’s what we have security for. That’s what security’s building for and you just don’t think that’s gonna happen. So like your brain is shut off from that part. You’re just in the performance. I’m just talking to Stewie. I’m just talking shit, just doing my thing. I was a bad guy at the time, so I’m just dancing around doing my weird Seth Rollins stuff and I’m not paying any attention.”
“In retrospect, what I remember is seeing somebody come around the corner running, which isn’t unusual either because sometimes they’re setting up pyro in the entrance for somebody else, and he was wearing, you know, he was in a T-shirt and pants, like he was kind of nondescript. I just saw him running and didn’t think anything of it, and then the next thing I know, he’s cutting the corner and just zips right by Stewie and just straight football tackles me, form tackles me right there on the ramp and it was terrifying because I was, like I said, I’m not prepared. So my instinct was to just try to get a hold of his head. He’s kinda like clawing at me. He didn’t have any weapons. Thank God he had nothing on him, but he’s like, just kind of clawing. He’s not really thrown any punches or anything like that. He’s like grabbing my hair. I’m trying to get him, but he’s like a little ball. He’s a stout man, but he’s short, so he’s like a little ball so I couldn’t quite get a hold of him. Security jumped quickly. Our referee actually jumped quick. Everybody was trying to get him off, but he had a hold of my hair.”
“I haven’t divulged this part of the story yet to try to dislodge him, the only thing that I could do, because I didn’t want to punch him. The only thing that I could do, I saw like he was on top of me, over me, all I saw was his legs were kind of like this. So I just reached up and just (grabbed him by the groin). Of course, I had to get this guy off me. I didn’t know what was going on, so I just reached up and just snatched. It was a squeeze, like a hard, hard squeeze. He had my hair and he finally got off me. It got him off, but it was nerve wracking, especially in the moment, once I realized, you know, a split second after he got me when I realized what was going on. I mean, if he had a shank, if he had any sort of sharp object, I would have just been slice and dice. It’s very, very scary.”
“Obviously the guy was arrested. He was arrested by the police that night and they asked if I wanted to press charges, and I didn’t. I asked that the NYPD just try to find a way to help him. Once I saw what happened online, like afterwards, you know, when all that kind of stuff popped up on Twitter afterwards, like who was this guy? What was he doing? I think he posted a video the next day when he had made bail or something like that and it was clear that he was not in a proper state. I kind of got what was going on. So when they started following up, I was like, ‘Look, this guy doesn’t need to go to prison. He needs some help, so if there’s any services you guys offer for people in situations like this, please, you know, do that on my behalf’, so hopefully that happened. I have not heard anything about it. It was just a very unfortunate incident all the way around. I’m happy that nobody was hurt. And hopefully, he’s gotten the help.”
Managing his family life and wrestling career:
“My daughter is two and a half now. She’s the best. I never thought I would want to have kids. really, and I mentioned earlier, the schedule I had when I was in my mid-20s, no time. I just was like, you know, if it happens, it happens. I was dating girls and they were fine. You know, great girls. Nothing bad to say about them, but I didn’t feel like I wanted to have kids with this person or that I wanted to marry this person. I cared about them. They were great people, but you know, you just it is what it is, and I was too focused on myself if I’m being fair, if I’m being truly honest. It wasn’t them. It’s not you, it’s me. It was me. Like I said, wrestling was my first love and I wasn’t gonna put anything before that including relationships and family. Then once me and Becky got together four years ago, I was just like, oh, okay, I get it now. Here we are, and then we had a kid and she’s the best. It’s hard for me to shut down from the business because I’m in it so much and I do love it so much, but like, if ever there had been a time where it wasn’t my first love, having my wife and kid probably has taken that over. I would say it’s probably now number two.”
Rollins also discussed his heat with Matt Riddle. You can check out his comments by clicking here.
You can check out the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
