IMPACT star and former X-Division champion “Speedball” Mike Bailey recently spoke with Fightful about a wide range of topics, including how he started practicing pro-wrestling moves at the age of 9, and recalls the first time he executed the very dangerous Phoenix Splash maneuver. Highlights from the interview are below.
How he started practicing wrestling at a very young age:
“So that happened very, very young. I want to say probably eight / nine years old. Me and my brother would do—not quite backyard, ‘cause we’d do it indoors, but—wrestling on our mattresses and we were smart about it. We would watch people on TV and we’d try to accurately replicate the technique in what they were doing. So nine year old Mike Bailey could probably do way crazier moves than he can now. So we had dressers on each side of the mattress, that was our top ropes.”
On performing the very dangerous Phoenix Splash for the first time:
“My brother would stand up on the dresser with his little brother, he’d pick me up in a powerbomb and I would counter it into a hurricanrana off of there. I did phoenix splashes off of desks when I was nine years old and I’d land them properly and hit them properly. It happened very often. We’d have friends come over to wrestle with us and my brother and I—who did this many, many hours a day every day—we’re like, ‘Oh, wow. These guys can’t really move.’”