Former WWE star Scotty 2 Hotty made an appearance on Insight with Chris Van Vliet to discuss a wide range of topics. Here are the highlights:
Returning to the ring:
“What a crazy time in my life. I’m taking this crazy step where I’m 48 years old and I’m going back into the ring. But I feel like I can go and deliver. If I couldn’t, then I wouldn’t do it. It just felt like the perfect time to do it.
I missed being in the ring, and I never said that I was retired. I took the job as a coach in WWE at the Performance Center back in 2016. I had my last match in August 2016, and that was it. I never said that I was retired, but I also never really saw myself having another match again. But I was ok with that. I look back at some of that Attitude Era stuff, and it is crazier than I remember. Nobody can take that away from me, my career peaked at the peak of professional wrestling. It was such a cool time with cool energy and cool characters, so I feel like I did everything that I wanted to do. But I missed traveling. NXT wasn’t doing any live events, and all the TV was shot in house. I wasn’t traveling and I wasn’t having fun. I saw people from AEW right down to the small independents having fun. The independents are on fire right now. So I started asking around, things like, ‘Well, what can I make?’ I was doing the numbers and thought to myself that I can go out there and kill it.”
Leaving WWE after working there as a Performance Center coach:
“It was over the last couple of months. Once the pandemic happened and all the releases started happening, I think the releases took a big toll on me. When I became a coach, I had no idea how much I would love that job, and those guys are then like your children. You create these relationships with people, and you see them get released, and you find out with everyone else when they come up on Twitter. My buddy in Nashville texted me, ‘Oh, the releases are happening again.’ So then I jump on Twitter and I see somebody released that was in my class that I just saw three hours before. That’s how I’m finding out, and dude, this is not cool.”
H/T to
WrestlingNews.co for the transcription