Former Impact Wrestling World Heavyweight Champion Bobby Lashley recently appeared on Sam Roberts Wrestling Podcast. Here are the highlights (transcript courtesy of Wrestling Inc):
On his first encounter with Kurt Angle:
“Kurt had told me that he knows I loves the Olympics, but that I needed to think about something else, considering there is no pro sports,” Lashley said. “So, Kurt gave my number to Gerald Brisco for a tryout. My goal was always to win the Olympics so at the time, I had told Brisco to hold off on the tryout because winning the Olympics was my dream.”
On his WWE tryout:
“I’m sitting there thinking that this is terrible, with me and my leg brace being on,” he said. “Suddenly the phone rings and it’s Mark Carrano from WWE, and I was thinking, there’s no way. We hadn’t had any communication in like 5-6 months. He said to me that he understood that I was interested in the Olympics, but this is a big opportunity, and there’s a lot of buzz that has been passed down the office about you, so we really want you to come to Louisville and sit down with you to see if we can bring you on. I said that I was in, so he asked if I could come next week, I told him that I couldn’t, and I kept trying to push the date back because of my knee situation. There was no way I was going to tell them that my knee was ruptured.”
“First time I even took a step was running the ropes, and it was one of the most ridiculously painful thing that I ever had to go through,” he explained. “Dr. Tom [Prichard] said that he liked the intensity as I was running the ropes, I was like, man, I wanted to cry because of the pain. The cool thing was I was there with Dolph Ziggler, we became friends, and every night we had the tryouts we would go back to the hotel and would have a couple of drinks. I’m icing my knee like crazy; it was four days of tryouts with my knee situation. I was learning all kinds of things, like running the ropes, taking bumps. When I left there I had left on a Friday morning after 4 days of training with those guys. I felt like I was in a car accident. I had bruised my heel, bruise in my back, my knee hurt, I walked home in so much pain. I thought that all they wanted to do was talk. I had done a lot of pushups, but I looked good, but actually had to do something, which was tough.”
