During a recent appearance on the “Insight with Chris Van Vliet” podcast, Colt Cabana commented on his run in WWE, when he plans to retire from the pro wrestling business, and more. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On his run in WWE: “I always saw myself in the Santino Marella role, and I’m not saying as Santino. But the story of Santino is that they were going to Italy and they needed someone Italian. ‘Oh, Santino, can you speak Italian?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Boom, he’s on the show……so, what was I hoping for? That they were going to tour Israel, maybe they got an Israel TV deal and they needed a Jewish wrestler, maybe they needed a funny sidekick. I had pitched ideas to be the general manager of Sunday Night Heat, which at that point was taken off TV and was just on WWE.com. I thought that was a funny idea. I was trying to weasel my way in somehow. I didn’t expect to be called up to wrestle John Cena. There is a story I tell where Dave Lagana goes, ‘Pitch me an idea.’ And I was like, ‘I want to be the Sunday Night Heat general manager.’ He goes, ‘That’s what you’re pitching? You [have] go to think bigger than that.’ So, the next week I wrote, ‘Here’s my pitch. I debut at WrestleMania. I beat John Cena. The Undertaker comes down, I piledrive him. I take both belts. I’m the champion. You send me to Letterman.’ And then [Lagana] was like, ‘OK, I see what you’re saying.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I have to sneak in the backdoor here buddy, that’s how this works.’”
On when he plans to retire from wrestling: “I’m no Billy Gunn. He’s a freak of nature. He’s 57 now, and he looks better than not only half our roster, but I’d say 80 percent of our roster, including his children. It gives me a lot of hope to look at wrestlers like Billy, to look at PCO, and even Christopher Daniels. When I was my early 20s, I was like maybe in my early 30s I’ll have to hang it up. And I don’t see it happening any time soon. If I’m not able to stick with AEW for the rest of my career, which I hope I do, I’m happy to play my softball league of the independents. My old-timer softball league a couple of times a month to go out there and wrestle on the indies and have fun. That’s kind of how I view it. I think people get the idea I’ve been setting myself up for post-wrestling my whole career through learning the merch, multimedia, and all this stuff. As someone who’s always had a lot of worry about their future, I just don’t worry about my future in that way because I think I’ll be fine in whatever I do.”
On his best advice for young wrestlers wanting to break into the business: “Have small goals. Small goals are so important. If you go to wrestling school saying I’m gonna be in WrestleMania, and you don’t make it to WrestleMania, you’re gonna consider your career a failure. But if you say to yourself you wanna learn how to do a dropkick, a bodyslam, have one match outside of the state I live in, I want to get flown to a wrestling show – you have these little goals, and if you have those goals and their obtainable, you get a sense of satisfaction from each individual goal. You feel like you’ve done something. Sure, you’re ultimate goal may be to be an AEW wrestler. But make you sure you have those small goals to get that satisfaction of learning how to do a hip toss.”
(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
