WWE Intercontinental Champion Gunther recently spoke with WittyWhittier about where he got his love for wrestling and why he specifically prefers sports-based wrestling.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On which superstar he’d love to have a storyline with: “I don’t have a list for that, but let’s just say it’s Roman Reigns, yeah.”
On where his passion for wrestling as a sport comes from: “First of all, thank you for mentioning that because that’s definitely the case. I mean I’ve been a lifelong fan before that myself. The first time I got in touch with wrestling actually wasn’t even WWE, it was in Vienna. The wrestling scene there used to be, they used to do tournaments in Germany and Austria. They would come to one city and would have like, however long the tournament was. Thirty, 40, 50 days they would have a show every day at the same place. And it was a completely sports presentation. It’s a 60-day tournament or something like that. And that the hot thing in town, everybody went there. My parents used to go there all the time, so my parents used to take me there. That’s when I saw wrestling live the first time, like I couldn’t believe it when I experienced it.
“And then later on I just got into WWE, and was watching VHS or on late night on free tv and stuff like that. So that was always my first contact with wrestling, was completely for focused on like a sports presentation. And then actually going forward becoming a trainee and the student of the game and stuff like that, I always liked the sports-based presentation more. And I consumed a lot of Japanese wrestling which is the same, where it’s a lot of it’s just presented as a sport. And then now with my with my partner Ludwig Kaiser, his father used to be a professional wrestler. And actually, my parents used to watch his father wrestle. So that’s how long it goes back, and he always was the one who — basically that’s what our character is influenced by, by the ideas that he gave us, that you should take this part seriously. That it’s not there, you should never take the sport for your own advantage. You’re there to contribute to this to this sport. That’s your job, like nobody’s bigger than the sport itself. And all those ideas is the thing that yeah, myself and also Ludwig, what we try to live every day when we when we get in the ring and yeah perform in front of an audience.”
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