#Braun Strowman on WWE Extreme Rules, ‘craziest’ WrestleMania, NFL chance

(Edited for length and clarity)

Q: What’s it been like creatively to, at what’s maybe your height in WWE, get to touch on so much of your beginning in the company and your past relationship with Bray?

A: With everything that’s going on in the world and us having to quarantine so much, self isolate so we could continue to go to work, it’s really allowed me a lot of time to think, not just about Bray and the past, but just think how crazy the last five years of my life (have been). You’re coming up on my five-year debut (in WWE). August 24, 2015 was when I debuted the night after SummerSlam and you know, it’s all happening so fast and everything is so crazy with WWE and how we’re all over the world. In 2018 I think I wrestled 192 matches and (traveled) like close to 700,000 miles. With this time, I’ve been able to sit and reflect about all the crazy and amazing things that I’ve seen and done and the opportunities that I’ve had.

Sitting here thinking back, it was about five years ago I was coming off of a back injury. January 2015 I ruptured my L5S1 disk in my back and it cut into my sciatic nerve and it partially paralyzed my entire left leg. I had to have emergency surgery. Luckily, I got 85 percent of my leg back, still have some atrophy in my calf and some dead spots in my glute and hamstring that really don’t fire that well. That’s why when you see me walking around I really hobbled around a good bit. It don’t work. I’m in pain. It is what it is.

From going and having surgery in January to being back in the ring in May after having a couple little matches in NXT on live events to debuting in front of a sold-out Barclays Center like 19,000 people. I debuted with literally seven or eight matches to my name. It’s crazy to think back on like coming in and … I didn’t know the difference between a headlock and my boots. To be able to learn and go along the way and think about that, my time with the Wyatt family. As much as it was a dark, dark place that I was in with those guys, I learned a lot. I learned how to carry myself. I learned how to be “The Monster Among Men.” I learned who Braun Strowman was and it’s been neat to kind of sit around and catch up.

As much as it’s awful and I’m ready for the world to open back up and everybody get over this and everybody go back to being healthy, it’s been a little bit of a blessing at the same time. It’s allowed my body to get some healing done any d things that have been nagging and hurting. It’s allowed me to sit and reflect about how the last five years of my life have been.

I’m the Universal champ. Like let me say that again, I am the Universal champ. Something that I heard since I started in this industry that I would never have. That I didn’t represent right. My character wouldn’t do that and it’s such a cool feeling just shutting naysayers up and making them eat their crow.

Q: You talked about the injury you had before coming up to the WWE main roster. How close were you to not getting the use of your leg back?

A: I had a 60-percent chance with the surgery to get my leg to work again. In the grand scheme of things the odds were in my favor, but were they good odds? Not so much.

Q: Kind of in the middle odds?

A: At the time I had a very nice girlfriend who took very good care of me and she was a saint helping me get through all that stuff. She pushed me through the airport in a wheelchair, pushed me through the hospital in a wheelchair. I’m talking about a poor little girl that’s like 5-foot-6, 130 pounds. Forever indebted to her for the help that she did with me.

Long story short, my leg did not work. She pushed me into my prep room at the hospital, it was either a Saturday or a Sunday morning at like 5 o’clock in the morning. I was flown to the University of Pittsburgh to see Dr. (Joseph) Maroon, who is one of the top neurosurgeons in the country and it was an emergency, 60-percent chance surgery was fixing everything, and I went under and an hour and a half after I came to I stood up and walked to my recovery room. The big man upstairs was definitely looking out for me.

Q: What do you remember about WrestleMania, obviously learning you were gonna face Goldberg for the Universal championship probably on very short notice?

A: Short notice is an understatement. With everything going on with quarantine and self-isolating and stuff like that, I had decided I was gonna drive to my property in Wisconsin. Get away, it’s a town of maybe 400 people. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. I’m going to go out, hide out and let’s ride this thing out. It’s a 21-hour drive from Orlando to my place in Wisconsin.

Twenty hours into the drive I got a phone call, “Braun, there’s last-minute changes and an emergency. We need you for WrestleMania back in Orlando.” I said, well guys you know I’m in Wisconsin like 20 hours into this 21-hour drive. Then they said, “We know. There’s a jet in the air already. It lands at 9:30 at Waukesha regional airport. And when I say regional, like legitimately I think half the runway was grass.

I get in, go eat dinner with my aunt and uncle real quick and then head to Waukesha and when I show up, legit like when I say little airplane I’m talking about a pack of chewing gum with some wings and a motor on it, a little four-seater. I got in it and took up every bit of all four seats. I got in the air, 10, 10:30 at night Central time, landed in Florida around midnight, 12:30ish. Luckily I have a house there and got to take a nap in my own bed when I got in, by 9, 10 o’clock in the morning a car came picked me up and we headed to the WWE Performance Center. I walk in they go, “You’re wrestling Bill Goldberg for the Universal championship.

Q: And you’re winning.

A: It was literally the craziest 24 hours of my life. I legit did the match. The craziest thing is I’m facing Bill Goldberg, the WWE Hall of Famer, an icon, legend in the industry It’s Bill frickin’ Goldberg. The 13-year-old boy in me is just marking out and losing my mind knowing that I’m just having the opportunity to step in the ring with a guy like this. I’ve been a fan of Goldberg for a long time. I idolized him as a kid.

Q: What can fans expect from your Swamp match?

A: It’s gonna be a fight. It’s gonna be war. Like I said leading up to this, I fully believe that Bray Wyatt is evil. I’m prepared and willing to walk into the gates of hell and slap the devil in the face. It’s two large men with a past that’s not pretty.

Q: Do you feel like this feud with Bray can’t end until you face The Fiend?

A: If I can’t end him with this one, I’m not looking forward. Let me be real, no one wants to come face-to-face with The Fiend. The Fiend is everything inside your mind that you’re afraid of, everything that’s ever hurt you in your life. Anything that you’ve been tempted with, the evil that lives inside your body is manifested into a human being and that is The Fiend. He is terrifying. I’m going to do everything I can to end Bray Wyatt and put all these crazy multiple personalities that he has to rest.

Q: You mentioned quieting some of the naysayers. There were sometimes in your career where it felt like you were so close to breaking through and being a world champion. What do you think held you back or kept it from happening sooner?

A: It’s timing. Who, when, what, where, why, how all that playing into factors. And the biggest thing is like, I didn’t really need a title. The reactions I would get just coming out being Braun. I’m the persona of what made WWE, WWE. The larger-than-life humans that you don’t see walking around on the street every day. That’s the allure that I’m lucky to have and blessed with thanks to genetics. And the fact that I’m the last of a dying breed. You look around the industry as a whole, everywhere in the world and there is nothing like me. There are no giants left who can come in the ring and move and talk and do everything. It’s been a blessing in disguise with this being a gigantic human being as much as it’s hard to get into airplanes and cars and I bang my elbows turning around in stores on the shelves and stuff.

It got down to the point where the company has the faith in me and they believe in everything that I believe in, my fans believe in and they took a shot and gave me an opportunity and like every time they’ve given me one, I take the ball, I put my head down and I run as hard as I can. That’s all I know.

Q: You participated in the 2007 NFL combine. Some of your numbers were pretty impressive. , but no one really scouted you. What do you think held you back? (Strowman has said he ran a 4.89 40-yard-dash, bench pressed 225 pounds 38 times and had a 31.5-inch vertical.)

A: I think the big thing with all that and it is in life is being in the right place at the right time and knowing people. I didn’t play college football because I didn’t  take care of my grades when I was in high school. I thought it was more important to goof off and skip class my first two years of high school. I didn’t play any sports, none of that. I was kind of a screw-up. There was a point in my life when I was like, this isn’t what I want to do. This isn’t how I want to live.

One day I was down fishing on the dock. I grew up in a little town called Sherrills Ford, North Carolina on Lake Norman. A friend of mine, he’s my oldest friend. We went to pre-school together. We’ve been friends since we were four years old. We are talking 32, 33 years of friendship at this point. I played pee-wee football with him and all growing up with him and I kinda started hanging out with a different crowd, doing something that I shouldn’t have been doing and got away from playing football. I was down just fishing on the dock and he came riding by on a jet ski and I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He got to telling me about how much he missed playing football with me, us hanging out and being friends and stuff like that.

It struck a chord with me and made me realize I wasn’t living how I wanted to be living. I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing in life. I completely 180ed, stopped hanging out with the people who influenced me to do silly things and I went out and tried out for the football team. I made the football team my junior year in high school and was the starting right tackle.

I was really mad at myself for doing the stupid stuff and being a screw-up and it was just being a kid and learning life. Unfortunately, I learned everything the hard way in life. It cost me some opportunities. Without a doubt in my mind I know I would have played in the NFL if I would have done well with my grades. I graduated from high school with a 1.8 GPA, which doesn’t meet NCAA requirements. I had to go to night school to make up for the classes that I missed. It cost me an opportunity to go into college and play football and possibly the opportunity to play in the NFL.


But in hindsight, now thinking about it, part of me is thankful that I had to learn that lesson the hard way and I had to go through all that crazy stuff because without doing that I wouldn’t be where I am right now. I wouldn’t be Braun Strowman. He wouldn’t exist.

I’m a firm believer in if you don’t give up on yourself, the world won’t give up on you and I’m proof. I’m living proof. I was a drug addict, you name it, vandalizing cars, doing stupid, stupid stuff as a young teenager that I got involved in and as dumb as it was and as much as I regret saying the things that I did, it turned me into the man that I am and I am thankful for it at the same time.