On Christian’s entrance into wrestling:
“Eventually what he did, is he got a student loan to go to the same college that I went to (different program). And he took his student loan and paid for wrestling training. Same school. Same trainers and he was a quick study I thought. He started training probably, I think about a year and a half after I did and he came in and adapted, what I felt much quicker than anybody else I’d seen to be honest. So we pretty quickly brought him on the road with us cause he could already get in and go. So we hit the road together and everything. By the time I had the match with WWF, he was just started to kind of have his first matches, essentially. So I guess both of us got places pretty quickly.”
On his first (unplanned) WWE match and getting praise from the locker room:
“My mom got a hold of Jay and said ‘WWF’s looking for Adam.’ Jay hops in his mom’s car, drives to Rockwood [ON] and says ‘hey, the WWF is trying to get a hold of you to wrestle tonight. To wrestle Bob Holly. So we hop in his car, he drives me to Copps Coliseum and I wrestled, it was May 10, 1996. We were opening match. The main event was Vader against Ultimate Warrior.”
“That night George ‘The Animal’ Steele was one of the agents and he pulled me aside said, ‘you’re good. Just keep doing what you’re doing and if I have anything to say about it, we’ll be in contact.’ Again, he didn’t have to do that. But it was when some of the other guys came up to me, you know. Warrior came up to me and goes ‘you’re really good kid. Way to go.’ I was like, ‘that’s the Ultimate Warrior. He’s the main event and he just watched my match.’ Bob [Holly] enjoyed it so, and I love Bob, but he’s a curmudgeonly man and he enjoyed the match. ‘Oh, that was great, kid. Thanks!'”
Scott Hall‘s sound advice that stuck with him over the years:
“Scott Hall came up and was really, really helpful, he said, ‘you got it. Now you have to learn how to do it in front of 10,000 instead of 10’ and that really stuck with me because that’s what I’ve been wrestling in front of was, you know, a good crowd was 150. That night I wrestled in front of 10,000 people so that’s a biiiig transition. That’s a big leap, but that stuck with me. I thought ‘Okay, I have to slow things down, make things mean more and translate it and relay it to someone that’s 10,000 people away as opposed to ten.”
On the idea of the Edge persona and name:
“No one had an idea. Including me, honestly. They didn’t think I could talk, still, because they had done these interviews with just us, as people, and I just talked like I normally do. And I think within that they saw ‘ahhh, okay I don’t know if this kid can talk.’ So at one point it was thrown around that I was going to be a deaf mute. I was just going to be this guy. This ‘angry guy’ and I thought ‘oh my gosh what do I do with that?’ Talk about just dead in the water. There’s nowhere to go there. So I didn’t end up talking on TV for probably a year and a half?”
“Initially Edge was just supposed to be this, I was told, a tortured soul. I just finished a dark match. I was riding with Don Callis and it was Albany, New York and there’s an ‘EDGE whatever’ station there, ‘EDGE 102’ or something and I thought ‘ah, Edge.’ I didn’t think though in terms of you know the cadence of a crowd being able to change that. I shot myself in the foot there, but it was better than ‘Rage’ or ‘Riot’ which were their [WWE] two ideas.”
On his risk-taking moves in his early days and Steve Austin’s advice:
“And I think we went too far. We really did, but at the time like I said we were young and we were hungry and we all thought we were indestructible, but I distinctly remember having a conversation with Austin on a flight either going to Europe or coming back and he was like ‘guys, you know, you gotta be careful here, you only got so many bumps on your bump card.’ You don’t think about 45 because that seems a lifetime away and in a sense it kind of was, because 15 years of doing that is like living three lifetimes.”
Edge also touches upon his retirement and what African-American wrestler he believes deserves to be in the WWE Hall of Fame. You can listen to the entire episode below:
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