Ken Shamrock recently spoke with Chris Van Vliet for a live question and answer session on The Chris Van Vliet Show. He discussed many topics, including his experiences in both MMA and professional wrestling.
Here are some highlights.
On why he returned to professional wrestling:
Shamrock: “Yeah, I would probably say, when I stepped away, because I was only out a year when I stepped away from MMA, because I went out of pro wrestling into MMA, so I had stepped away and it had been about a year, and I just felt like, man, I can’t live like this. I need excitement, I need something to challenge me and so I said, I’m gonna start training again, I’m gonna start getting back into the gym, to see if I could get myself in a position to where I could actually wrestle and feel good about wrestling. And so I think it was about a year, maybe a little less than a year, I felt pretty good. I got in, I started doing some practicing, I was like, wow, I feel pretty good. So I ended up doing a little one-timer over in Australia with Battle Championship Wrestling and I had a great match and I felt like, wow, I feel good, so I went and did a few more over there and ended up catching the tag team titles. And like I said, it was one of those things where I really didn’t know but when I first hit the ring, then I knew, and that’s when I made the challenge on Twitter and FaceBook, that I was coming back because I felt really good about where I was at and how my body felt after taking a year off. ”
On whether he gets the credit he deserves for being the first crossover star between MMA and pro wrestling:
Shamrock: “I mean, I do. You know, it is what it is. One thing i don’t understand is the WWF, you know, it just seems, and maybe it’s not, I don’t know, but it just seems like I’m left out of a lot. They even put up, on one of the magazines, the best finishing holds, submission finishing holds, and they had Kurt Angle on there, with the Ankle Lock, and, I was like, listen, I’m not trying to dis him or anything like that, but he’s never done one for real, like, so, sometimes when I see him put it on, it’s not even done right. But yet they use him as the picture for the finishing hold. And I’m the one that created it and did it for real. So those are the kind of things, and it’s not like they’ve corrected it, or done it and changed it, trying to make sure people understand where it came from. No, they keep trying to bury it, like they want Kurt to be the one who created it. And it’s like, no matter how much they do that, it’s never going to be happen because history always rises to the top, people will always know where something comes from, it won’t go away.”
On AEW and modern wrestling:
Shamrock: “Yeah, I like AEW. I think that they’re very talented. It’s a different type of wrestling, right, I mean you’re almost going back to the Japanese style but they’re putting a little more selling into it. But the moves, they’re these constant chain moves where everything is chain wrestling together. And then you got WWF, right, where they don’t have enough of the chain wrestling but they got the stories, the storylines. It’s almost like, if you could put the two together, then you would have that Attitude Era. You would have the attitude, you would have the chain wrestling, you would have the storylines, you’d have the selling, you’d have the tough guys. I think the mixture of those two is what we’re trying to get.”
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