Alberto Del Rio recently spoke with Bill Hanstock for Uproxx; you can read a few excerpts below:
Alberto El Patron comments on his current status with Combate Americas:
Well, I used to be the president of the company, I was helping them finding places, finding fighters, hiring fighters. Unfortunately because of all my activities, because I travel all the time and I have to come back — my professional career with my projects in Mexico and my family — it was being impossible for me to maintain the pace or to be on top on the demands that the company was needing for me.
So because Campbell McLaren and I are friends above anything, I talked to him and I said, “Listen, I don’t think I can do this for you the way you want it, and the money for me is better — even though you pay me fantastic money, the money I’m doing here is really good and one of these projects that I have in hand right now in Mexico are something that I really want to do, because that’s the transition that I’m planing on doing; from a pro wrestler to being a TV host or TV entertainer or TV personality.”
And of course he said yes, but he asked me if I could still help them in certain moments when they needed to hire someone like [Érik] “Goyito” Pérez, or if they needed to find a new place to bring the sport, or if I could help them just with stuff like this, just promoting the company, promoting the events.
Alberto comments on trying to keep his personal and professional life separate:
It’s so difficult, to be honest it’s so difficult. I was just talking about this with Goyito Perez. It’s so difficult because I’m still old-school, and to me it’s like, if you have for whatever reason, let’s say I couldn’t make it for this interview with you, why do I have to explain to someone besides you, why do I have to explain to the rest of the people the reason why I couldn’t make it?
Of course, I will call you, and explain to you, “Eh, you know what, my wife left me, my dog died, my children is in the hospital. Hey, I had a nervous wreck and I feel sick, I cannot make it, my brother, I’m so sorry, I will do… can we do it tomorrow?” But I … to me, that’s the way it should be, just the ones involved are the ones that need to know what really happened, not to make a long statement explaining the whole, “Hey you know what, my fifth wife just left me and that’s the reason i couldn’t make it, I’m so sorry I will make it … ”
I’m from a different era, but these days that’s the way it is, you have to tell them absolutely everything, it’s just sometimes we need to learn how to handle it, how to manage or how to explain things in Social Media these days.
It’s more than difficult, to me I’m a wrestler. To me, my idea is that you should only be concerned about what’s going on with me in the ring, what’s going on with me in the ring or in my … or the things I do related to wrestling or the sport or on any type of entertainment. The rest of the stuff, my personal life, who am I dating, where am I going, what type of toilet paper I use when I go to the bathroom, that’s my business.
Alberto comments on there being a breaking point for when he needed to leave WWE:
To leave the company? Yes, I had a … everyone knows that I don’t have a good relationship with someone in the company, and to me it was really difficult to go and see this person, see his group of people and have to deal and work with him every single week. And as you know, you have to spend 260 days on the road with them, see them every day, so one of those days, being completely tired, exhausted, a little bit hurt, I said to myself, “You don’t have to do this, you have all those projects out there, all these people calling you to offer you a job, not only in the pro wrestling business, but in other business,” where I started thinking about my age, I said, when I left the company I was 38.
I said, “I’m 38 years old, I only want to wrestle another three to four years, and this is not the place where I want to be, I want to leave this place and fall in love with the business again, and go and work with a big smile on my face and not be miserable.” Plus, all my friends were gone, all of them; Chavo [Guerrero], Drew [McIntyre], well I mean Drew’s back in the company. But back then he was doing these shows, Drew was gone, Chavo was gone, Edge, Rey Mysterio, all the people that used to hang out with me were gone, so I said, “This is not the place for me. I can go and make the same amount of money but being free instead of being 260 days out of my house, I can be 100-160 days on the road and be happy.”
And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I’m working for Combate, I’m working for Impact, I’m doing indie shows all over the world, having fun in Mexico, I’m about to start a reality show in Mexico in January. I just did a podcast for the first time with Combate and it was fantastic, it was so much fun. There’s an offer from Telemundo to do some episodes with one of the most important soap operas, there’s a lot of things that are coming in my way, and I’m completely happy.
