Every year, I think you earn the right to eat cake on your birthday.
'Superstar' Billy Graham was someone that my dad taught from A to Z, from tying up to submission wrestling. Billy was more of a showman than a wrestler. My dad used to love tying Billy in knots, and Iron Sheik would be watching.
The importance of hard work was a message I learned from my parents, and that is something I worked to pass on to my kids and grandchildren. Winning is important, and you should want to win, but the main priority is to strive to be the best.
If you look at wrestling when I started to get my big break back in 1992, I changed wrestling from the cartoons of Hulk Hogan and Iron Sheik and the matches with the leg drop and the hand behind the ear and the playing to the crowd. They were just cartoon characters if you ask me.
After being signed by WWE, Edge, Christian, Mark Henry, Giant Silva, Test and Ken Shamrock all trained at my house. I had a pool room with an indoor pool and a garden behind it. I took out the garden and put in a wrestling ring.
Flair was a tricky guy to work with when I worked with Ric. When he was champion, we had much better matches, and the moment the title got switched, we seemed to screw up my match every night.
I think the best wrestling always needs to pretend to be real, and Vince Russo's wrestling is so pathetically far-fetched and phony that I think he does a disservice to his wrestlers and the business.
I don't know about England so much, but in Germany and some of these other countries, the pink was something that they liked. For those kids, the pink and black and the whole look with the sunglasses and the leather jacket was the right kind of hero they could get behind, and I think that really set me apart from everyone else.
I love tag team wrestling, and it's different than all the other matches.
Since retiring, there's only been one time I actually dreamed about wrestling. In my dream, I was wrestling against Kurt Angle. I had him clamped in a headlock. I was breathing hard, and I remember telling myself, 'This is only a dream. It's not real.' But the longer I held Kurt in a headlock, I started to believe it was real.
Triple H is a former bodybuilder. He's all about bodies. He thought that Hulk Hogan was the greatest wrestler in the world. They think Ultimate Warrior was the greatest wrestler in the world because that's what they're attracted to, but he's not really a wrestling fan like I grew up. I was a wrestling fan.