The problem with Deep South to me is that there was a group that were tight with the boss, and they would always go out and drink and have barbeques. Then, when WWE would say, 'Who should we look at?' Bill Demott would say, 'Oh, look at this guy and this guy.' Of course those were his buddies.
John Cena is one of the great WWE talents that I respect most. If I were to end up there, working with someone of his caliber would certainly be a goal and jive with my mission of changing wrestling.
As a kid, when the neighbors were out playing street hockey or tackle football, my friends and I were in my basement with the NES/SNES.
In high school, despite my involvement on four different sports teams, I threw my duties of being a jock out the window and spent my spare time in wrestling training or on the PS2.
The Young Bucks and myself are always full of ideas.
As naturally athletic as I'm gifted to be, where certain things came easily, I always rely on my brain first.
When I was growing up, I thought there was only WWE. That's it. One promotion in the world. And then, as I grew up, I found that there's local wrestling. There's WCW, there's ECW. In Mexico, there are the luchadores. And then, finally, I realized there's wrestling in Japan.
In WWE, a gay person is usually portrayed like some sort of comedy act to be mocked and laughed at. The world's not like that anymore.
I exposed myself, and I exposed my relationship and deep love and trust for Ibushi in front of the world. And we want to work together and change wrestling for a brighter future.
A lot of my main-event matches will last around the half-hour mark, and if you can have a variety of emotions within that half hour, that's a great story from start to finish.
A lot of people, especially performers in wrestling, feel that winning the title is the only statistic that matters, but it's always about the journey. If you don't have the people behind you, believing in you, and the start of a new chapter after winning the title, then you don't have anything.
We have a very physical performance art. A lot of times, when you want to achieve a certain emotion, you have to use professional wrestling ingredients, which are moves or a sequence of moves.
If LGBT people can identify with our story, if they think, 'The Golden Lovers are my team,' I'm good with that.
I have a vision for what I want wrestling to be, and I was fortunate not just to have the opportunity to show my talents at the right time, and not just to have the right opponents, and not just to have the knowledge that the front office has faith in me, but also the good fortune not to get hurt in the middle of all this.
Since I'm not in WWE, some people think I'm not even in their league. It's easy for me to tune those people out because they have no idea what they're talking about.
If I lose my confidence, then I'll lose my way.
Learning Japanese was certainly a task, but my passion for the culture, as well as my will to communicate with fans and friends, always encouraged me to continue.
I main-evented a sold-out Budokan Arena show; I participated in the first-ever ladder match in NJPW, made the transition from junior to heavyweight, and earned a G1 win with a series full of performances that I'm personally very proud of.
If you're holding a championship that means something in the landscape of Japanese wrestling, you're guaranteed to get a huge feature in almost every magazine - you might even be guaranteed a front page. That's big.
I have sort of made it my mission to be treated less as a foreigner, less as a guest.
