Former WWE star/coach Scotty 2 Hotty was interviewed this week on Chris Van Vliet’s “INSIGHT” podcast.
Scotty talked about his return to the ring:
“What a crazy time in my life. I’m taking this crazy step where I’m 48 years old and I’m going back into the ring. But I feel like I can go and deliver. If I couldn’t, then I wouldn’t do it. It just felt like the perfect time to do it.”
Scotty continued, “I missed being in the ring, and I never said that I was retired. I took the job as a coach in WWE at the Performance Center back in 2016. I had my last match in August 2016, and that was it. I never said that I was retired, but I also never really saw myself having another match again. But I was ok with that. I look back at some of that Attitude Era stuff, and it is crazier than I remember. Nobody can take that away from me, my career peaked at the peak of professional wrestling. It was such a cool time with cool energy and cool characters, so I feel like I did everything that I wanted to do. But I missed traveling. NXT wasn’t doing any live events, and all the TV was shot in house. I wasn’t traveling and I wasn’t having fun. I saw people from AEW right down to the small independents having fun. The independents are on fire right now. So I started asking around, things like, ‘Well, what can I make?’ I was doing the numbers and thought to myself that I can go out there and kill it.”
If leaving WWE was a hard decision:
“It was over the last couple of months. Once the pandemic happened and all the releases started happening, I think the releases took a big toll on me. When I became a coach, I had no idea how much I would love that job, and those guys are then like your children. You create these relationships with people, and you see them get released, and you find out with everyone else when they come up on Twitter. My buddy in Nashville texted me, ‘Oh, the releases are happening again.’ So then I jump on Twitter and I see somebody released that was in my class that I just saw three hours before. That’s how I’m finding out, and dude, this is not cool.”
Scotty was asked what WWE is looking for in talent today:
“Well, it might be different now. But when I left there a month ago, they want young. I know that they are doing tryouts for people who have never done this. They are hiring all these college athletes. I have always said that you can’t teach passion, and you need passion to do this. No matter how much money you’re making, if you’re on the road doing 200 shows a year and you’re traveling, which adds about 50 days, you are looking at 250 to 300 days a year on the road. No matter what you’re making in money, you need passion. I think at some point it will swing back the other way and they will go, ‘Where are the men at? We need men’, and then you will see a bunch of guys come in who are a little bit older and more experienced. Putting green on green on live television can be dangerous.”
When Scotty was asked, Scotty said he can’t use the Scotty 2 Hotty name.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Chris Van Vliet with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. Also, be sure to subscribe to “Insight with Chris Van Vliet” on your mobile device by clicking here if you have an iOS device or here on your Android device.
