I keep trying to convince people that I'm OK to wrestle, and I think that's probably the hard part. A lot of times I'm trying to convince myself, too, that I can wrestle. It's really hard, because the concussion issue is very subjective, and that's the part that a lot of people don't understand.
Wrestling is different to me. As I talk to other wrestlers, wrestling seems a little different to me than it does to a lot of them. To me, it's about an artistic performance and about honing my artistic performance in pursuit of these minute moments of perfection. These little encapsulations. And none of them are ever perfect.
I think of Bret Hart as somebody who held the Intercontinental championship like it was the World Heavyweight championship. Every title match he was in felt important, like it was the most important thing on the show. The way he carried himself and the matches he had, it was just everything I thought a champion should be.
I've been wrestling since I was 18 years old. And within the first five months of my wrestling career, I'd already had three concussions. And for years after that, I would get a concussion here and there, and it gets to the point that when you've been wrestling for 16 years, that adds up to a lot of concussions.
My favorite wrestler growing up was Dean Malenko. He was a very technical wrestler, and when I trained with Shawn Michaels, he wasn't that kind of a technical wrestler. So, when I finally met Regal in 2001, he was that kind of a wrestler, and all of a sudden, I could ask him things, and he would know what I was talking about and how to do it.