Edge was the most recent guest on “Primetime With Sean Mooney”. During the interview, he discussed meeting Christian, how his name came to be, advice he received from several legends and more. Here are the highlights:
Edge On His Friendship With Christian:
Just so happened to find two people – same mindset, same drive, same goal. That to me is the crazy part. and he fact that we stuck to it is because we had each other to lean on throughout the years, but to get there, to go through all the training, to wrestle in the barns in Fall Branch, TN and go through all of that stuff and then eventually at WrestleMania 16 to be standing there on top of the table holding the tag team belts, just all very, very surreal at times.
Edge On Training At Sully’s Boxing Gym In Texas:
So go down there, like I said this rough neighborhood, Parkdale, I mean at this point, there’s hookers, there’s pimps – it’s a bad, bad neighborhood at this point. It’s since gentrified but at the time it was rough. So I go down to this beat up old thing called Sully’s gym and it’s straight out of Rocky. Like I expected to see Mick there or Stallone walking with his racquetball. So we trained in a boxing ring.
With a wrestling ring, it’s bigger. There’s a little bit more give, not much, but a little bit, but boxing this thing, it was a concrete block. It made every ring after that seem like a dream.
On How He Viewed His Career:
To me I didn’t look at wrestling as a way out or a way to be rich and famous. Wrestling to me was always just something I had to do, and if that came great.
On If Wrestling Came Easy To Him:
I didn’t feel like a natural. The footwork was new, I’d never taken dance or anything like that but I did box for a couple of years, but the footwork was different. Boxing was being on your toes, this was having a good base.
On How Important His Mom’s Support Was:
To her eternal credit, she never once doubted me, at least to me. She might have to herself and just never vocalized that to me. But from the point I said I wanted to do it, she was nothing but supportive and that was huge because, you know, you tell your parents that you want to essentially pursue this pipe dream and I think anybody who gets into entertainment has this same conversation with their parents at some point.
On taking television and radio courses in college:
I took television and radio and I thought it would help me break out of my shyness. I truly thought it would help me with my promo skills. It was my main reasoning for taking it. I was like ‘yeah, it could be a fallback option’, but to me there wasn’t a fallback option. It had to be that, there was no other choice and it was always going to be that. I don’t know, I’ve always said I think there’s a difference between cockiness and confidence, but I truly always had the confidence in that I was gonna make it. Whatever my version of ‘make it’ was, at that time it was ‘get to the WWF.’ That to me was the goal and I was going to get there. So I wanted to come in with as many tools in the tool belt as I could, and where I felt lacking in the shows that I’d done, was confidence on the mic, confidence with just coming out of my shell.
But If you were to hand me a microphone it was not going to be pretty and I knew that was the part of my game I needed to work on and I thought radio would help just in terms of my cadence, my inflections, my timing because if you gotta do a live spot, it may be 2 am on Humber College radio, but I still want to hit that 30 second spot, and I think it did help. Eventually, I got to where I was really comfortable on the mic, but I think that helped a little bit.
On when he knew he had something in wrestling:
And eventually, got up to Winnipeg and that’s where I ran into guys like Lance Storm and ‘Bad News’ Brown. Names that had been around. And when a guy like ‘Bad News’ Brown takes an interest, I’m like ‘okay, well I must be onto something here’ or if I go up to the east coast Rick Martel would request to work me I’m like ‘alright this means something. This means that I’m safe and that they must see something. Whether it’s a drive or whether it’s the fact that I was wide open to just listening and if I asked advice I would then implement it. I wasn’t just asking it because that seemed like the political thing to do.
On Christian getting into wrestling:
Eventually what he did, is he got a student loan to go to the same college that I went to (different program). And he took his student loan and paid for wrestling training. Same school. Same trainers and he was a quick study I thought. He started training probably, I think about a year and a half after I did and he came in and adapted, what I felt much quicker than anybody else I’d seen to be honest. So we pretty quickly brought him on the road with us cause he could already get in and go. So we hit the road together and everything. By the time I had the match with WWF, he was just started to kind of have his first matches, essentially. So I guess both of us got places pretty quickly.
On the praise he received for his first WWE match:
My mom got a hold of Jay and said ‘WWF’s looking for Adam.’ Jay hops in his mom’s car, drives to Rockwood [ON] and says ‘hey, the WWF is trying to get a hold of you to wrestle tonight. To wrestle Bob Holly. So we hop in his car, he drives me to Copps Coliseum and I wrestled, it was May 10, 1996. We were opening match. The main event was Vader against Ultimate Warrior.
That night George ‘The Animal’ Steele was one of the agents and he pulled me aside said, ‘you’re good. Just keep doing what you’re doing and if I have anything to say about it, we’ll be in contact.’ Again, he didn’t have to do that. But it was when some of the other guys came up to me, you know. Warrior came up to me and goes ‘you’re really good kid. Way to go.’ I was like, ‘that’s the Ultimate Warrior. He’s the main event and he just watched my match.’ Bob [Holly] enjoyed it so, and I love Bob, but he’s a curmudgeonly man and he enjoyed the match. ‘Oh, that was great, kid. Thanks!’
On Christian’s entrance into wrestling:
Eventually what he did, is he got a student loan to go to the same college that I went to (different program). And he took his student loan and paid for wrestling training. Same school. Same trainers and he was a quick study I thought. He started training probably, I think about a year and a half after I did and he came in and adapted, what I felt much quicker than anybody else I’d seen to be honest. So we pretty quickly brought him on the road with us cause he could already get in and go. So we hit the road together and everything. By the time I had the match with WWF, he was just started to kind of have his first matches, essentially. So I guess both of us got places pretty quickly.
On his first match receiving praise from the WWE locker room:
My mom got a hold of Jay and said ‘WWF’s looking for Adam.’ Jay hops in his mom’s car, drives to Rockwood [ON] and says ‘hey, the WWF is trying to get a hold of you to wrestle tonight. To wrestle Bob Holly. So we hop in his car, he drives me to Copps Coliseum and I wrestled, it was May 10, 1996. We were opening match. The main event was Vader against Ultimate Warrior.
That night George ‘The Animal’ Steele was one of the agents and he pulled me aside said, ‘you’re good. Just keep doing what you’re doing and if I have anything to say about it, we’ll be in contact.’ Again, he didn’t have to do that. But it was when some of the other guys came up to me, you know. Warrior came up to me and goes ‘you’re really good kid. Way to go.’ I was like, ‘that’s the Ultimate Warrior. He’s the main event and he just watched my match.’ Bob [Holly] enjoyed it so, and I love Bob, but he’s a curmudgeonly man and he enjoyed the match. ‘Oh, that was great, kid. Thanks!’
On Advice He Received From Scott Hall:
Scott Hall came up and was really, really helpful, he said, ‘you got it. Now you have to learn how to do it in front of 10,000 instead of 10’ and that really stuck with me because that’s what I’ve been wrestling in front of was, you know, a good crowd was 150. That night I wrestled in front of 10,000 people so that’s a biiiig transition. That’s a big leap, but that stuck with me. I thought ‘Okay, I have to slow things down, make things mean more and translate it and relay it to someone that’s 10,000 people away as opposed to ten.
On his “Edge” persona and how it came to be:
No one had an idea. Including me, honestly. They didn’t think I could talk, still, because they had done these interviews with just us, as people, and I just talked like I normally do. And I think within that they saw ‘ahhh, okay I don’t know if this kid can talk.’ So at one point it was thrown around that I was going to be a deaf mute. I was just going to be this guy. This ‘angry guy’ and I thought ‘oh my gosh what do I do with that?’ Talk about just dead in the water. There’s nowhere to go there. So I didn’t end up talking on TV for probably a year and a half?
Initially Edge was just supposed to be this, I was told, a tortured soul. I just finished a dark match. I was riding with Don Callis and it was Albany, New York and there’s an ‘EDGE whatever’ station there, ‘EDGE 102’ or something and I thought ‘ah, Edge.’ I didn’t think though in terms of you know the cadence of a crowd being able to change that. I shot myself in the foot there, but it was better than ‘Rage’ or ‘Riot’ which were their [WWE] two ideas.
On his risk-taking moves in his early days and Steve Austin’s advice:
And I think we went too far. We really did, but at the time like I said we were young and we were hungry and we all thought we were indestructible, but I distinctly remember having a conversation with Austin on a flight either going to Europe or coming back and he was like ‘guys, you know, you gotta be careful here, you only got so many bumps on your bump card.’ You don’t think about 45 because that seems a lifetime away and in a sense it kind of was, because 15 years of doing that is like living three lifetimes.
You can listen to Edge’s full interview on Primetime With Sean Mooney by clicking HERE
