Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [36]
I had no problem laying down for Bill Goldberg for my final match, even though I had been told I was set up to squash him in thirty seconds. I guess they were more pissed at me for leaving than they were pissed at Bill for doing the same thing.
Bill wasn’t Vince’s guy. To Vince, Bill was a WCW creation, a carpetbagger. So Bill got to spear me and beat me at WrestleMania. But no one in the Garden cared. They were too busy booing us both out of the building because they knew we were leaving. The best part of the match was Austin stunning us.
Bill’s my kind of guy. Neither of us wanted to be in the ring that last night—we just wanted to collect our checks and be done. It wouldn’t have mattered if we had been buddies and had hung out together in WWE, because you’re so numb there anyway, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. It’s better that we got to know each other away from there, because that’s when we both realized we could have a friendship. In WWE, we were just two big miserable SOBs. Once we were both outside of the company, we realized we had a lot in common.
Bill is a straight-up guy who got in to get out. I respect that. He wants to do a job he enjoys. You know that Bill could be sitting in the TNA locker room right now, milking every paycheck he can get out of them just like the other so-called “legends.” But that’s not Bill. He wanted to play with his son, work on his cars, and do a few TV spots for cash. Bill was the ringside commentator for my first MMA fight, and we’ve been good friends ever since.
It’s funny that we were both “seek and destroy” behemoths in pro wrestling, and wrapped it up together at WrestleMania. I never spent any time with Bill before that last day, but because he was so cool, I was open to us becoming friends once we got out.
So, I did WrestleMania, and I went home in March 2004—no longer a champion, and no longer a pro wrestler. I was about to try my hand at the NFL.
PART III
THE SWORD AT MY THROAT
MY BRIEF NFL EXPERIENCE
After getting out of WWE in the spring of 2004, I started chasing after a career in the NFL. But it didn’t matter what sport I was going after. I was escaping the WWE lifestyle. The NFL made sense to me. It was legitimate competition, and I wanted to compete.
I went shopping for a football agent, and the first person I called was a guy by the name of Mike Morris, who was a longtime long-snapper for the Minnesota Vikings. Back when I was wrestling for the Gophers, I met Mike through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I was invited out to his MILO gym to lift some weights. That gym got a lot of notoriety, because Mike would talk about it all the time on KFAN radio in Minneapolis. In case you’re wondering, MILO stands for “Mike’s Insane Lifting Order.”
Mike Morris and I hit it off pretty good because we were both guys who just loved to crank up the music in the gym and do squats until we were bleeding out of our noses. My weight-training routine at the University of Minnesota was my own program, and I started training with Mike in between my junior and senior year. I looked up to Mike because he was successful, had a good family, nice kids, nice wife, a very decent life.
The MILO Gym was in Mike’s basement. His whole basement was a gym. Since I knew Mike, he knew he could be honest with me. In that first phone call, he couldn’t believe I was getting out of WWE. “You must be nuts!” he said. “You want to walk away from a sure thing, guaranteed millions of dollars for ten years, so you can go after something that has maybe a five percent chance for you to make the transition? You haven’t played football since high school!”
I appreciated his honesty.
I told Mike I was serious. I had jumped off the train and I was done with WWE. I wanted to pursue this