Former-IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Champions Karl Anderson & Luke Gallows were on The Jim Rome Show, talking about life in the WWE. During the interview, Anderson dropped some big numbers, when talking about his days in NJPW:
Transcriptions via Robert Gunier at Wrestling INC.
“When I first signed that contract, 2008, it was the coolest thing that ever happened. It was the first time I started getting paid, ’cause I did it from 2002 and – I went from probably $5,000 in 2007 to making, probably, $55,000 in 2008. And that was like I just struck gold. Then each year, the contracts got better, and by the end, we were pulling some bank in.
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“It’s still the same thing [with fans]. Good guy vs. bad guys still telling the story, but there’s nothing like competing in Japan. Wrestling in Tokyo, or Osaka, or Sapporo, or Fukuoka, or Nagoya, all those towns that we hit, those people believe. And they love the sport of professional wrestling.”
Luke Gallows compared life in football to life in WWE, saying it’s different because they’re a touring company:
“I think the difference with us is the grind, because we’re on the road so much. We’re a live event, touring, media based company, but we’re out there 200 nights a year doing this, and feeling it, and then getting in the car driving 3 or 4 hours. It’s a grind. There’s no off season.”
Finally, Gallows addressed the dangers of the wrestling industry, and how WWE has “cleaned up” a lot of the more dangerous standards of the old days:
“Like, I wish there were fake chairs, I wish the ring felt like a trampoline, I wish all of those things because I would feel so much better, but it’s funny because the WWE has cleaned up the business so much. When we first broke in fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago, if you took a chair shot to the head and put your hands up, you were considered not a man. So, we’re standing there for twenty bucks just gelling are el kabonged. And now, the head shots are out of there. The drug testing policy, it’s the most advanced one in sports that I know of. So, they really cleaned it up and they take a lot better care of the guys than twenty years ago. It’s a lot different.”
The Jim Rome Show
