Wrestling Authenticity Quotes

If anybody dared say wrestling was fake, you'd punch 'em. And you never used the word show. If you used the word show it was an insult.

It's kind of beating a dead horse if you're talking about going out and saying wrestling's fake, or this or that. People don't want to hear that. They want to hear, they wanted to find an inside story.

I like pure pro-wrestling, when it's serious in its orientation and presentation - like it's a legit sport with Jim Ross calling the action.

You hear the word 'fake' thrown around wrestling, but it doesn't get more real when you hear the sound of 20,000 people coming unglued.

I would be a fool to tell you that there was no fixing. You ask if wrestling is for real? Well, I think my own body answers that question.

When the script for 'The Wrestler' kept coming to me I said, This movie is so good if you put me in the film as a wrestler people are going to say, 'No credibility, Hulk Hogan isn't a good actor,' whatever Hollywood thinks of me.

If I were to tell you that my day was all pure wrestling, I wouldn't be honest with you. Because there were crooked promoters. There were a lot of guys that knew that they couldn't even compete with other guys. But to suggest that every match was like that wouldn't be true.

When you see Bret Hart versus Steve Austin, it just seemed so much more real than Hulk Hogan versus Sgt. Slaughter.

I think the best wrestling always needs to pretend to be real, and Vince Russo's wrestling is so pathetically far-fetched and phony that I think he does a disservice to his wrestlers and the business.

I don't like my wrestling or entertainment in general to be too clean or predictable for me as a fan. When I say clean, I'm not talking about dirty jokes, middle fingers and stuff like that. I'm actually not even a big fan of that. A lot of people talk about the attitude era being so great but a lot of it was terrible crap, sex jokes and over-the-top terrible bad comedy. It was Jerry Springer-like. They made a joke about a woman's breasts. Hilarious, but where's the wrestling? I look back on a lot of stuff now, and I'm like where's the wrestling? It's just a lot of crappy jokes.

The best ones - Hulk Hogan believes in Hulkamania. It's not a thing he's selling here. It's real. He knows it's real because he goes to the Mall Of America and everybody goes insane, right? Wrestling is real. Those characters are real.

I don't want to watch phoney looking wrestling, nor does any of us anymore - we've seen too much of it.

I used to be a lot better looking before I joined WWE. Whatever happens in the ring is real, and for anyone to think any differently would be a big mistake.