In professional sports — legitimate or hyphen-entertainment — the end goal and reason for years of passion, dedication and hard work is being the best in your field. Being the champion, winning the cup, being MVP. Sometimes it becomes a contest of how many of those you’ve been able to collect, and people make memes of you arguing with other people who’ve won. It’s weird.
In pro wrestling you’ll often hear, “if you aren’t here to be the champion, you’re in the wrong business.” The goal of professional wrestling is to love it the most, to put it before everything else in your life and sacrifice everything you have to make it. It’s admirable. You wear the scars of your successes and failures in wrestling for life, especially in an era of instant gratification and social media where random jerks in their parents’ basements can tear you down.
In an interview with the PodNasty Wrestling Podcast, 1/3 of the WWE Tag Team Champions (not a typo) Xavier Woods spoke about the value of having something other than pro wrestling, and how doing so can make what you do in pro wrestling matter more.
“I feel like we have the opportunity as WWE Superstars to make some sort of impact on lives whether it’s one kid or whether it’s an adult. Yes, guys have been WWE World Heavyweight Champion, and it’s amazing, I take nothing from that at all. But if there’s a kid who’s out there in the world watching wrestling and they see me and they know I have my PhD while I was wrestling, that could possibly inspire them to not drop out of school, to not drop out of college, to go and obtain that type of educational status, and that to me means a lot more.”
In case you didn’t know, Woods graduated from Furman University in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and in philosophy. In 2013 he received a masters degree in psychology from Walden University, and he’s already got PhD in his Twitter handle. He’s a smart guy, and with that comes actual wisdom, like “if you’re gonna hurt yourself for a living, it’s not a terrible idea to have something to fall back on, even if that sounds like something your uptight parents would say.” You don’t have to live one dream, you know? You can live a bunch of them at once.
As a bonus, Woods also talked about why The New Day didn’t work as babyfaces, and why anybody anywhere thought they would.
“We thought this would occur, that people would be into it, because it’s maybe one of the only positive things on television, because you turn on the news and there’s death, murder, car crashes and everything. Here’s a positive thing with three guys, all college educated, all college athletes, all very eloquent so we’ll preach a positive message like ‘do well in life and go to school, make sure you work out you could be big and strong like E, make sure if you stretch a lot you can be flexible and agile like Kofi and make sure if you read your books you could be smart like Woods.’ And then we realized after a few months it turned into ‘people don’t like those who are happy. So it’s kind of like a play on society, essentially, people of American society.”
I guess things work out like they’re supposed to.
