Jake Hager

I grew up with two cousins from North Dakota who were junior national champions. They're a lot older than me and I looked up to them as my older brothers.

I'm lanky and goofy.

Your natural instinct when people are throwing punches at you is to back up. That just makes it more dangerous for you. You'll get hurt that way. You've got to teach yourself to go forward, move your feet and move your head. I'm not going to lie, that was tough for me to learn.

A long time ago I learned how to shut my mouth, listen to my coaches and put trust in my coaches.

I'm making MMA great again for pro wrestlers.

I was never the best athlete, but I knew how to be coached and I knew how to work hard at it.

MMA is very difficult; you can't just be good at wrestling. You need striking, kickboxing, jiu-jitsu and countless other things.

I am Jack Swagger. My background, it's there for the world to see, and you look at MMA today, you look at boxing today, you look at professional kickboxing today, you need that entertainment value. You want people to relate to you as a character, as a personality. Honestly, that's what they're going to remember.

Whether you speak English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, everybody can speak wrestling and it's really cool to go to different cultures and societies and see how the littlest things we do as performers influence the biggest things.

Coming to WWE, where they treat the talent a certain way, I really gravitated toward Bellator because you saw the trend in fighters wanting to go over there because they were getting better deals and getting more freedom with it.

Growing up in Perry, Oklahoma, there's not a lot going on, so we would go wrestle anywhere and anyplace we could. It really is who I am.

When you get in the cage with me, you'd better be ready to go 35 minutes, not just 15.

Yes, pro wrestling is damaging on your body. It hurts.

Luckily, I feel like I was a late bloomer as far as my body developing. I really didn't start developing until I was like 18, 19, 20 years old.

All Elite Wrestling completely changes the entire landscape of pro wrestling.

For me, the wins and losses in pro wrestling never mattered. The thing that matters is the time on television to tell that story. If you have a two-segment match on television, whether you win or lose, both people's brands win with a great match.

All I want to do is go out there and win. That's all that is important to me.

As a fighter, I'm not one of those people that wants to prove I can go out and throw strikes.

Chris Jericho is on the Mount Rushmore of professional wrestling.

I've heard that I'm a wrestler and not a real fighter, but I have nothing to prove to anybody.