Kevin Nash has shared the gruelling details of his early pro-wrestling tryouts, revealing how the process was deliberately designed to break down anyone who wasn’t fully committed to pursuing the business.
Speaking on an episode of Kliq This, Kevin Nash said that aspiring wrestlers not only had to endure a punishing physical test, but also had to pay a large sum of money for the privilege.
“No, that’s, exactly the [point was] to break you,” Nash recalled. “They would have these tryouts and back then, people don’t remember that it was $1,500 for the Saturday tryout. So you paid $1,500. And then you went in there, and they Hindu squatted you… then they put you in the ring with two shooters. By that time, you could barely stand.”
Nash said the WCW trainers then pushed the hopefuls even further.
“And then you’d go and run around the outside of the Quonset hut. Then you’d run the ropes. And they wouldn’t smarten you up. They wouldn’t tell you there was a work. And they’d say, ‘Okay, Monday at six or seven o’clock.’ Nobody would ever come back.”
Kevin Nash Shares How He Learned The True Nature Of The Wrestling Industry
Kevin Nash then spoke about how he was the only person who returned to the training school on the following Monday, and that there wasn’t anybody there, as the trainers expected nobody to return after the brutal workout they put people through.
Nash explained how he called the telephone number he was given for WCW’s office to enquire where everyone was.
“I called the number I had. I think it was Mike Atkins who answered it, and he was one of the refs at WCW. He basically said, ‘You’re not gonna believe this, but one of the guys came back.’ And Jody [Hamilton] said, ‘Which one?’ He goes, ‘The big one.'”
Nash then said that Hamilton drove down to the training ground and took him into the office there and actually explained the wrestling business to him.
“Jody drove down. And we went in, and he had a little office. And because I showed back up, he immediately smarted me up. We talked about psychology and s**t like that.”
The experience highlighted how difficult breaking into the industry was, and how the old system aimed to expose whether someone truly had the drive to keep going.
