Randy Orton Talks His Suspensions, Botched Evolution Start, His Injuries, More
Randy Orton recently sat down with Sam Roberts. Here are some highlights from the interview.
Is it weird that he is a veteran of WWE when most guys are barely starting: "It's weird because, like Sheamus, for instance, he's older than I am, not by much. But he didn't start here, I think it's three or four years ago, and when you come in and you're thirty and you're a young guy, it's hard to call you a kid. I was always a young guy and everyone, hey kid, hey kid. That's just kind of what you call the young guys, you know? How do you call a 32 year old guy hey kid, you know? So yeah, it does make it a little weird back there, but to be a veteran and be 32, that's weird too."
How the people in his "class" (Cena, Batista, etc.) didn't come up through the indies: "In OVW we paid our dues the best we could. We would run that territory where we were working. We were having shows in front of people, but they were free shows, or they were very cheap shows. Like our Sunday show might have 10 people attend, but you're getting experience, know what I'm saying? If you can work a crowd of ten people, you can work a crowd of 10,000 easy."
Is it tougher to work a smaller crowd: "Oh, much, especially doing what we do. For me, the louder the people get, like last night I keep telling people about Hartford, CT as a good example because there were just so energetic and so loud, when they're like that we can run faster, jump higher. We become more super human, I think. In front of 10 people, even if they're all just into it 100 percent. You're not going to have that. You have to make that up. You have to find the emotion somewhere else. But when they're screaming like they were last night, it's no thing to flip into gear and go crazy. Grab him, grab him, pull them out for a double DDT. Boom. And those people go crazy. It's just f***ing, it's crazy. You feel it and they feel it and it's just this mutual energy that everyone's getting high off of at the same time."
When was the first time that he got hurt and he realized how dangerous the sport truly is: "My injuries happened very quickly. After I was on TV for less than six months I dislocated my right shoulder on RAW. It's hanging from a thread and God it hurt. But that adrenalin that I was talking about, mixed with the nervousness of being on live TV for the third week in a row. I had started on Smackdown, which is taped, moved to RAW like two weeks in, bam, dislocated my shoulder. So I had got this push, I got my start, here we go and then boom, four months. Then I came back, my first match back I broke my foot and was out another four months.
"And when I came back before I broke my foot, we were going to start Evolution, me, Batista, Triple H and Ric Flair. We were at a live event in Reading, Pennsylvania and we were going to do those live events and kind of work [towards it]. That was the first night I was going to hit the RKO. I was going to start using the RKO and call it the RKO. Didn't get to do that because I broke my foot and Batista tore his tricep in the same match. So we both got sent to Dr. James Andrews down in Birmingham and Evolution had to be put on hold."
How close has he been to losing his job due to his past problems (drug suspensions, etc.): "I think I was just a little impulsive with my decision making. I wouldn't really think how it was going to affect me or the others around me. Being a dad now, that was the biggest thing when I became a father, was I can't do the stupid s*** anymore because I got a kid. What am I doing? It was pretty much just bam, stopped then. I haven't had any other problems."
You can check out the whole interview above.
Source: The Sam Roberts Show
Gary Emmitt contributed to this article.