Flashback Audio: Matt Striker Talks Being Outed As A Wrestler While Teaching, Working In WWE
Above is audio from an interview WrestlingINC.com conducted with Matt Striker regarding a variety of topics, including how he ultimately got a spot wrestling for WWE. We are posting interesting clips and stories from our interviews to our YouTube channel, so please take a moment to subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/WrestlingINC1.
Early in his career, Striker was employed as a schoolteacher and moonlighted as a wrestler, sometimes using his sick days to work wrestling dates. Asked to recount how these two worlds eventually collided, Striker provided a few details.
"My students were avid wrestling fans," he explained. "I went to wrestle in Japan and one student, because of the Internet, saw me and didn't say anything. He was very cool. But a couple of weeks later I had done something with WWE and that showed up on television and that secret could not have been kept. So that's how it kind of all unraveled from there."
Striker said he had to consider a number of legal issues and potential repercussions to his professional life as he moved forward.
"I was fortunate, and then the school board is really good at providing you legal representation," he noted. "So I was fortunate and had the time to know what was going down. So I got together with my close circle, which translates to my dad, and we sat down and said what do we do here? If they're really going to pursue this and they're going to take your license away, you're screwed. If I resign, I can at least keep my license and maybe something else will come up. That was the decision we arrived at and thankfully it worked out. I got to keep my teaching license."
Striker credited Vince McMahon with having the vision to mold his real-life story into a character for WWE.
You can read much more from the original interview here.
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