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I had a great run with WWE. WWE gave me great visibility. I met my wife there, and I got paid a lot of money; it was just my time to go. I sensed it. I was smart enough to leave. That's the bottom line.

There's plenty of people who've never gotten the opportunity to wrestle at WrestleMania. To perform there and do that, I never thought it would ever happen. I had learned to live with it. So to say I did, that is a big notch in my belt.

When I saw that Wrestlemania had broken an indoor attendance record, I just walked into a wrestling office, Championship Wrestling in Florida, during the offseason, and they introduced me to Hiro Matsuda, who became my mentor... and the rest is history!

Not only was it that I surprised people by beating Bret Hart, but it was a great match. They still rate it as one of the best wrestling matches of all time.

I had a great time in the NFL. To make it in the amount of time that I did was awesome; it's a dream come true, and hell, it gave me the opportunity to go wrestle.

I don't think anybody else could have gone out there with Brock Lesnar and do what I did. I stand by that, and I'm proud of it. My father and my mother were in the front row watching, and they got to see their son go toe-to-toe with Brock Lesnar. Not many people can say that.

When I wrestled Randy Orton, that was probably the biggest match of my career at that point, because that was when I had the other shot at the WWE championship.

I realized my dream and was proud to be a Superstar. I never won a title, but being hired by WWE and being a Superstar, to me, was like winning a championship.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me. Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.