Paul London Explains Why Amateur Wrestling Is Perfect For Aspiring Pro Wrestlers

In an interview with Fightful, Paul London said that amateur wrestling is a ‘perfect foundation’ for anyone that is hoping to become a pro wrestler. London himself did amateur wrestling training when he was in high school. Other former amateur wrestlers currently working in the business include Nic Nemeth, Shelton Benjamin and Cody Rhodes. Here are highlights:

On amateur wrestling: “Easily, yes. It’s that perfect a foundation for anyone that wants to be a professional wrestler. As great as a foundation as you can have doing this and/or martial arts and having that level of physicality is part of your daily diet, your physical diet is so healthy. Not just for sport and career but in life because if you happen to end up in a fight, most fights end up on the ground and if you know how to handle yourself on the ground, you have a better chance of surviving that situation or at least getting away from it with minimal damage. You can also mess somebody up pretty good too. I didn’t have, there was no amateur program at my high school. I went to Austin Westlake High School and it’s a pretty storied high school in terms of sports. Drew Brees went to my high school. He was two years ahead of me and we won state title through Drew Brees for football. Lakers legend, Chris Mihm. Chris was a great dude. Chris was cool. This is very cool. Great tennis player actually for a seven footer. But we had some great talent. Houston Street baseball player. Just a ton of great athletes came through there, right? But we’d never had a wrestling program. My high school was like a mix between Beverly Hills High and the high school in Varsity Blues. It was like that. Football would dominate my high school. So me and a few guys, we needed like X amount of people onboard who wanted to do the wrestling program then we had to find a teacher who is qualified. That turned out to be the geology teacher, who was like the biggest nerd in the whole school, right? Coach Fly and he would make these terrible like dad jokes and stuff. Anyways, we trained at the elementary school down the street. I mean, the whole program was brand new. So I was the first letterman. I was the first varsity captain. I was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This was towards the end of my high school run though, so I didn’t really have much time to build anything and I wrestled up a weight class. I weighed 174 or 175 pounds, but I wrestled at the 184 weight class because we didn’t have anybody in that division. It was great, just great to tie up all these football guys who would come in right off of football season and then just time up, and they’re throwing up and they’re like, ‘I think I want to try something else,’ and just watching them drop. You know what I mean? It was great.”

On his love of wrestling: “I love wrestling. I love wrestling in its purest form. I love catch wrestling. I love that contest of, of mano a mano. It’s really a lion’s fight and it’s a chess game. It’s a mental chess game, a physical chess game. All these things are things that anybody who knows wrestling obviously already knows. But there’s such a physical barrier that you’re overcoming, win or lose, that you’re always just ultimately testing yourself. That’s just what I love about it. It’s the ultimate test of self, right? I did a little bit of club wrestling in college, but ultimately I knew this isn’t where I want to be.”

On selling: “Completely. The falls came second nature. I think that’s why I love bumping so much and why selling came so second nature to me as well, because I came up from a martial arts foundation and very similar to how you’re saying the break falls, like slap the hand down and this and this. So that was just kind of second nature. I walk with what’s called a Caesar neck in theater where your neck is bent forward and that’s just from [reaching in]. So like all wrestlers kind of have that, but it can kind of limit your breathing.”