Reggie Reveals Vince McMahon Once Told Him He Used To Do Gymnastics Back In The Day

In an interview with Fightful, Reggie spoke about discussing his gymnastics background with Vince McMahon, who told him that he used to do something similar when he was younger. Here are highlights:

On practicing gymnastics when he was younger: “So there were two moments I realized that. One moment is when I was flipping, my brothers and I had mattresses in the backyard and they were back there doing a back tuck and then another back tuck, consecutive back tucks. I didn’t know how to do two. I would do one and I would stop and then I would do the second one. I’m like, ‘How do Ido that?’ I remember I was sitting in my underwear in my room watching out the window. I was looking at my brothers do it and then everything slowed down, legit, it slowed down, ‘Okay, land the first back tuck and use that rebound to go into a second one.’ So I saw that ran outside in my underwear and I did one, two. Super excited. So there was that moment.”

On how it always didn’t end well: “Then there was a moment that wasn’t so pretty where I was flipping in my bed and fell out the window. I bounced back up and just went back into the house. I’m like, ‘Am I actually a superhero? Because that was a two-story window.’ I fell out of the window at two stories and I was pretty young.”

On talking with Vince McMahon about his gymnastics background: “So, he didn’t say, ‘Let me show you,’ but he watched my PBS documentary where I was talking about getting out of the games and all of these things and using flips to do all of that stuff. He comes to me and goes, ‘Just watched your PBS documentary. Really good stuff. I use to do all of that back in my day.’ I didn’t want to laugh because I’m like, ‘Maybe you’re serious, but uh…’ He didn’t say he could show me how to do things, but he said, ‘I used to do all that stuff back in my day.’ That was so funny to me.”

On pitching higher risk stunts in WWE: So, I’m the daredevil actually. They try to give me things that are not as demanding or not high risk. They don’t want to take high risks. They say, ‘If you can do this, we can make this a little bit lower or dumb it down a bit.’ I’ll say, ‘No, no. Let’s actually make it higher and get a few more trucks I can go over.’ So, I’m all about pushing my limits. They want to be as safe as possible. No risk, no reward type of thing for them. I’m like, ‘It’s fine.’ I’m always pushing my own limits. They just let me go, let me be free. I don’t think there’s been anyone that’s pitched anything crazy to me. No. They’ve pitched pretty good stuff. I try to make it crazy. There was one time where they wanted me to scale a wall and I wasn’t using a trampoline. I was like, ‘Hey, guys. I don’t think that’s actually possible to do.’ It was cold outside and I was like, ‘Yeah, we might need the trampoline for this.’ It’s crazy because we’ve done so many crazy stunts. Flipping out of trees, flipping over ice cream trucks, jumping over cars. I’m just like, ‘Who comes up with this stuff?’”