Toa Liona Reflects On His Experience Training At Rikishi’s School

Toa Liona trained at Rikishi’s wrestling school, and he recently talked about the experience of learning there. The Gates of Agony member spoke training at Rikishi’s KnokX Pro Wrestling Academy in California during the tag team’s appearance on Talk is Jericho. You can see a couple of highlights below, per Fightful:

On how he started at the school: “Man, it was awesome. My thought process when I first started going to wrestling, I was like, ‘Alright, who can teach me to be the best wrestler I can?’ I was looking at San Diego and Rikishi’s school is in LA. I was like, ‘Man, no better person to teach me to be a Samoan wrestler than a Samoan Hall of Ffamer.’”

On the experience: “Training under him, it was three times a week, he really took a lot of time out of training to work with me after class or before class because he saw that I was really invested in it. Me and my whole family man, coming into post-football, I got hurt, I was into power lifting stuff and I know that if I benched 100 pounds, it’s not gonna put a million dollars in my bank account. So I needed to make a lateral move here because I don’t know what to do. My wife suggested wrestling so that’s when I looked it up and once I decided to do that, we just put all of our eggs into this one basket, whether it’s us moving to the Bay Area during the pandemic to live with family so I can still drive to LA for training, or whether it was us driving to LA to fully commit to training and hopefully get an opportunity, those were the things. I was happy he was able to take us in.”