Edge Interview

[GreatWhiteNope 0]

http://sports.ign.com/articles/565/565537p4.html

 

Edge Interview

Wrestler turned author talks about his new book, mullets, and Survivor Series.

 

November 11, 2004 - In the most enjoyable wrestling autobiography since Mick Foley's "Have a Nice Day", Adam Copeland, AKA Edge, details his life from Kiss and Spider-Man to suplexes and Sexton Hardcastle (his original wrestling name), while at the same time, writing with a humor that is more of the "reeking of awesomeness" Edge than the bad-ass heel seen on Raw every Monday night. There might not be any pictures of him, pen in hand, striking a five-second pose, but you could almost see the smirk on his face as he recounts stories from the road and his past.

 

There's the time Kurt Angle answered the door buck naked and dripping blood needing Edge's help. The time Rhyno thought they were going to die while crossing an icy lake. The time he was given a gimmick to play and had no idea who this character, this Edge guy, was even supposed to be. From his neck injury to the night Bradshaw soaped his ass in the shower (you'll need to read the book for that one), there isn't much left out of "Adam Copeland on Edge".

 

IGN Sports had the chance recently to sit down with Edge to talk about his book, his dreams of a championship, and the upcoming Survivor Series. Here's what he had to say.

 

IGN Sports: What I enjoyed about your book most was the personality that you wrote with. It reminded me of Mick Foley's writing in that it's not just a wrestling book, but a book about your life, and I think it was written in a fun voice that really makes it stand out.

 

Edge: I think the main difference is that Mick and I are the only two to write the books ourselves. That was one of the things that I was really adamant about. I told everyone, if you want me to do this, then I'm writing it myself. If they wanted me to use a ghost writer, I would've said no. That was one of the regrets that some of the guys have had about their books. They had some guy follow them around for a week and interview them, then things that were important to them, the writer just brushed by. I want people who read my book to hear my voice because it's me telling the story. When I read Mick's, I had Mick's voice in my mind, and as I read it, it was like Mick was telling me the story. So I think that's why you see the comparison, but his books were awesome and I don't expect mine to compare to those books. I just want people getting the sense that this really is Edge, this really is Adam Copeland, and I'm telling you the story of my life.

 

IGN Sports: Did you really write the whole book in longhand?

 

Edge: I did, I wrote it longhand. [laughs] I did it while I was off with the neck injury. I had a year with nothing to do and physically at first, I really couldn't do anything at all. I was sleeping sitting up on my couch with the neck collar on, and my mind was going 120 miles per hour, but my body couldn't do anything. So I had always kept a journal of everything that has happened throughout my career, and I just took them all, there are about six or seven journals, and I started going through them. I started calling all of my childhood buddies and my mom and my family and getting them to remind me of things that we did. I started writing it all down in this one big journal, thinking I was just going to keep it for one day when I have kids and grandkids so they could see what I went through. From there, I started doing a column on the WWE Web site and some of the people from the office read it and thought it was pretty entertaining, pretty funny. They asked me if I would like to do a book and I told them I would love to as long as I got to write it. So I sent in like 20 chapters to them right away because the book was pretty much already written. All I had to do was add on the end about how I came back from my injury.

 

IGN Sports: I remember one of the first times I went backstage at a WWE event. I didn't know you yet, but you were the first guy I saw and you were sitting in the arena reading a book. Now, I didn't expect you to be drinking blood with Gangrel in some dark room, but I also didn't expect to walk back there and see anybody reading. Do you see your book and Mick's books as breaking some of these stereotypes people may have about not only the characters they see on TV, but the men who portray them?

 

Edge: I love to read, so it's a natural for me to try to write. I think it does help break those stereotypes, or at least I hope so. I think if Mick hadn't written his books, there wouldn't have been an opportunity for me to write mine, so I think Mick definitely opened some doors in that respect. I just hope that when people read it, they get a chuckle and realize that we aren't all growling Neanderthals. We can actually speak, put sentences together, and have some intelligent stuff going on in there. I just hope people have a fun time reading it. If I can give the readers a few laughs, then I accomplished my goal. And to see my name on the spine of a book, to see Adam Copeland on that spine, I always thought it would be cool, I just never thought it would actually happen. To see my real name on there is really important to me.

 

IGN Sports: In the book you say how you loved heavy metal and comic books. Is being a wrestler the perfect blend between Gene Simmons and Spider-Man?

 

Edge: I think it was pretty obvious from the get-go that with those as my main interests I was going to fall into something like this. [laughs] Yeah, it was Kiss and comic books. I loved Spidey, Incredible Hulk, and Thor…those were my guys. I think it was a natural progression to when I first saw Hulk Hogan and went "Wow!" Kiss and those guys looked cool, but they didn't look big like real-life super heroes. Hulk Hogan looked like the Incredible Hulk, but he was real. That is what hooked me. Here is this big, blonde, blue-eyed, huge, massive, larger-than-life character, but he was real and I could go to Maple Leaf Gardens and see him every month. You never know what's going to hook you, but once I saw Hogan, I was sold. This is what I was going to do.

 

IGN Sports: You exposed so much about yourself and your life in the book. Was there anything out of bounds as far as you were concerned that you didn't want to write about?

 

Edge: I think one thing that I didn't talk about too much was my divorce. I decided to take the high road in that one. I wasn't sure if people wanted or needed to know about it, really. I didn't want to try and drag anybody through the mud, I just wanted to go the route I did, and if people didn't think I gave enough dirt about it, then too bad. I think that's the only thing I really didn't fully go into. I said that it happened, then moved on. A lot of people keep coming up to me and saying how Ric Flair's book is really controversial and my book isn't controversial enough. The thing is, I really haven't had any problems with anybody, so I'm not going to make up problems just to have controversy. I'm not going to sit here and complain because I enjoy what I do. I read one review and it talked about how I didn't gripe about anything. What do I have to gripe about? If I don't have anything to gripe about, I'm not just going to gripe for griping sake. All I wanted it to be was a fun read and maybe open up some people's eyes about what I did before I got to the WWE. A lot of people just think I started wrestling in 1998 and that's it, not knowing any of the stories prior to it. I just wanted to throw in some weird one-liners and the things that were going through my mind as we were falling through lakes and stupid things like that. It was one of those things, you're only 30 years old, is it too early? But Rock was only in the business four years when he wrote his. I'm almost 14 years in. I've broken my neck, won a few titles, and lived out a few dreams, so why not?

 

IGN Sports: What does Bradshaw think about the part where he's soaping your ass in the shower?

 

Edge: Like I said in the book, no knuckles disappeared. It was simply a gentle caress. [laughs] I actually haven't seen him or talked to him since the book has been out. He doesn't even know it's in there until he reads it, so it should be pretty interesting to see his reaction. I think he'll get a kick out of it. He loves doing stuff like that. It's like his way of weeding out the prima donnas to see who is going to be a cool kid and who is going to have an attitude. I just laughed along with it and joked around with him. It was one of those things where I knew I was starting to belong. If they were willing to have fun with me like that, then I knew they must like me, so I just kept doing what I was doing.

 

IGN Sports: In the book you talk about how wrestling is choreographed but not fake. If someone doesn't believe you, what's the one match of yours they should watch as proof that wrestling hurts?

 

Edge: Any of the TLC matches, any of the ladder matches. The cage match I had with Kurt Angle in Calgary was pretty brutal. Anytime you wrestle Batista or Big Show, that's pain right there. Look at Batista - he's 6-3, no fat on his body and weighs 300 pounds. When he hits you, whether he's trying to full out hit you in the face or not, it hurts. It just does, there's no way around it. When you run into that, you're running into a dude who has no fat on him and weighs 300 pounds. It's not like we're putting pads in between us when we hit. I think when you look at the TLC matches, though, those are the most obvious ones to show the hurt. One misconception people always have is: What are the chairs made of? Steel. What are the ladders made of? Steel. What are the tables made of? Wood. Do you cut the tables? No. When you see us going through a table, it doesn't feel good. [laughs] When you get hit with a chair, you're a little bit out of it, you're a little bit loopy. I'm sure every time we get cracked with one of those, it's a concussion because you get that copper taste in your mouth, and that's not normal. This is real steel, and it folds around your head because we're swinging it pretty hard. So yeah, it's choreographed in the fact that we know what we're going to do at the end, but getting there, that's the part that hurts.

 

IGN Sports: Another funny thing is how you talk about Kurt Angle always calling you Edge instead of Adam. Do you guys refer to each other in your gimmick names or your real names?

 

Edge: It's weird because I've known Rhyno for ten years now and I've never called him Terry. He's always been Rhyno to me. I knew him about a year and a half before he was called Rhyno, actually it was D-Lo Brown who looked at him and said: "Man, you're a Rhyno." And that was it, he was Rhyno, the name just stuck. For some reason, certain guys, you just call them their wrestling names. Christian I call Jay, because I've known him since we were kids, so he's Jay to me. Taker is Taker. And with certain guys, I'm Edge or Edge-O or Edgeward. Taker calls me Edgeward. Rey-Rey calls me Edge-O, and I call him Rey-Rey, not Oscar. It's weird. It's kind of half and half. No real rhyme or reason to it. Shane is Sugar Cane because he used to be Sugar Shane and now he's Hurricane so I just mix the two.

 

IGN Sports: You won your free wrestling lessons as a kid by writing an essay, but you never said what you wrote in your essay. Do you still remember?

 

Edge: I never saved a copy, and I wish I had because it would've been awesome to put it the book. I wanted it so bad. I asked my trainers, I asked people at the gym if they had a copy, but nobody does. It's gone, and I really don't even remember what I wrote. Like I said in the book, I just tried not to embarrass myself by saying I was a huge Hulkamaniac or anything like that. It was more or less that I wanted it, I knew there were sacrifices and dues to be paid, but I want it bad and am willing to work for it. That was pretty much the gist of it, but I don't have a copy, and it's something I really regret because now it's such a huge part of my history.

 

IGN Sports: When you started wrestling, you were Val Venis before there was a Val Venis with your Sexton Hardcastle gimmick. Do you think your career would've been more limited if when you went to the WWE, they used that Sexton Hardcastle angle for your character?

 

Edge: Yeah, definitely. That's one of the things I talked about when Sean and I first came in the WWE and he was given the Val Venis character. I was like, man, that's Sexton, that's what I wanted to do. I was given Edge and I was like, what the hell is Edge? I had no clued what the hell Edge was, but in hindsight, I'm so glad my character is Edge because I can do anything. If you're Val Venis or Sexton Hardcastle and you're a porn star character, once you sleep with all the women in the company, what do you do? There's no where to go. You could have a good two years, but then what? But with my character now, it's kind of an open book and you could do what you want. I'm just a wrestler with a nickname. Would I have preferred to use the name Adam Copeland? Yeah, and I if I came into the company within the last couple of years, that's what I would've used, but when I came in, everyone needed a character name. It was Edge, it was Val Venis, it was Christian, it was Test. Guys had to have names.

 

IGN Sports: I thought it was funny in the book how you're constantly taking jabs at yourself for your mullet. You must see some pretty fierce mullets when you travel around the country.

 

Edge: Oh yeah, still do, still do. To this day, every time I see a mullet, I still cringe. The way I see it is if you make fun of yourself before anyone else does, then it's not as much fun for them to do it to you. You beat them to the punch. And lets face it, a mullet deserves to be made fun of, especially with some of those pictures of me that are in the book. At that point, sure, it was in, I just don't know why.

 

IGN Sports: What's the worst mullet you've ever seen?

 

Edge: I can't get this one family out of my mind. I swear, it was like that TV show "The Mullets" that was on the air for like a week. There was this husband, and he was kind of a redneck guy and he had the mullet thing going on. Then his wife came in and she obviously liked her husband's hair because she had the same thing going on. Then the kids started walking in, and they kept getting younger and younger and younger and I swear there was this baby who couldn't have been more than a year old, and he had a full on raging, down to the back of his neck mullet. It was really, really disturbing. What were they doing to this poor kid, he doesn't even have a choice yet and they are already tainting him with this bullet (baby mullet). It was just all sorts of wrong, but really funny. He was just like, I've got this hair, it must be cool.

 

IGN Sports: You're killing me with the bullet. [laughs] Back to wrestling, though, you're one of the best tag team wrestlers in the history of the sport. If you had to rank the top three tag teams of all time, who would they be?

 

Edge: Wow. Man, that's a tough one. To be honest, I'm biased toward the WWE teams because I didn't get much NWA at all, so I never got to see The Midnight Express and The Rock and Roll Express or even The Road Warriors. I never got that stuff when they were in the NWA, I got tapes years later. I had to wait until I was already almost in the business before I saw those teams, so I'm biased toward the golden age of tag team wrestling with teams like The Hart Foundation, The Brain Busters, The Rockers, those guys. At the same time, I think you really need to break it down into two different eras. To me, you have The Hart Foundation, The Rockers, and The British Bulldogs as the three best teams of that era, because these were the teams that were just as entertaining as Hogan. Hogan was still my guy, but because of these three teams, I was just as entertained if Hogan wasn't on, they were that good. And I like to think that when you had The Hardy Boyz, the Dudleyz, and Edge and Christian, that people were just as tuned in to what we were doing as they were when Rock and Stone Cold were on. Hopefully we were just as interesting. Obviously, I'm biased toward our team, The Dudleyz and The Hardy Boyz because I have a special place in my heart for these teams and everything we went through together. I think these six teams really brought tag team wrestling back to the forefront where it really meant something to the show, where at Wrestlemania, if there were considered three main events, the TLC match would be one of them. Let's face it, for a while, after The Hart Foundation, The British Bulldogs and The Rockers, tag team wrestling was pretty stale. You went through though the whole era of The Smoking Guns and The Godwinns and The Body Donnas and teams like that, and I feel like we broke it back open again.

 

IGN Sports: Why do you think you're better as a heel than as a babyface?

 

Edge: I think in certain aspects I'm better as a heel, in other aspects I'm better as a babyface. I think when it comes to wrestling, I wrestle better as a babyface because I sell better as a babyface than I do as a heel. I'm better using the long, exaggerated Ricky Steamboat style of selling than I am the bump-and-feed, bump-and-feed, Rick Rude style of selling. It's something I need to work on, and it's something where I need to get back in my grove to get better at. When it comes to character, I think I'm a lot more effective as a heel because I can add a lot more layers to the character. This is something that I hope I'm doing now so that one day, if I do turn babyface again, I can keep all of those layers of the character and people will accept it. Initially I went from Edge and Christian, a heel tag team, to being a singles babyface, and it was hard. My character as a babyface never added that layer, that layer that Rock or Austin have, but they got that layer when they were heels. I never got that chance as a singles heel to add all those layers so when I turned babyface, people could say, okay, Edge is being a dick, but that's just Edge being Edge. When Rock carves everyone to pieces, people laugh and get it because that's something he started doing when he was a heel. What I'm starting to do right now is add that element to make my character something more than just he's good or he's bad. I'm trying to add that layer.

 

IGN Sports: It's interesting how the sport has evolved from Doink The Clown, to now you're talking about layers to a character.

 

Edge: It has come a long way, and I think it's because the audience has forced that. They don't want guys dressed up as a clown or a plumber or anything like that. I think now, all of the characters are a bit more like our real personalities.

 

IGN Sports: You have Survivor Series coming up this weekend. Do you still remember watching the first one?

 

Edge: Oh man, that's the cool part, I do. And this Survivor Series match is just like the classic ones, the elimination ones that started it all. We're doing that again on the 14th and it's going to be cool. It was the whole elimination thing that turned me on to the Survivor Series when I was a kid, so it should be fun. Plus, there's this extra stipulation put in where Hunter, Batista, Gene Snitsky, and me against Benoit, Maven, Jericho, and Orton and the winner gets control of Raw for a month. So it's pretty interesting to me to think about Jericho in control of Raw for a week. That should make for interesting storylines. But let's say we win: Hunter gets it for a week, Gene gets it for a week, Batista gets it for a week, then I do. This actually makes the match mean something rather than just having eight guys trying to eliminate each other. There's actually something at stake, because first thing I would do is give myself a World Title match, which is something I've never had. That's been the whole basis of the character and why I've evolved into this bitter, angry bastard, because he wants a World Title shot and thinks he deserves one. So if I get control, I want a title shot, and the cool thing about that is, the guy who is the champ, he's my partner. That makes for some interesting twists and turns in the story.

 

IGN Sports: Are you disappointed Flair isn't on your team?

 

Edge: Totally. I would love for it to be Evolution and me. It would be great to team with him because I've never teamed with him. I've worked against him a lot now, pretty much wrestled him all around the world, but I've never had the chance to team with him and that would be pretty cool. I figure we'll get to it at some point since we're pretty much on the same side right now. One of my highlights was teaming with Hogan because as a kid, you grow up watching Hogan and Flair, they were the guys. Just like now, there are a lot of kids who grew up watching Stone Cold and The Rock, and if they grew up to be wrestlers and had a chance to team with them, it would be a amazing for them. I never thought I would be able to team with these guys or work against them, it's been pretty cool. It's something I never thought I would have the opportunity to say, but yeah, I got to team with my childhood idol. Yeah, I got to wrestle against Ric Flair. Amazing.

 

IGN Sports: How do those chest chops feel?

 

Edge: Not good. I think Benoit's are probably the worst. They both just light you up, but Benoit's actually cut you open. Your chest actually bleeds and you walk around with scabs on your chest. Then you wrestle him the next night and they bust open again. You never get the chance to heal when your working Benoit. You're always scabbed or bruised. That's why Flair's chest is like leather now because he's always exchanging chops with people. He's built up this immunity where he has like a leather couch on his chest and there's now way to break that skin.

 

IGN Sports: You say your one goal is to win the World Title. How long do you think it will be before we see you with that strap?

 

Edge: I would like to say this year, but who knows. I would say definitely within the next year and a half, though, I don't think anyone is going to have a choice. It's going to be something that I'm going to force down everybody's throat until I get it. I would like to think that by the end of 2005, I would've had it.

 

IGN Sports: Do you get to keep the belt?

 

Edge: I believe you do. I have a copy of all of the belts I have won. In the book, there's a picture where you can see I have the U.S. title, the IC title, and the tag team titles on my wall. I went ahead and reserved a spot right at the very top for that World Title, and it's still empty.

 

IGN Sports: So your not the type of guy to turn around and sell it on eBay?

 

Edge: No, hell no. [laughs] And I don't plan on being one of those desperate guys who needs to sell it in 15 years. I'm hoping that I can keep everything that I've earned.

 

IGN Sports: Do you see yourself writing any more books in the future?

 

Edge: I would love to, but probably not another autobiography or anything like that. I always thought along the lines of Mick, again, of writing children's books. I already have a huge collection of them because I wanted to have this great big library of books to choose from, so when I have kids, we'll have all of these books that I can read to them at night.

 

IGN Sports: What do you hope to accomplish for the last chapter of your wrestling career?

 

Edge: I want to be the World Champion. If I can do that, I can retire in contentment because that means I would've accomplished everything that I set out to do, including writing a book. I win that belt, and I'm good. I can kick up my feet at the end of my career and say I did it. I made it there, succeeded there, succeeded to the point where I was the man there, and I'm good to go. Then I can look after my kids. I want to be in the mix, the mix I feel I'm in right now, and I want to stay there for the next five years or whatever it is, then ala Mick or ala Ric Flair, whoever the new kid is who comes in and is nice and red hot, I'll do the favor for him, tip my hat and walk away.

 

You can purchase a copy of Adam Copeland's new book, "Adam Copeland on Edge", at the WWE Shop.

 

-- Jon Robinson

[Guest wrestling365]

A very good read. His explanation for the lack of dirt in his book is more than sufficiant...

[Guest PimpDaddySarp]

Bradshaw fisted Edge up the ass?

[TheBigSwigg 0]

Bradshaw fisted Edge up the ass?

Holy Shit. (No pun intended)

[The C Man 0]

Get this guy on the booking committee. No, seriously. I've thought that for a while now. From reading his columns and some of the stories I've heard the guy seems to actually know what he's talking about, which seems to be lacking from the current writers. Sure he's no Cornette, Heyman or even Raven but they could do a lot worse.

[Hunter's Torn Quad 0]

Get this guy on the booking committee. No, seriously. I've thought that for a while now. From reading his columns and some of the stories I've heard the guy seems to actually know what he's talking about, which seems to be lacking from the current writers. Sure he's no Cornette, Heyman or even Raven but they could do a lot worse.

They tried that once. He pointed out the logic flaws in the booking. He was soon off the committee.

[The C Man 0]

That's what I was meaning by "stories". I'm sure he asked to review SmackDown or something while he was injured and his critical (but probably fair) opinion wasn't liked.