Thanks to Sarah for the following excerpt. This is the part about his back injury that appears on the picture of him displaying his scar.
The scariest injury for me was my back. It was after the Casket match with Undertaker at the Royal Rumble in 1998. I was fine after the match, did the TV show the next day, went home the next morning, went to sleep that night. But when I woke up Wednesday morning, I couldn't move in bed. I couldn't even turn to get to the phone. It was like the world's hottest knife in my back. I couldn't move my legs; I couldn't even turn my upper body. Every time I tried to move, it was just searing pain down my legs. All I could think was, "Make the pain go away." I was living alone in this big house, so I was stuck in bed, one of those huge four-poster beds. I had to roll myself off the bed to the floor, which hurt like you can't believe. Then I reached up and managed to grab my phone, and I called my parents and said, "I'm on the floor in my bedroom and I can't move. Call me an ambulance." It took the ambulance 20 minutes to get to the house, and my parents probably 30 minutes. From where I was on the floor, it was no more than 12 feet to my front door, and it took me 20 minutes to crawl that far, on my stomach, inch by inch. I was stuck in a flat position. I couldn't bend to get my hands up underneath me; I couldn't grab the wall to get up. I was crying; I was calling out to a God I didn't know, "Make the pain go away!" I'd never, ever felt that kind of pain in my life; every time I moved, it just shot through my body. They had to shoot me up with Denerol to get me on the gurney for hte ride to the hospital. That eased everything up, but I knew something wasn't right. I found out I was going to need surgery to fuse vertebrae in my lower back. Before I could get that done, I still had to wrestle at Wrestlemania, get through my match with Steve Austin. That was in January; Wrestlemania was in March. They let me off of the February Pay-Per-View so I could just make it to Wrestlemania and do the job I needed to do. About halfway through that match, I was in awful pain again. There are just some things you have to do for the business. I knew Steve was where we were going in the future, and I knew I had to go in there and make that happen. So from that standpoint, it was very noble. But I certainly can understand why somebody on the outside would say we're just incredibly dumb for taking chances like that. In my condition, if it were any other show except Wrestlemania, you might not do it. But this was for the world title, the main event at Wrestlemania, all those things that very few guys get a chance to do. Here you are, you've had a chance to do it a couple of times, and now you're on the other end, the part where you've got to hand that baton off; you've got to do the noble thing. And you say, "I've got to do that. I would want somebody to do that for me.
(The next part is the four yellow lines underneath the above passage)
I'm an egg-whites-and-chicken-breasts guy, and a low-carb guy. I could probably be a little bigger, but at this age, if I carry a little less weight than I used to, it's better for my knees and my back, and keeping a low-card diet helps me do that. The way you look is so important now, more so than when I got into wrestling; there were a lot of big, fat guys in it then. Now, it's a very asthetic business. It demands more, too; the athletes are just getting better.
Talking about the younger wrestlers
There's a lot more at stake now than when I got into it. There's more money at stake, period. It used to be it was a line of work where you could make a living. Now it's a line of work where you can secure your future, Plain and simple, you can get rich, at least some guys can. I did what I think anybody would say was pretty darn good financially in wrestling. But now, in my second time around, its staggering. That's why I say my God is s a God of redemption, a God of second chances. I am what I would consider to be an old-timer. and the big difference between us and the newer guys is that the newer guys-and I dont's mean this critically-don't have a genuine, genuine, genuine, appreciation for the business, because I dont know that they would do it for nothing. You get your Undertaker, you get your Steve Austin, none of us got into it for the money. We got into it because we wanted to do it, and then it exploded, and got so big, and we realized that you could make a future, so it was even better. There was a time when I drove down the road in a beat-up car that my parnets helped me get; there was a time when I was eating out of tin cans; there was a time I was staying in hotels that were not pretty. You don't have that anymore. It's not the newer guys' fault, the business has just gotten better. But to say that they have the same appreciation that we do, I just think that would be inaccurate. Becuase of the circumstances, the can't have the same appreciation.
On his training schedule
I do cardio 6 days a week, and I train with weights 5 days. I try to do a body part a day. I'll do 30 to 45 minutes of cardio every morning, then I'll do my body part after that. What's difficult is that I can't lift heavy anymore. The injuries and everything have taken their toll, and I just can't lift anything that heavy. I've got to discipline myself to go to the gym, because I've got a 3-year-old that I'd rather play with. He understands now that Daddy's got to go to the gym first thing in the morning, and he's got me the rest of the day, so I try to get it out of the way early in the morning. Once I get into a groove, I'm pretty disciplined with my diet and training. It's only when I get away from it that I can be really lazy.
On his style since his return and why he still wrestles.
Some people would make the argument that since I've come back, I haven't backed off much in what I do in the ring. But I have a little bit, and I plan on backing off even more. When you've been around a long time and are popular with the fans, they allow you, whether consciously or not, to do less. You give them your trademark stuff, but don't have to do anything crazy, and they still go away happy. That's been a learning process for me, because it used to not matter to me what risks I took in the ring. I was always hurting to some extent, but I never really care about it. Now, I do care, because I have a reason to be healthy. I want to be able to chase my son around the yard; I want to be able to chase my wife around the house. Physically, I can still do the high risk stuff, but you're not going to see a lot of it from me. I used to wonder, "Why do guys stay around for so long?" and now I know why. Because when you have a family , you can never earn enough, becase you want to give them everything you can. I'm going to stay around until someone kicks me out the door. As long as they're willing to allow me to work, I'm going to work, at until I don't enjoy it or feel God wants me doing something else. I want to be able to provide as much as I can for my wife and my son.
On getting into the business
I got in it in 1985, when it was still a territorial business and the money wasn't nearly what it was today. For me, it had nothing to do with the money. From the time I was 12, when I first saw wrestling, I never thought about any other form of life's work for me. I graduated high school and told my dad that I wanted to try wrestling. He got me in touch with a local promoter. We talked, and both of them said, "Get a college education so you can have something to fall back on." I went two semesters at Southwest Texas State and had a 1.4 GPA. I was put on academic probation and, in so many words, asked to not come back for awhile. I told my dad at that point, "I'm only going to waste your money; I don't have any desire for school." All I thought about was wrestling. I was studying speech communications because I figured that would help me when I was doing interviews and promos as a wrestler. I wasn't on the fast track. I started in wrestling by getting beat up every night in the first match of the card. Slowly, as I moved from territory to territory, I went up a little higher on the card. My first week, I think I made 700 bucks. I wrestled seven days for it, and because I was traveling every day, I spent probably most if it on the road. But still I thought, "700 bucks! Wow! This is fantastic." I made enough money to live and eat and have a studio apartment- I was 19, 20 years old and didn't need any more than that. I even saved a little money; I've never been somebody who had the ability to spend more than I had or more than I made. I was doing OK, and was having a fantastic time. At first, I was quiet, intimidated, nervous, shy-all the stuff that I really was in real life when I got into wrestling. Then about two years into it, when I went to Minnesota, I became part of a tag team with Marty Jannetty; we were the Midnight Rockers. Marty bought me out of my shell. We enjoyed some success there, and thats when I really became a wrestler 100 percent of the time- the lifestyle, everything. We'd be up all night running around and we'd go out and wrestle 20 or 30 minutes, and we'd do the same thing all over again the next day. I lived that way for the better part of 15 years. I really have no idea as I look back now how I did it all those years and was able to stay healthy, and perform well. I guess it's youth-and ignorance. I know it's a lot of ingnorance, not knowing that your body is probably screaming in pain. I've seen other guys do it, too, maybe for longer than I did. There's an old saying, "Wrestlers are a different breed of person," and I think to some extent that's probably true.
On getting saved
Five years ago, I stopped wrestling because I needed back surgery. So the traveling and being out on the road, being out on the town, stopped. But I was still not in a good place in my life. Then I met Rebecca, who was sent to me by God, and a year after we were married, our son was born. But I still wrestled a few demons that kept me from being alll that I could be as a husband and a father. I was trying and trying, but I couldn't do it by myself. Then one Christmas, my wife left a study Bible and a book called "Straight Talk" to men under the tree for me. The book was by Dr, James Dobson, who is a Christian psychologist. I read it and I found just how desperately short I was falling. I think I was probably better than 70,80 percent of the husbands and fathers. By the world's standards, I was doing OK, but by God's standards, I was far,far short of what he expected from my life. I read a couple more books on that, and I started to read that Bible. I was raised Catholic, but I didn't know about salvation, about being born again, and my wife - she's a Biblical woman - just sort of let me find out on my own. One day, I walked into Cornerstone Church and asked them if they could set me up with Bible study. This guy peeked his head outside of his door and said, "You can come to mine." So that Wednesday I went to his house for Bible study and he said, "Have you said the Sinner's prayer?" And I said, "No. I've said a lot of prayers, but I don't remember the name of that one." And he said "Well, have you been born again?" And I said, "No. I've heard that term, but I've been born just the once." He said, "Well say this with me." And I said the Sinner's prayer with him, and I wept like a baby, and from that day on I have lived by the guidelines that God puts forward to me as a man in the Bible. My outlook physically and spiritually from that day has changed and had done nothing but get better ever since. Everything that was once there in my life is gone, and it wasn't even a struggle. I was never really a drinker, but I've never touched a drink since. I found out last week that some of the supplements I was taking had ephedra in them - it was in the news that that stuff was linked to a baseball player's death - and I threw them all out. One I realized that the Holy Spirit and God's son are living in my body and that my body is a temple, I won't do anything to compromise my health.