"People want to see you fail," he would tell me before every big match. "People think you don't deserve it. People don't think you are worth it. Everybody wants you to get punked. Prove everybody wrong."
For some, that would have been just an idle pep talk. But to me, it was real. Nobody really thought a poor kid with borrowed shoes
and a torn singlet deserved to be among the best wrestlers in the country. From the very beginning, this lack of faith was my fuel.