I recently had the opportunity to interview World of Sport Wrestling’s Justin Sysum, following his appearances at Fight Forever Wrestling’s first run of shows. Sysum is best known for his time with WOS, in addition to his letter to British wrestling which received some interesting feedback from fans online.
On getting into pro wrestling:
It was something I always kind of looked at, and it always looked like a hell of a lot of fun. I was always trying to make it in professional sport, and when that didn’t manifest itself, I went along to my local training school in Gloucester and it was a lot of fun. It was just brilliant. It seemed like everything I’d done up to that point in my life was a great building block to pro wrestling.
On competing professionally in Hammer throw:
It was one of my main goals [competing at the Olympics] but it turned out not to be a realistic possibility. Maybe I wasn’t big enough, maybe I wasn’t physically gifted enough. I sure as hell wasn’t going to take any performance-enhancing drugs to get there. I just kind of stuck around the ‘pretty good’ national level, but never the international level. It slowly started to dawn on me about five years into that, that I wasn’t able to keep up with the guys ahead of me.
On joining World of Sport Wrestling:
I actually missed the opportunity to do the pilot of World of Sport. I was touring with Marvel at the time, and I got an email from ITV to see if I wanted to go in and have a chat. I had to turn it down and say I was contractually obliged to the Marvel Universe Live Tour. We weren’t allowed to gig outside of it in case we got hurt. That was a bit of a let down, but fortunately two years later, they still had me in mind.
On being compared to John Cena:
I thought they were saying Super Cena, and it turns out they were saying Budget Cena! No matter what anyone thinks of John Cena, he’s like the hardest working guy in the business. If I could be half the performer and all-around giving guy that John Cena is, then I would consider myself to be a very successful wrestler and human being. The more comparisons I get the better. I’ve stood next to the bloke backstage at a WWE tryout, and I am nowhere near the size that he is.
On his controversial NXT UK tweet:
I felt passionate about something and I wanted to say something. I wanted to say that I’m not sure I like the way business gets done sometimes with WWE. So I got a bit passionate and a fire was lit underneath me, and once something leaves your lips and goes out there to the world, it’s not yours anymore. People will interpret it how they please and unfortunately for me, I got quite a bit of flack for it. It make have been a mistake, and it’s something I’ve learnt from.
