Full Circle interview with John Morrison (FSM 98; Oct 2013)

As if to validate the title of The Doors' 1972 album, John Morrison is currently contemplating a return to wrestling. WWE's version of the rock star front-man tells Thomas Gerbasi that he's not fallen out with his first love.

You're currently working on a few films. If this takes off and more roles come, does that change how you feel about being on the road as a full-time wrestler, with the physical toll that takes?
Not necessarily. I ended up leaving WWE because I needed a break from that. I was getting beat up; I had neck surgery and creative wasn't really using me the way I wanted to be used. But the reason that I started wrestling and stayed with it for so long is because I love it. There's not really anything like professional wrestling; it's everything I've been interested in since I was a kid. I basically grew up watching "Macho Man", Ricky Steamboat, Hulk Hogan, and then Rey Mysterio when I was older.
I always loved movies, too. Jackie Chan was my first hero as a kid; I wanted to be Jackie Chan, and I think that's how I inadvertently prepared for professional wrestling. I did real wrestling in high school, but then I started taking Kung Fu and gymnastics, and began stunt fighting when I was in college. I wrestled there, too, but if I hadn't done that, I don't think I would have ended up succeeding in WWE. It's just a different skill-set than most of the other people had.

Several wrestlers have been in movies over the last few years, and they always come back to WWE. What is it about wrestling that brings everyone back?
Performing live in front of 20,000 people at Monday Night Raw, or 100,000 people at a WrestleMania is a unique experience. There's nothing like it. I talked to John Cena about this a little bit at one point; you get instant feedback in wrestling. When you do something, you can hear how the crowd is reacting. Do they like it, do they not like it, do they want more of it? The emotion you put out, you receive back instantly from the crowd.
In a movie, the performance is smaller and more contained; the camera can come in really tight and take micro expressions that won't play in wrestling, but you don't get that instant feedback. I'm really excited about this movie I'm making, but I'm not going to get to see or experience how it went until I see the final cut, hopefully in a few months. Where in a live environment, you put it out there, and there it is, instantly.

Do you feel that you had more to give to WWE?
At the moment that I walked away, no. I had come back from neck surgery three months early, and I was still having numbness and experiencing shooting pain, and I think if I hadn't walked away when I did, it was possible that I would've had long-term consequences to deal with.
I'm much stronger and better today having walked away when I did, than I would be if I had stayed, so I don't regret that. I look forward to getting back in the ring at some point, but I certainly feel like I made the right decision.

You recently released Out Of Your Mind Fitness, which is not just a DVD but a manual and a phone app. Why was it the ight time for that?
Everybody's gravitating more and more toward functional training, and I've had this idea for a long time. I even ran it by WWE, and they said they didn't have the resources to do it, but I was free to do it on my own, so I did. Me and Jeff Carrier, who is a genius at fitness, compiled this whole programme, which has far more content than other workout programmes on the market today.
What we've created is different from a home fitness programme; it's a virtual personal trainer, so it's designed to be done at a gym. It's designed to take somebody who wants to go beyond home fitness, who wants to take their training and strength training to the next level. It tells you exactly what you need to do every day in the gym, and where that will lead. Jeff and I have spent years looking at every contingency, and figuring out how to break this down to the most accessible format, so that anyone can get into this.

With everything that you're doing, how do you stay sharp if one day that call comes to go back to wrestling?
Well, I have kept sharp. I watch the product still, and I've been practicing stunt fighting in addition to regular fighting, because I've never trained boxing or Muay Thai with the intent of learning how to physically knock someone out, or kick someone in the leg. I always had stunt fighting and pro wrestling in mind, and I think learning all that stuff has now left me sharper than when I left.

With your hiatus from full-time wrestling, none of the Tough Enough winners currently have long-term roles in the sport. Do you think there is any reason for this?
No. I think if you look percentage-wise at how many people dream about being a pro wrestler, compared to the percentage of people that follow up on that dream, to the percentage that get a developmental deal, to how many of those people end up getting a spot on TV, I think you take the three pure seasons of Tough Enough, where there's only six winners, and it's a wonder that the six had as much of a run that they did. Now if you're looking at Tough Enough: Season Four, The Miz took second place in that, and he's on TV. But I always loved Tough Enough, and I hope that they do another one, because I think it's a really interesting show.

Your 2006 rivalry with Paul London and Brian Kendrick was a classic tag team feud. Did you find that tag teams had a lot of support behind the scenes?
Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. It's easy to say that tag teams don't get any love, but look at The Legion of Doom or DX or even with Kane and Daniel Bryan. I think it just depends, and when I was with MNM, I feel we did get the love, and that was because we brought something new, and it was the case definitely for MNM that the total was greater than the parts individually.
You can complain that sometimes tag teams are an afterthought, but I love tag team wrestling and I wish they did more with it. I can talk about tag teams forever. Tag team matches have the opportunity to be more innovative and more impactful and intense than a regular match; there are five people in a tag match - two teams and the referee. If you have a valet or a manager, you're just adding to it. In a singles match, it's just two guys, so with that extra number of people you multiply the possibilities for misdirections, for false finishes, for ways to arrange the action, and I think it's really cool.

There's a lot of experience backstage in WWE, with agents such as Arn Anderson and Fit Finlay. Was there anyone who was a particularly big influence on you?
It's hard to pick one person. Both of the two you just named have these huge knowledge bases, plus Dean Malenko, Ricky Steamboat, Mike Rotundo, all in their own way, have given something to me.

You arguably gave CM Punk his first five-star match on ECW in September 2007. Is it fair to say that you were both trying to make a point?
I think we both realised that we'd had opportunities that we let slip through our fingers, and when that match happened we didn't talk about it, but knew that it wasn't going to happen again.

Things seemed to have changed with the Total Divas show, but WWE has historically discouraged relationships between the wrestlers. Was your relationship with Melina ever problematic?
I definitely think there were times when it was frowned upon. For some reason, we were constantly drafted to separate shows. I haven't seen the Total Divas show, but maybe the idea of that has changed, but relationships in the business are always tricky.

There was a lot of buzz about a possible return after WWE.com ran an interview with you recently. Have there been overtures?
I left on good terms, and when I walked away there was no bitterness. Everyone involved - Hunter, Vince and Johnny (Laurinaitis) - at the time said they were sorry to see me go, and that the door was always open. We've been communicating since I left.

Do you see yourself making a full-time return to professional wrestling?
I don't know. My chapter right now, so to speak, is Out Of Your Mind Fitness and action movies. WWE was a great chapter. At some point, there are a lot of things in the world of pro wrestling that I feel like I still have yet to accomplish, and at some point I'm going to do them. When? I don't know.

So, summing up, what would it take to bring you back to pro wrestling full-time?
Just the right opportunity. I think that I'm in a really good place physically and mentally, and I'm also really happy with where I'm at right now. I don't feel like I need to go back. It's just a matter of sitting down and figuring out a good gameplan.