David Finlay was a recent guest on the latest episode of Total Engagement with Matt Koon. During the show, the subject of protecting the wrestling business came up, as well as his father’s legendary reputation for being a badass in the wrestling business. Finlay used the opportunity to talk about how his father protected the wrestling business, saying he went along with the infamous storyline about Hornswoggle being Fit Finlay’s on-air son, and told people he was Swoggle’s brother:
“I’ll answer that with a story. When I was in seventh grade or eighth grade, and they revealed that Hornswoggle was my dad’s son—I think it was on RAW or something—and [my] mom sat me down the night before. And she was like, ‘listen, this is what they’re gonna do on TV. That means kids are going to ask you if he’s really your brother. You have to tell them yes.’ So, I got clued in before everybody else, and it was made sure that when kids ask if that’s really your brother, you said yes. My dad’s very protective of the wrestling business and that’s kinda how I grew up.”
Additionally, Finlay talked about his experience as a Young Lion in Japan, saying it was grueling work, but also enjoyable at times:
“It is insanity. You wake up at 8 am and start cleaning, and if there’s time to eat, you eat. There’s usually time to eat, you’ve got about an hour to kill because training starts at 10. I would just go back to sleep, I was like “ah, screw eating, I don’t care.’ And then you’d start off with this weird 15 minute warm-up that actually doesn’t warm a single thing up. And then—you start with squats and I remember I asked Jay because I heard all the horror stories, ‘how many have you done?’ He’s like ‘the most I ever did was 500.’ I was like, alright I’ve done that before, I can do that, no problem. I get in there my first day of training, they say something in Japanese. I don’t know a word of Japanese at this point…so I was just going. I watched the clock because I didn’t know what number we were on. It took 45 minutes, it was like mindless squatting, and then we continued our workout. So it was a lot of brutal days but it’s a lot of fun at times, too.”
Check out the entire interview with David Finlay on the latest episode of Total Engagement with Matt Koon below:
