Jeff Cobb was a recent guest on Talk Is Jericho and he discussed his rise on the independent scene and amateur wrestling career. Cobb says it’s been a crazy two years, but he’s staying busy and there are negative parts of the job, but overall he loves it. When asked what makes him stand out, Cobb said he thinks it’s because he’s a more grounded style of wrestler and gets to show off his strength.
“I think it’s because I’m a little bit different—I don’t fly around too much. I suplex a lot of people, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have a weird stupid strength. I haven’t met someone that I haven’t been able to suplex yet. I’m very fortunate for that but one day, my back is going to give out and then I’ll have to work for real.”
Cobb profiled his amateur wrestling background and said he started off not knowing much about the sport, but he “stuck with it because I spent $98 on the shoes” and eventually got good enough to wrestling in the Olympics in 2004. Cobb says he trained with a company called Action Zone Wrestling when transitioning to professional wrestling, but his big break really came with Lucha Underground and cited Konnan and Lucha Underground’s Chris DeJoseph as two names giving him a chance.
Cobb went into detail about initially signing with Lucha Underground, a contract he recently got out of. Cobb says the restrictions in the contract, including the extended layovers between seasons, caused him to seek out an entertainment lawyer to negotiate his way out of it.
“TV is where you make the most money, but I can’t go on any other TV spots because I’m stuck under this contract so eventually we negotiated a way out of it. I don’t know if it’s the Lucha team or the El Rey team or what, but I had a lawyer draft up a termination letter, and he’s a big entertainment lawyer. They stopped returning my emails, all that, and I emailed Chris DeJoseph like ‘hey man, what’s going on?’ and he’s like ‘listen, I just write the stuff.’ I didn’t want to get him involved in that side of it, so I had always emailed the office or anybody up there and they would never return my calls.
Eventually I just got frustrated with it, got a hold of an entertainment lawyer and he’s like, ‘yeah this contract is horrible.’ He drafted a letter, because at that point we were eighteen months without work, so he drafted a letter and he sent it in. Lo and behold, two days later, get a phone call. ‘Hey Jeff, how’s it going?’ I’m like ‘Oh, come on!’ I just said, ‘Hey listen, I just want to be done with this.’ So they ended up just saying, ‘cool, we can release you, just come back for season four, film an ending to your character.’”
Related: Jeff Cobb On Why He Decided To Sign With Ring Of Honor
