Sometimes - and I don't mean it disrespectfully - the easiest people to work in the wrestling business are the people in the locker room.
Growing up in wrestling, I would see my uncle put on his mask before he walked into auditoriums. The kids would run up to him and ask for autographs and pictures, and seeing him lacing up his boots in the locker room and putting on his mask before heading to the ring, that was all so real to me. That was the modern day superhero to me.
You address the respect issue in a team-meeting environment. With respect to its application, it's not just locker room. It's practice field. It's on and off the field. It's on Sunday, and it's on game days.
You want to play for a guy who's going to be there for you. He's going to lead you. He's going to inspire you. Someone that the guys in the locker room can really rally around.
My teammates would never say anything bad about me, even if they thought it. That's the kind of locker room we have.
For a long time, I was an assistant in the NFL to George Allen, and George was paranoid that other teams were cheating on him... that they were offering bounties, that they were wiring our locker room, that they were putting food poisoning into the pregame meal of the other team's stars, stuff like that.
The hardest thing in the world is to write something critical about someone and then show up the next day in the locker room. I mean, that is not fun, and that takes an awful lot of guts. And I never enjoyed that.
Matches are won and lost so many times in the locker room.
I think there's nothing that's not important. Everything you do - from how you connect with the guys in the locker room, to how you learn, to how you play on the field - everything's important; everything goes with the position.
I remember one time I wrote something very, very critical about Wilt Chamberlain. The next time I saw him - and Wilt was not a man, as huge as he was - he was not a man of confrontation. And we were in the Lakers locker room. And he sent Jerry West over, and he said, 'Frank, Wilt would like you to leave.'
You can't live on last year, you can't live on the year before. I can't bring in my 13 Pro Bowls in the locker room and say, look at me. No. That is gone. That is the best thing about the game of football is that everybody starts over.
