The following are Chris Nowinski's excerpts from Unscripted:

The only wrestling I got to watch as a kid was at my cousins' house. It wasn't allowed at my house. My mom's quote was, "Wrestling causes brain damage.", she thought it made you stupid; I think she's wrong.

At my cousins' house, after we watched, they'd take me in the basement and do all the moves on me and beat me up. I didn't know how to defend myself, because I didn't watch very often. So I'd get elbow drop after elbow drop off the couch, and I'd just have to take it. My senior year at Harvard, I lived with five of my football teammates in a two-bedroom apartment off campus that had cable TV. They were all wrestling fans, and we had one television and one couch, so every Monday and Thursday night we all hung out together and watched wrestling. That's when I started loving it; it's so easy to get into it.
Wehn you've got a degree from Harvard and you want to be a professional wrestler, yes, it is difficult to approach your parents and tell them what you want to do. But it's easier to tell them when you're not asking for money. I still had a consulting job, which I was working part-time, so it was like, "I'm still going to pay my bills; I'm still going to support myself; but I'm also going to be pursuing this wrestling thing." They really couldn't say anything; they couldn't cut me off or anything. They at first thought I was really weird and thought I might have taken too many head shots playing football. But they started watching wrestling to get into it, and they started to appreciate the skill and the artistry about it. They understood how I could fall in love with it.

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