IGN Sports: What does Bradshaw think about the part where he's soaping your ass in the shower?
Edge: Like I said in the book, no knuckles disappeared. It was simply a gentle caress. [laughs] I actually haven't seen him or talked to him since the book has been out. He doesn't even know it's in there until he reads it, so it should be pretty interesting to see his reaction. I think he'll get a kick out of it. He loves doing stuff like that. It's like his way of weeding out the prima donnas to see who is going to be a cool kid and who is going to have an attitude. I just laughed along with it and joked around with him. It was one of those things where I knew I was starting to belong. If they were willing to have fun with me like that, then I knew they must like me, so I just kept doing what I was doing.
IGN Sports: In the book you talk about how wrestling is choreographed but not fake. If someone doesn't believe you, what's the one match of yours they should watch as proof that wrestling hurts?
Edge: Any of the TLC matches, any of the ladder matches. The cage match I had with Kurt Angle in Calgary was pretty brutal. Anytime you wrestle Batista or Big Show, that's pain right there. Look at Batista - he's 6-3, no fat on his body and weighs 300 pounds. When he hits you, whether he's trying to full out hit you in the face or not, it hurts. It just does, there's no way around it. When you run into that, you're running into a dude who has no fat on him and weighs 300 pounds. It's not like we're putting pads in between us when we hit. I think when you look at the TLC matches, though, those are the most obvious ones to show the hurt. One misconception people always have is: What are the chairs made of? Steel. What are the ladders made of? Steel. What are the tables made of? Wood. Do you cut the tables? No. When you see us going through a table, it doesn't feel good. [laughs] When you get hit with a chair, you're a little bit out of it, you're a little bit loopy. I'm sure every time we get cracked with one of those, it's a concussion because you get that copper taste in your mouth, and that's not normal. This is real steel, and it folds around your head because we're swinging it pretty hard. So yeah, it's choreographed in the fact that we know what we're going to do at the end, but getting there, that's the part that hurts.
IGN Sports: Another funny thing is how you talk about Kurt Angle always calling you Edge instead of Adam. Do you guys refer to each other in your gimmick names or your real names?
Edge: It's weird because I've known Rhyno for ten years now and I've never called him Terry. He's always been Rhyno to me. I knew him about a year and a half before he was called Rhyno, actually it was D-Lo Brown who looked at him and said: "Man, you're a Rhyno." And that was it, he was Rhyno, the name just stuck. For some reason, certain guys, you just call them their wrestling names. Christian I call Jay, because I've known him since we were kids, so he's Jay to me. Taker is Taker. And with certain guys, I'm Edge or Edge-O or Edgeward. Taker calls me Edgeward. Rey-Rey calls me Edge-O, and I call him Rey-Rey, not Oscar. It's weird. It's kind of half and half. No real rhyme or reason to it. Shane is Sugar Cane because he used to be Sugar Shane and now he's Hurricane so I just mix the two.
IGN Sports: You won your free wrestling lessons as a kid by writing an essay, but you never said what you wrote in your essay. Do you still remember?
Edge: I never saved a copy, and I wish I had because it would've been awesome to put it the book. I wanted it so bad. I asked my trainers, I asked people at the gym if they had a copy, but nobody does. It's gone, and I really don't even remember what I wrote. Like I said in the book, I just tried not to embarrass myself by saying I was a huge Hulkamaniac or anything like that. It was more or less that I wanted it, I knew there were sacrifices and dues to be paid, but I want it bad and am willing to work for it. That was pretty much the gist of it, but I don't have a copy, and it's something I really regret because now it's such a huge part of my history.
IGN Sports: When you started wrestling, you were Val Venis before there was a Val Venis with your Sexton Hardcastle gimmick. Do you think your career would've been more limited if when you went to the WWE, they used that Sexton Hardcastle angle for your character?
Edge: Yeah, definitely. That's one of the things I talked about when Sean and I first came in the WWE and he was given the Val Venis character. I was like, man, that's Sexton, that's what I wanted to do. I was given Edge and I was like, what the hell is Edge? I had no clue what the hell Edge was, but in hindsight, I'm so glad my character is Edge because I can do anything. If you're Val Venis or Sexton Hardcastle and you're a porn star character, once you sleep with all the women in the company, what do you do? There's no where to go. You could have a good two years, but then what? But with my character now, it's kind of an open book and you could do what you want. I'm just a wrestler with a nickname. Would I have preferred to use the name Adam Copeland? Yeah, and I if I came into the company within the last couple of years, that's what I would've used, but when I came in, everyone needed a character name. It was Edge, it was Val Venis, it was Christian, it was Test. Guys had to have names.
IGN Sports: I thought it was funny in the book how you're constantly taking jabs at yourself for your mullet. You must see some pretty fierce mullets when you travel around the country.
Edge: Oh yeah, still do, still do. To this day, every time I see a mullet, I still cringe. The way I see it is if you make fun of yourself before anyone else does, then it's not as much fun for them to do it to you. You beat them to the punch. And lets face it, a mullet deserves to be made fun of, especially with some of those pictures of me that are in the book. At that point, sure, it was in, I just don't know why.
IGN Sports: What's the worst mullet you've ever seen?
Edge: I can't get this one family out of my mind. I swear, it was like that TV show "The Mullets" that was on the air for like a week. There was this husband, and he was kind of a redneck guy and he had the mullet thing going on. Then his wife came in and she obviously liked her husband's hair because she had the same thing going on. Then the kids started walking in, and they kept getting younger and younger and younger and I swear there was this baby who couldn't have been more than a year old, and he had a full on raging, down to the back of his neck mullet. It was really, really disturbing. What were they doing to this poor kid, he doesn't even have a choice yet and they are already tainting him with this bullet (baby mullet). It was just all sorts of wrong, but really funny. He was just like, I've got this hair, it must be cool.