12 Questions For Shawn Daivari
12. Returning To Minnesota
Andrew Soucek (AS): The second independent show I ever saw had you on the card, in Minnesota, before you joined WWE. What’s it like to kind of come full circle, chasing the dream of wrestling, but in a different form?
Shawn Daivari (SD): Not many people know this but I left Minneapolis in 2007, so I haven't lived here in 8 or 9 years, but on TV they announced I was from Minneapolis. I lived in San Diego most recently and Ken lived in New York.
There's so much going on in Southern California that wrestling has kind of felt like a bastard form of entertainment out there. There's the New York City market, and wrestling does well there for the masses, but not for the hardcore fans.
If there wasn't 20 million people in New York, they couldn't fill The Garden. The same with California. If it wasn't that populated, the ratio isn't that high for wrestling fans. So Ken was from Green Bay, I'm from Minnesota and this is kind of where I made a name for myself. We thought ‘f*** it yeah let's go home and do it', and that's what brought me back to the Twin Cities.