Freddie Flintoff has revealed he turned down a colossal sum of money to take up professional wrestling with WWE. After hanging up his cricketing whites in 2010 due to injury, the English sporting legend has embraced an array of fresh challenges, including his stint on Top Gear. Yet, in a confession on The Overlap and Betfair‘s Stick to Cricket show, Flintoff divulged a career opportunity in the wrestling ring that he ultimately passed up.
Flintoff described his life changes following retirement, recounting his brush with potential WWE stardom and the chance to grapple with icons like The Undertaker. He said: “We moved to Dubai – the plan was, I was going to play in the IPL and I was going to play for Brisbane, basing ourselves in Dubai. Unashamedly, If I could earn a bit of IPL money tax-free I’m sorted. When I had to retire, we decided to go through with it anyway and it was probably a good move getting away, my lifestyle wasn’t great at the time.
“I just hid for a bit and started to wonder ‘what am I going to do now?’ Some of the TV offers started to come, which was never the plan – I stumbled into that. I nearly joined the WWE, I didn’t want to box, that was never the plan! I would have been called ‘Big Fred.'”
Flintoff has made a comeback to cricket, stepping up as a coach for England’s main squad and youth teams after surviving a severe Top Gear collision in December 2022. Yet he could have taken a wildly different career path.
Flintoff disclosed that he was once offered a three-year contract by WWE, which would have catapulted him into the heady world of Wrestlemania and Royal Rumble events.
“What happened was, it got to a point in Dubai where I was unfit, I’d put weight on and I was just not in a good place. I wanted to get fit again, but I needed motivation,” Flintoff confessed.
“As a kid, I loved WWE, so I came up with this idea, because I was doing League of Their Own with Sky, to fight the Undertaker in Manchester! I wrote this treatment up and presented the idea to Sky, it started gathering momentum and next minute it’s being passed onto WWE.
“I was in contact with the WWE, Vince McMahon! Dave Roberts ‘Rooster’ who was a physiotherapist who lived with us throughout my career, lived with us and looked after us. I asked him to send a trainer over to Dubai for six weeks because I needed to bulk up.
“He sent this fella over, I trained my nuts off, got fit and then the WWE flew me to Tampa. Me and the missus have gone over to Tampa, I’ve got two weeks at wrestling academy.
“They fly us over business class, next morning we get in the car and go to WWE’s academy, two massive units all branded. We’re sitting in the car and these things are walking past me, like 6ft 8in monsters.
“My missus asked, are you going to be okay? I said, ‘yeah, I’ll be fine’. I walked in – on the first day, nobody liked me because it’s really competitive with 60 of us all wanting a contract with the WWE – then this English lad walked in.
“So I go in and we do the warm-ups, then they put me in the ring for three hours and I just ran the ropes; I’d run into someone and they’d throw me. The second day I went in there, I had lashes all down my back and my missus said ‘are you alright with this?’
“I was sore and thought something’s not right here. I said to this physio, ‘I think I’m having a back spasm’; so they’re all like ‘ohh the English lad’s got a back spasm’. So they put me on the couch, he’s pushing me and I can feel my ribs separating.
“I said ‘mate, I think I’ve broken my ribs’. He said I’d be in so much pain and I was like ‘mate, I want to cry but I can’t in there’. I went for an X-ray and this fella who puts it up asked ‘what do you do’ I said ‘I’m a wrestler’. He asked, ‘how long have you been doing this’ and I said ‘two days’.
“We did all of that – on the third day you do acting lessons, but I didn’t think I was in on it. I was just sitting minding my own business and they said ‘Fred, you’re up’. I got up, and I had the microphone in my hand saying how hard I am; but I didn’t like that so said ‘can I do another’.
“I looked out and there were all of these weird and wonderful looking people, so I just tore them all a new one. They were trying to get me to wind up after two minutes but I was not finished.
“Two weeks later, I got an email from WWE, saying ‘you can’t do your documentary because you’ll give the secrets away, we want to put you on a three-year contract’.
“They said ‘we’ll fast-track you and in 18 months you’ll be at WrestleMania and Royal Rumble’. The money was obscene, but we wanted to move back from Dubai. The kids wanted to play cricket and didn’t want to go to America, so I just changed it to boxing and had a fight instead.”
Content Source: www.express.co.uk