Post by jagi on Aug 16, 2009 4:41:11 GMT -5
JAGI, aka Ja-Gi Kyung-Moon. In the guiding endeavor to bring today's sophisticated wrestling viewer the best sporting action possible while highlighting an eclectic mix the stars of today and the future leaders of industry, True Glory Wrestling has seen fit to give this brash upstart his first opportunity at the big leagues. What the young lion lacks in experience, he more than makes up for in confidence, but surprised our press team with a rather well considered insight into the wrestling business and the world around him. TGW's globetrotting correspondent Nathaly "Quest" Questas sat down with JAGI in order to learn more about the little-known rookie.
Quest: JAGI, thank you for meeting with me today.
JAGI: Not a big deal. Not like I got much else to do until TGW production tosses up the first show. They got media and press events but naturally the familiar faces would get those. I did show up at one thing at a Big Lots in Fort Lauderdale and some jackass had the nerve to ask me if I worked there. I WAS IN JEANS AND A MARINERS JERSEY! Is that standard attire for Big Lots employees?
Quest: Yes, well... what I'd like to do is help people get to understand the man outside of the ring, as well as help you to highlight your training and any prior experience that will assist the TGW audience in seeing more of what the management saw when they hired you.
JAGI: Yeah, whatever.
Quest: Now, let's start at the beginning. You grew up in Verona, Washington. Could you describe for us the area, and what your childhood was like?
JAGI: What do you want me to say? Coupla Koreans came over to the states and got jobs in the insurance industry. They had me. Your typical boring suburban lifestyle. Verona isn't much to look at. I mean, it's pretty and I think it's almost a 1 in 5 poverty rating but it's not a major hub for crime or drugs or anything. And even among the gangs there nowadays are so many neutral zones you gotta figure they're just in it for the look. Like Anne Hathaway's group of kids in Havoc, which you have to see if you haven't already.
Quest: Okay, I'll take that suggestion under advisement.
JAGI: Seeeeee iiiiiit.
Quest: Moving on, you told me before the interview that you didn't watch wrestling when you were younger. So what made you decide to approach the sport after college?
JAGI: Well, like I said in my blog, anthropologists are like the starving artists of the academic community. I did that in school, but damned if I'm going to be begging for grant money for the rest of my life just so that I can keep the lights on at a dingy, sparsely-furnished little apartment.
Quest: Why did you choose to major in a subject that you knew had little career demand or pay?
JAGI: Because I still liked the subject. That and Philosophy, I got a minor certificate in that. But when you go to a university you're supposed to be there to study something that you really enjoy. You want job skills go to a local tech center. That's the disconnect in this country, but it's enforced. One of the things that the anthropology degree helped me realize is that the American university system is the greatest con in the history of the United States. It's a self-sustaining Ponzi scheme with no payout. And people know from the start that there's no payout and they still go through with it.
Quest: I'm sorry?
JAGI: Think of it this way. You go to school and you take classes in music appreciation and chemistry and underwater basket-weaving and all this bullshit that employers don't give a damn about in the slightest. You spend anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 dollars all to learn stuff that you could've just done for free at the county library on your own time. And for what, so you can get a piece of paper from an "accredited" institution that tells people that you spent 4+ years dedicating yourself to a system that can't guarantee you employability or a favorable job market for whatever you bothered to learn. Now, I'm not saying that the whole experience is a waste, but anybody who goes to a university for anything other than trying to be a doctor is wasting their time. The universities, however, have so poisoned our thinking as a society that they've indoctrinated people into believing that you have no worth as a person or a potential employee unless you went to school. Hell, you could study hard in your own house using the internet and become one of the most knowledgeable individuals when it comes to the politics of the Middle East and write whole volumes about it, but none of that matters worth a damn if you don't pay into the system so that you get a stamp validating that you've covered the entry-fee into "true society" and therefore people are allowed to take anything you say seriously. The university system has therefore devalued any learning that they don't give you, all so that they can pump you for extra money, even though whether or not you actually learn anything at their school is a distant secondary priority to getting more and more cash from you to fill the pockets of the administrators and board members.
Quest: That's certainly an... interesting theory.
JAGI: So that's why I took into anthropology. An individual? Trying to get a psychology degree to attempt to dissect a person one-on-one and figure out everything about them... too inefficient. Life is a series of group-think metastructures and self-enslavement subcultures, spheres of influence and social habits all ruling us in some way or another. My outlook on life is, if you just analyze the larger cultural construct in which a person lives their life, or at least a certain aspect of their life relevant to your needs and interests, you can much more easily and efficiently learn what you need to learn to con the system and get ahead. Once you figure out what game somebody's playing, you see that everybody has some sort of rules and unquestioned habits and standards they live by and it's just exploiting that framework.
Quest: Hm. I never thought about it like that.
JAGI: Most people don't, not looking at it globally. That's how the masters of the universe can rise to the top.
Quest: Okay, but going back to my earlier question, how did you get from university into wrestling? I know you said that it "pays the bills" but there are other occupations that are less dangerous and afford a fair standard of living. Why professional wrestling?
JAGI: Well in a sense it my own little experimental study in social science. When you look at pro wrestling you see a bunch of people killing themselves today for the chance to kill themselves tomorrow in a sport that has a much lower life expectancy than even other full contact or combat sports. Beating yourself up in training to hopefully become strong enough that you can take out the extreme punishment that is tossed out at one another on a weekly basis, and then having just enough time to pretend to heal before you're back at it... boxers and MMA fighters can take months before bouts, but wrestlers don't even attempt that kind of lax schedule. You have to be kinda crazy from a normal person's perspective to even try it, but I thought that "crazy" was too simple a reasoning. So I figured I'd give it a shot. I'll admit it was harder than it looked at first but I picked it up quickly enough to not wash out of training or die in the process.
Quest: And where did you train?
JAGI: You wouldn't know the place if I told you, but there's an old firefighter in Deland, Florida who used to wrestle in the old circuits back down that way. He introduces me to the guys who run the school at Coastal Championship Wrestling. I never worked a CCW show but I went through and got the basics down.
Quest: And then from there you actually went to Mongolia? Is that right? Let's talk about that.
JAGI: *Sighs* Yeah, I got my start in some crap fed that a Russian dude tried to start out that way. MONGOL! it was called.
Quest: And how did you hear about this organization.
JAGI: They were begging for workers. You didn't even need to audition or anything. I mean, it's Mongolia; who's signing up for that shit? I found the ad for it on Craigslist. People find that surprising for some reason. I don't know why, you can find people offering anything on Craigslist. One guy was selling his daughter as a mail order bride, with a bonus human kidney thrown in if you bought within 48 hours. And I wish I were joking about that.
Quest: How did you find the experience, working in Mongolia?
JAGI: Maybe it's just me being spoiled by the U.S. but clean running water seems to be on a premium there. And if Mongolia's reading this now... what the hell is up with the showers? I mean, yeah, not every one of you people can be some sort of out of shape steroid freak baby like Harvey Clayton -- or simply "the motherfucker" as I shall refer to him from now on -- who just grabs a bar of soap and washes himself off with his own sweat, but one thing I hated about Mongolia was the "sit in front of a sink faucet and wash your ass" bathroom design. Course I wouldn't expect proper facilities from Mongolians, a people who are historically known for getting the hell out of Mongolia because it's such an empty, resource-lacking country. At least no matter where you go in the world, you can get a Coca-Cola. And thank god that it's not bottled locally. Oh, and Mongolia seemed unaware but their roads aren't even paved and it takes 4 hours to drive across town. They should really get somebody on that. Ty Pennington needs to run through and give the whole country an extreme makeover.
Quest: What was your opinion of MONGOL! before you got there?
JAGI: A Mongolian wrestling federation didn't sound like a cash cow. The country's principal crop is dirt, and the main export is the square root of a negative number, if you know what I mean. Luckily Kojak, aka Kolzak Vladiyev, came through with the money and the vision to take the place pan-Asian because that's the only way I'd have ever heard about it. Truth be told, even then I was only in this for the money and the bitches. But they had to be clean -- there was no V.A. or health insurance to cover me if I got syphilis over there. But at least I got paid in dollars, which made me a damnhellass king since a dollar in Mongolia is like Oprah Winfrey's salary over here.
Quest: As a part of the junior heavyweight division, you were facing the likes of one of Japan's fastest rising juniors, Mitsuharu Kisseki, as well as "The Ukranian Assassin" Frederyk Novo Pul, and even fellow Americans Josh Cameron and Byron Maloka. What did you think of them?
JAGI: *Yawns* I'm sorry, I just get a little sleepy when such uninteresting people are mentioned.
Quest: Um... okay. Well what were your thoughts on MONGOL's reigning Junior Heavyweight champion, Dancing Man?
JAGI: Interesting story. His real name is Winston James. He was about a year behind me in school. Most retarded kid you ever met. He still owes me about fifty dollars he borrowed from me for a date because he was trying to nail Liz Pressley and took her out to dinner. If he'd managed to score it'd be okay but he ruined it for himself and then didn't even pay me back when he knew good and damn well that it was a favor, a loan. It's not my fault that Liz got drunk and went on her Myspace page and let slip one night that the dude was hung like a baby gorilla. Poor Winston had to leave the country, steal a dead Japanese guy's identity, and get into puroresu to try to reclaim any dignity.
Quest: While you joke about that, Dancing Man did hold a victory over you in a non-title match, and you never did get a match for the title.
JAGI: Look, I'm not gonna act like I didn't take some losses over there. Hell, I walked in without a single professional match under my belt. It's all a learning process, right? Baptism by fire and all that. But don't think I make light of past opponents because I think I'm better than them or that I'm bitter over losing. I'm just an asshole, simple as that.
Quest: So you plan to continue this behavior in True Glory Wrestling, then?
JAGI: Oh, definitely. By now you've probably noticed that I'm rather abrasive. And it's cool. My name is Kyung-Moon Ja Gi. That nebulous group of people called "they" refer to me as JAGI. And I am a totally messed up human being. But that's fine, somebody's gotta be. Honestly, if I didn't fit into the business plan, you think I'd have got a job here at all? I'm the spoiler; I'm the guy they call in when you need the fans to feel like they're better than somebody. I'm the guy that nobody wants their favorite wrestler to lose to and sometimes you need that because this whole sport is just as much about catharsis and projection for the fans as anything else. I'm the boss they hate, I'm the guy who stole their job, I'm that damn ex-husband they never wanna see again; whatever the people need me to be that they buy tickets or watch TV or order DVDs to hopefully see me get my face kicked in. In a nutshell, I'm the Tito Ortiz of TGW, and it's a role I happily take because one thing you notice about pro wrestling is that while the fans are fickle and the marketability of faces will rise and fall over time, assholes are always always always gainfully employed. So, yeah, I'll be around for a good while... and unfortunately for the fans, I don't intend to give them the happy ending that they want.
Quest: JAGI, thank you for your time.
JAGI: Don't mention it. Hey, since you're in town, howzabout some bowling?
Quest: Bowling?
JAGI: Don't act like you don't bowl.
Quest: I... think we're done here.
JAGI: Or go-karts. You must do something for fun.
Quest: To our TGW fans, thank you and stay tuned for more interviews!
Quest: JAGI, thank you for meeting with me today.
JAGI: Not a big deal. Not like I got much else to do until TGW production tosses up the first show. They got media and press events but naturally the familiar faces would get those. I did show up at one thing at a Big Lots in Fort Lauderdale and some jackass had the nerve to ask me if I worked there. I WAS IN JEANS AND A MARINERS JERSEY! Is that standard attire for Big Lots employees?
Quest: Yes, well... what I'd like to do is help people get to understand the man outside of the ring, as well as help you to highlight your training and any prior experience that will assist the TGW audience in seeing more of what the management saw when they hired you.
JAGI: Yeah, whatever.
Quest: Now, let's start at the beginning. You grew up in Verona, Washington. Could you describe for us the area, and what your childhood was like?
JAGI: What do you want me to say? Coupla Koreans came over to the states and got jobs in the insurance industry. They had me. Your typical boring suburban lifestyle. Verona isn't much to look at. I mean, it's pretty and I think it's almost a 1 in 5 poverty rating but it's not a major hub for crime or drugs or anything. And even among the gangs there nowadays are so many neutral zones you gotta figure they're just in it for the look. Like Anne Hathaway's group of kids in Havoc, which you have to see if you haven't already.
Quest: Okay, I'll take that suggestion under advisement.
JAGI: Seeeeee iiiiiit.
Quest: Moving on, you told me before the interview that you didn't watch wrestling when you were younger. So what made you decide to approach the sport after college?
JAGI: Well, like I said in my blog, anthropologists are like the starving artists of the academic community. I did that in school, but damned if I'm going to be begging for grant money for the rest of my life just so that I can keep the lights on at a dingy, sparsely-furnished little apartment.
Quest: Why did you choose to major in a subject that you knew had little career demand or pay?
JAGI: Because I still liked the subject. That and Philosophy, I got a minor certificate in that. But when you go to a university you're supposed to be there to study something that you really enjoy. You want job skills go to a local tech center. That's the disconnect in this country, but it's enforced. One of the things that the anthropology degree helped me realize is that the American university system is the greatest con in the history of the United States. It's a self-sustaining Ponzi scheme with no payout. And people know from the start that there's no payout and they still go through with it.
Quest: I'm sorry?
JAGI: Think of it this way. You go to school and you take classes in music appreciation and chemistry and underwater basket-weaving and all this bullshit that employers don't give a damn about in the slightest. You spend anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 dollars all to learn stuff that you could've just done for free at the county library on your own time. And for what, so you can get a piece of paper from an "accredited" institution that tells people that you spent 4+ years dedicating yourself to a system that can't guarantee you employability or a favorable job market for whatever you bothered to learn. Now, I'm not saying that the whole experience is a waste, but anybody who goes to a university for anything other than trying to be a doctor is wasting their time. The universities, however, have so poisoned our thinking as a society that they've indoctrinated people into believing that you have no worth as a person or a potential employee unless you went to school. Hell, you could study hard in your own house using the internet and become one of the most knowledgeable individuals when it comes to the politics of the Middle East and write whole volumes about it, but none of that matters worth a damn if you don't pay into the system so that you get a stamp validating that you've covered the entry-fee into "true society" and therefore people are allowed to take anything you say seriously. The university system has therefore devalued any learning that they don't give you, all so that they can pump you for extra money, even though whether or not you actually learn anything at their school is a distant secondary priority to getting more and more cash from you to fill the pockets of the administrators and board members.
Quest: That's certainly an... interesting theory.
JAGI: So that's why I took into anthropology. An individual? Trying to get a psychology degree to attempt to dissect a person one-on-one and figure out everything about them... too inefficient. Life is a series of group-think metastructures and self-enslavement subcultures, spheres of influence and social habits all ruling us in some way or another. My outlook on life is, if you just analyze the larger cultural construct in which a person lives their life, or at least a certain aspect of their life relevant to your needs and interests, you can much more easily and efficiently learn what you need to learn to con the system and get ahead. Once you figure out what game somebody's playing, you see that everybody has some sort of rules and unquestioned habits and standards they live by and it's just exploiting that framework.
Quest: Hm. I never thought about it like that.
JAGI: Most people don't, not looking at it globally. That's how the masters of the universe can rise to the top.
Quest: Okay, but going back to my earlier question, how did you get from university into wrestling? I know you said that it "pays the bills" but there are other occupations that are less dangerous and afford a fair standard of living. Why professional wrestling?
JAGI: Well in a sense it my own little experimental study in social science. When you look at pro wrestling you see a bunch of people killing themselves today for the chance to kill themselves tomorrow in a sport that has a much lower life expectancy than even other full contact or combat sports. Beating yourself up in training to hopefully become strong enough that you can take out the extreme punishment that is tossed out at one another on a weekly basis, and then having just enough time to pretend to heal before you're back at it... boxers and MMA fighters can take months before bouts, but wrestlers don't even attempt that kind of lax schedule. You have to be kinda crazy from a normal person's perspective to even try it, but I thought that "crazy" was too simple a reasoning. So I figured I'd give it a shot. I'll admit it was harder than it looked at first but I picked it up quickly enough to not wash out of training or die in the process.
Quest: And where did you train?
JAGI: You wouldn't know the place if I told you, but there's an old firefighter in Deland, Florida who used to wrestle in the old circuits back down that way. He introduces me to the guys who run the school at Coastal Championship Wrestling. I never worked a CCW show but I went through and got the basics down.
Quest: And then from there you actually went to Mongolia? Is that right? Let's talk about that.
JAGI: *Sighs* Yeah, I got my start in some crap fed that a Russian dude tried to start out that way. MONGOL! it was called.
Quest: And how did you hear about this organization.
JAGI: They were begging for workers. You didn't even need to audition or anything. I mean, it's Mongolia; who's signing up for that shit? I found the ad for it on Craigslist. People find that surprising for some reason. I don't know why, you can find people offering anything on Craigslist. One guy was selling his daughter as a mail order bride, with a bonus human kidney thrown in if you bought within 48 hours. And I wish I were joking about that.
Quest: How did you find the experience, working in Mongolia?
JAGI: Maybe it's just me being spoiled by the U.S. but clean running water seems to be on a premium there. And if Mongolia's reading this now... what the hell is up with the showers? I mean, yeah, not every one of you people can be some sort of out of shape steroid freak baby like Harvey Clayton -- or simply "the motherfucker" as I shall refer to him from now on -- who just grabs a bar of soap and washes himself off with his own sweat, but one thing I hated about Mongolia was the "sit in front of a sink faucet and wash your ass" bathroom design. Course I wouldn't expect proper facilities from Mongolians, a people who are historically known for getting the hell out of Mongolia because it's such an empty, resource-lacking country. At least no matter where you go in the world, you can get a Coca-Cola. And thank god that it's not bottled locally. Oh, and Mongolia seemed unaware but their roads aren't even paved and it takes 4 hours to drive across town. They should really get somebody on that. Ty Pennington needs to run through and give the whole country an extreme makeover.
Quest: What was your opinion of MONGOL! before you got there?
JAGI: A Mongolian wrestling federation didn't sound like a cash cow. The country's principal crop is dirt, and the main export is the square root of a negative number, if you know what I mean. Luckily Kojak, aka Kolzak Vladiyev, came through with the money and the vision to take the place pan-Asian because that's the only way I'd have ever heard about it. Truth be told, even then I was only in this for the money and the bitches. But they had to be clean -- there was no V.A. or health insurance to cover me if I got syphilis over there. But at least I got paid in dollars, which made me a damnhellass king since a dollar in Mongolia is like Oprah Winfrey's salary over here.
Quest: As a part of the junior heavyweight division, you were facing the likes of one of Japan's fastest rising juniors, Mitsuharu Kisseki, as well as "The Ukranian Assassin" Frederyk Novo Pul, and even fellow Americans Josh Cameron and Byron Maloka. What did you think of them?
JAGI: *Yawns* I'm sorry, I just get a little sleepy when such uninteresting people are mentioned.
Quest: Um... okay. Well what were your thoughts on MONGOL's reigning Junior Heavyweight champion, Dancing Man?
JAGI: Interesting story. His real name is Winston James. He was about a year behind me in school. Most retarded kid you ever met. He still owes me about fifty dollars he borrowed from me for a date because he was trying to nail Liz Pressley and took her out to dinner. If he'd managed to score it'd be okay but he ruined it for himself and then didn't even pay me back when he knew good and damn well that it was a favor, a loan. It's not my fault that Liz got drunk and went on her Myspace page and let slip one night that the dude was hung like a baby gorilla. Poor Winston had to leave the country, steal a dead Japanese guy's identity, and get into puroresu to try to reclaim any dignity.
Quest: While you joke about that, Dancing Man did hold a victory over you in a non-title match, and you never did get a match for the title.
JAGI: Look, I'm not gonna act like I didn't take some losses over there. Hell, I walked in without a single professional match under my belt. It's all a learning process, right? Baptism by fire and all that. But don't think I make light of past opponents because I think I'm better than them or that I'm bitter over losing. I'm just an asshole, simple as that.
Quest: So you plan to continue this behavior in True Glory Wrestling, then?
JAGI: Oh, definitely. By now you've probably noticed that I'm rather abrasive. And it's cool. My name is Kyung-Moon Ja Gi. That nebulous group of people called "they" refer to me as JAGI. And I am a totally messed up human being. But that's fine, somebody's gotta be. Honestly, if I didn't fit into the business plan, you think I'd have got a job here at all? I'm the spoiler; I'm the guy they call in when you need the fans to feel like they're better than somebody. I'm the guy that nobody wants their favorite wrestler to lose to and sometimes you need that because this whole sport is just as much about catharsis and projection for the fans as anything else. I'm the boss they hate, I'm the guy who stole their job, I'm that damn ex-husband they never wanna see again; whatever the people need me to be that they buy tickets or watch TV or order DVDs to hopefully see me get my face kicked in. In a nutshell, I'm the Tito Ortiz of TGW, and it's a role I happily take because one thing you notice about pro wrestling is that while the fans are fickle and the marketability of faces will rise and fall over time, assholes are always always always gainfully employed. So, yeah, I'll be around for a good while... and unfortunately for the fans, I don't intend to give them the happy ending that they want.
Quest: JAGI, thank you for your time.
JAGI: Don't mention it. Hey, since you're in town, howzabout some bowling?
Quest: Bowling?
JAGI: Don't act like you don't bowl.
Quest: I... think we're done here.
JAGI: Or go-karts. You must do something for fun.
Quest: To our TGW fans, thank you and stay tuned for more interviews!