Tim Storm On His NWA Roots And Being a School Teacher
Tim Storm recently appeared on the Chris Van Vliet Show. The NWA Powerrr star discussed several topics, including his NWA roots and how his wrestling career affects his job as a schoolteacher. Here are some highlights:
On how he started working with the NWA:
Storm: 12 years ago, I got involved with an NWA association and, the first match that I had with them, I won the NWA Oklahoma Heavyweight Championship. And that was huge for me. Getting to know the ownership, director of operations, getting involved with it, I just kind of thought to myself, I don’t know what I have to bring to the table, but I love those letters, I respect those letters. And if there’s anything I can do to help bring that back to the prestige that it once had, and I don’t know that I could, I want to do that. I think we made some headway in the old ownership. There was some Japan stuff, there was a lot of TV talk, there were franchises throughout the United States and it was okay.”
On how the NWA is different now:
Storm: “Under the current regime, William Patrick Corgan buys it, Dave Lagana has huge just magic with camera work and editing, and that was the Ten Pounds of Gold series, which really was my introduction to the world. And that in itself is a story because it took a lot of trust for a guy who grew up under the old system of ‘Protect the business, don’t ever bring your family up.’ You don’t want anybody in the world to know, as everybody knows now I’m a schoolteacher, but you don’t want anybody to know that, right? Because you want everybody to believe you show up to the shows in a limousine, you’re making millions of dollars.”
“There was a level of trust there that Dave and Billy earned, and their idea was, ‘We think you have a really good story. Are you comfortable with us just opening it up?’ And I wasn’t. I won’t say it took convincing, but I’m okay with who I am, I didn’t have anything I wanted to hide so I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And people liked it.
On whether his students know he was the NWA champion:
Storm: “This is now my 11th year teaching. And my wife taught at the same school. Actually, she moved up into the administration side and I literally walked into her classroom in between years, took her classroom, started teaching her subject. As a guy, for people that don’t know, sometimes some of us are not very arts, right, so I literally didn’t have to change anything. The same name was on the door, everything. I just walked in and I didn’t know if I’d be a good teacher or not. Turns out I’m pretty good at it. They already knew because she used [his wrestling career] to kind of connect with the kids. Once one group knows, every group knows. So I could easily walk in and say you know, ‘Here’s my name, here’s what I do,’ and the two years before that were at that school that are now older kids already know what I am.”
“I did not talk about it at all for the first couple of years but they’re gonna know. So this is probably now my fifth or sixth year, opening day of school, I do my introduction, I talk about expectations, I do the teacher thing and I have one or two slides that say, Here’s what I do for fun.’ I list my passion, I love to do it, I may miss a few days for this, you know, and there’s a connection. A lot of kids think it’s cool, but then I’ll say, ‘And just we’re clear, this is US history, we’re not gonna talk about it. I think one of the worst things that could happen would be for 13 or 14 year olds to picture their history teacher wearing a pair of wrestling trunks. You know what I’m saying? It is not conducive to the perfect classroom.
The full episode is available below: