Scott Garland, better known to fans as Scotty 2 Hotty, sat down with Chris Van Vliet in Orlando, Florida to discuss The Attitude Era, how he was paired with Brian Christopher, Rikishi joining Too Cool, how The Worm became his finisher, the iconic Royal Rumble dance spot, still wrestling now and teaming with his son Keegan, wanting to live to be 100 years old, and more!

You’re still wrestling!

“I love it. Yeah, it’s crazy. I tell this story a lot. I remember being in Europe somewhere on a tour bus. The WWE tours. You go from town to town on a tour bus, and it’s like 3 o’clock in the morning. I’m standing at the front of the bus with Tim White, and I remember telling him then. I was probably in my mid-20s. I remember saying I’m going to be done doing this when I’m 30. Now I just turned 53. I started when I was 15, I love it. It’s never been about the money for me. It’s just doing something I’m passionate about and doing something that I love, and I get to do it, and I feel like I can still go, and I do it at a respectable level. I always said when I have to start wearing a shirt to the ring and not taking it off, that’s when I’m going to stop. I don’t even know if that’s true anymore because I love it so much. But yeah, it’s awesome.”

It’s so cool seeing your son Keegan in the ring. Was this something he always wanted to do?

“No, not really. I mean, of course, he grew up around it. He was born in ’04, so I was still with WWE at the time. He grew up around WWE the first few years of his life, and then I went out on the independents for 9 or 10 years, and then back to WWE as coach now with AEW. Butso he’s been a part of it, and he’s grown up, and he never really had interest in doing it, and I never wanted to pressure him to do it. I’m not one of those guys [where I think] ‘I don’t want my kids doing it.’ It’s been so good to me. I’ve done so many cool things because of wrestling. I want my kids to be happy. I’ve never been, ‘Oh, they gotta go for a job with money. They gotta concentrate on money.’ Of course, you want to be financially secure, but I want them to be happy with whatever they do in life. I wanted him to ask me about doing it. One day we were in the gym, and he started talking about it on a treadmill. I remember it was the first time he said it. Then Ace Steel ended up opening up his school, the foundation in Orlando. I worked with Ace at that Performance Center when I was there as a coach, and I knew what a good coach he was. I didn’t want to train him myself. I wanted him to go through it from the ground up and do the training. I never did that. I was a backyard wrestler basically before there was a word for backyard wrestling. I was self-taught in my mom’s garage. We had literally 18 mattresses in this garage, [actually] 20 because we had a mattress in each corner, and then we had three-by-three rows of three by 2 high, with a sheet of plywood in between to stabilize a little bit. And my buddies and I kind of self-taught ourselves.”

Why was Rikishi added to Too Cool?

“I don’t know. I remember Michael Hayes coming up to us, because the last thing he had done on WWE television was the Sultan, and then he had been sent down to Memphis and he was wrestling there, and I think he was kind of doing the Rikishi gimmick a little bit there. I might be wrong, but I know they said he was going to come out and save us. He’s got this thong on, and I’m like, this doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t fit what Brian and I have been doing. I go, I don’t see this working. But that first night, man, it’s one of those things you can’t even describe it, or feel like you can come up with and go I know this is going to work. We did the dance, I always say it was magic.”

You had a magical moment at the Royal Rumble 2000, where it’s Rikishi, it’s Brian Christopher in the ring, and then your music hits. So you got all three members of Too Cool, and then the music hits, and it’s just what a great moment.

“Again, that was a defining moment, and what made our career.”

The crowd knew exactly what was going to happen.

“Yeah, it was the right timing. I think if it was probably two weeks earlier, it wouldn’t have got that reaction. But we just had those four or five weeks, whatever it was, to condition the audience to what was coming, and they knew when it was only the three of us, they knew what was coming. It was New York City, where either they love you or they hate you. I’ve been on both sides of that, where I was the new guy, and I’m the white meat babyface trying to get over in New York when I first started, and going out there, and they boo you out of the building as a babyface to the other side where they love you. If you can get New York to love you, you can get anybody to love you.”

Do you know how much longer you want to wrestle for?

“I told you I’m going to live to 100, but just as long as I can present in a professional manner, and look the part and feel the part, I will continue.”

What about a match in AEW?

“So I’ve done a couple of dark matches. I’m not against wrestling; I just want it to be the right thing. I’m very, I don’t know if protective’s the right word, but I feel like what I’ve done up to this point. I don’t want to sound like I think I’m this top guy or this mega star, but I feel like what I do have, what I’ve created in the time that I’ve been doing it, is something special. I don’t want to water that down. I want it to mean something. I almost feel like I’d be best used in a nostalgia role, but in a not used all the time [role]. A mystery opponent, or in the gauntlet battle royal, or just one-offs here and there. I think that’s where I would best be suited. The talent at AEW is so good, and their style is so insane and awesome. I don’t know how I would fit in.”