Why did he get into the business? He’d loved it since he was little and wondered why anyone would want to be anything but an athlete when they’re a kid. He says that "people who want to be adored by millions have a bit of insecurity in their life, and I had that." He would watch Florida Championship Wrestling and see someone like Ricky Santana and think "If he can do it, I can do it." As a result, Santana isn’t a big fan of his.

How did he get into the business? He tried to train with the Malenkos but had a lot of trouble finding it since it wasn’t advertised anywhere and couldn’t find it in the phone book. "It was really piss-poor marketing by Boris Malenko." They turned out some good students "but they also turned out some guys like Van Hammer and Johnny B. Badd, so you got to take the good with the bad, or the REALLY bad for that matter." He contrasts that with Larry Sharpe’s school, the Monster Factory, in New Jersey, which had gotten a lot of publicity in Sports Illustrated but the only publicized star graduate was Bam Bam Bigelow, who was not yet a superstar. He also looked at Killer Kowalski’s school and a few others before going with the Monster Factory.

First territory- Memphis. He compares it to the Hotel California because "You can check out but you never leave. Hell, I never thought I’d be back there again, but look at me now." When he, Vince Russo, and Disco Inferno got out of the car the other day at the Nashville Fairgrounds for a TNA PPV, he remembered thinking to himself before that he’d never be there again. He isn’t sure who his first match was with and talks about how he realizes now why old-timers he’d talked to didn’t remember angles they did during his childhood. He thinks it may have been with Ray Odyssey, although he’d also gone to Puerto Rico at one point and did jobs for three people, including TNT (Savio Vega). He talks about how he’d only been at the Monster Factory a month when Sharpe told him "You’ve got all the moves down, you just need to work in front of a crowd." He then started sending out tapes and letters to all the territories still in operation, such as Continental (Alabama), Portland (Oregon), Memphis, Puerto Rico, etc. and no one would hire him. He would send stuff every three weeks until he finally got a call on a Thursday from Jerry "The King" Lawler in Memphis telling him he was starting on that Saturday. He says that people who get developmental deals have no clue about how much things used to suck back then because it would take forever to get booked then you might be somewhere for a week or 5 years, and only be paid about $300 a week to drive thousands of miles to shows. He would travel with Marty Jannetty at that time because Marty and his Rockers teammate, Shawn Michaels, weren’t getting along at the time.

He’d been in Memphis for three months and then got released over BS reasons. He showed up for the first TV there and was asked what his finisher was and went "Uhh… the clothesline?" because he had no idea that he was going over that day. "As bad as it was back then, it’s not as bad as if I’d said it today because people throw 87,000 clotheslines in a match." Since they weren’t happy with it, he quickly improvised and said it would be from the second rope, which they were happy with. They then sent him out there with a TV jobber and told him he had four minutes, then "I forgot everything I’d ever learned in that first minute." That night, they worked at the Nashville fairgrounds and put him in a 10-minute broadway with Jesse Barr (Jimmy Jack Funk), who he puts over as a worker. He then starts talking about how Larry Sharpe didn’t prepare him for some aspects of the business, like speaking carny, but figures it made him better in the end than if he’d come in thinking he knew everything. Jesse carried him to a good match, so they thought he was good and put him with the Zebra Warriors the next night, where they proceeded to have a bad match. At that point, Memphis management decided he was going to be a jobber and was kept on for several months.

Raven then convinced Tom Brandi (Sal Sincere, The Patriot after the original Patriot, Del Wilkes, retired) to come to Memphis and they had a good time. The problem came in when Raven had been there about a month, as he had figured out how to work and got pissed about putting over veterans who, routinely, had matches worse than the one he had on his first night in the territory.   More...