‘I don’t really see wrestling as an escape, it’s an alternative to becoming fat and sitting on the couch.” It is difficult to distinguish who is talking: Tim Wiese, the former Germany goalkeeper who went to the 2010 World Cup and played in the Champions League with Werder Bremen, or Tim Wiese, the WWE character getting ready to make his fighting debut on Thursday in Munich.
They seem to be very different people and not only in appearance. Standing 6ft 4in, Wiese weighed about 90kg (14st) as a goalkeeper. “When I stopped playing, at my biggest I weighed 132kg, and I had to have about six to seven thousand calories a day. Every woman enjoys a muscular big type by her side, instead of some weakling. But now I’ve cut that down to about three thousand calories and am down to about 120kg. I want to lose another three or four kilograms so I’m more explosive and more aggressive in the ring, so that I’m unbeatable.”
As a footballer, Wiese was certainly explosive and aggressive, an uncompromising sweeper-keeper never afraid to charge out of his area – once mistiming a tackle and drop-kicking Hamburg’s Ivica Olic in the throat, for which he received a yellow card – and could often be seen berating opponents, officials and even members of his own side. “My sporting hero was Oliver Kahn, because his style was very similar to mine,” Wiese says. “As a football player I tried to make people hate me. I like that I polarised opinion. If you are hated, people react to you on the pitch, so I never had a problem with that. In Germany, nobody ever enjoys you being successful or having anything. I don’t like that mentality of not being happy for somebody else. I’d say half the wrestling fans like me, half the fans hate me, which is good – at least I’m being discussed.”
Wiese’s attitude to external pressure and fans has not always been this balanced and this apathy towards those who dislike or criticise him is something that has been carefully curated over the past two years to create this new wrestling character. The long-term success of a career in wrestling is built on a foundation of trash-talk and bravado, and it is blindingly obvious Wiese – both the man and the character – no longer wants to be seen as physically or mentally weak. When asked whether he has sustained any injuries in the ring, Wiese says: “That’s a stupid question, of course I haven’t had any injuries, because I dole out the punishment, I don’t receive it. Next question.”
This confidence, said with a smile, has not always been the case and Wiese has admitted the pressure of performance affected his decision to leave football in 2014 at only 32, an age in which he should have been in his goalkeeping prime. Having left Werder Bremen on a Bosman in 2012, Wiese turned down the chance to be Iker Casillas’s No2 at Real Madrid, signing instead for Hoffenheim as he felt it a better place to maintain his place in the Germany side. However, despite taking up the captain’s armband, Wiese’s performances started to decline and he became a target for criticism, was subject to a fan protest at the club’s offices and shortly afterwards conceded that: “It was like being in a horror movie. The pressure was inhuman. I could not play freely. Every time we lost, it seemed it was my fault. I would never wish this on another player.”
After almost a year without first-team football, it was widely reported Wiese’s contract with Hoffenheim was mutually terminated in January 2014 but he says his four-year contract “ended on 30 June this year” and he has been receiving “individual training, not with the team”, which perhaps explains why his WWE debut has been so long in the making.
The training process has taken two years. In November 2014, Wiese appeared as a guest timekeeper at a WWE live event in Frankfurt. He was a natural, his now muscular figure strutting around the ring. Boot camps in Germany and an invitation from the wrestling legend Triple H to the WWE Performance Centre in Florida followed. The Orlando facility, closed to the public, is a kind of wrestling finishing school in which skills and moves are honed under ultra-slow motion footage. There is even a voice-over room where would-be graduates can practise their put downs. Wiese has impressed – “I’ve got trash-talking in my blood,” he says – and next month he will join two of the WWE’s biggest stars, Sheamus and Cesaro, on a tag team against opponents named the Shining Stars.
“My game plan against the Shining Stars will basically be to go full throttle, beat them down out of the ring, and seeing as they weigh 30-40lbs less than I do, I will grab them, one with the left hand, one with the right, and end them. I’ll drop kick Bo Dallas and throw him off the stage.”
This is not the first time the worlds of football and WWE have collided. Wayne Rooney appeared at an event in Manchester in 2015, slapping the wrestler King Barrett to the ground. In 2013, the former Port Vale and Burton Albion goalkeeper Stuart Tomlinson, who was forced to retire with a knee injury and now goes by the moniker of Hugo Knox, signed a development contract with the WWE, training at the same Florida facility as Wiese.
Whatever one may make of the WWE, with its scripted narratives and choreographed violent fights, it is some feat for Wiese to have reached the pinnacle of two furiously competitive fields. “There’s a lot of people that say: ‘No we don’t like it’ just because they can’t admit that they actually do. I’ve always been very ambitious and I never cared how people reacted to the things that I did. I was always like that as a child – I didn’t care, I dropped out of school because I didn’t see how you could make any money unless you became a top businessman. So I became a professional football player, became a multimillionaire, so everything was good.” Wiese made 269 Bundesliga appearances and won the first of his six Germany caps in a 2-1 defeat to England in 2008 at the Olympiastadion in Berlin. “It wasn’t my fault what happened in that game,” he says.
For all the pomp and show, it is clear Wiese is a happier man these days and views his football career with a degree of healthy perspective. “I don’t miss or regret anything. I’ve played professionally for 15 years so I’m quite enjoying my spare time. There’s not really anybody I would want to fight in the ring from my football days, and I don’t think anybody would dare face me anyway. Who else has a physique such as me?”
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