Dean Ambrose's wild ride from rejection to WrestleMania 32 star

Nothing enthralled Ambrose in his formative years more than pro wrestling. He devoured countless hours of wrestling footage on videotape. Soon, he concluded that the wild and colorful world inside his TV screen would be a great place to build his future.

"It was like a life on the other side of this," Ambrose said. "This green, sprawling Land of Oz that is pro wrestling. You just imagine, 'What would it be like to be a pro wrestler? What do they do every day? They just go out there and... wrestle.'"

In 2003, Ambrose found his entry point: An ad for a wrestling school run by old-school grappler Les Thatcher. Ambrose reached out to Thatcher right away.

"[Thatcher] was like, 'You gotta be 18 and get on the weights and get on a training program and get your degree' and everything," Ambrose said. "I didn't want to hear any of this. So I just showed up [at Thatcher's school]. I initially lied when I first got there. I was like 'Yeah, I'm 18.'"

Ambrose bluffed his way into the building long enough to watch some wrestlers in training. Before long, Ambrose confessed his fib.

"It was the coolest thing I had ever seen, just people doing drills," Ambrose said. "I was mesmerized. And he was going on his spiel, talking about what goes into it and so forth, whatever. Then, you know, [Thatcher said] 'Would you want to pay up front?' or whatever. I was like 'Oh, well uh, yeah, I don't have any money and I'm not 18.'"

But Ambrose refused to go away, hanging around the school until they put him to work doing odd jobs like selling popcorn and working on the ring crew. Inevitably, Ambrose became a trainee himself. When he wasn't at the school or working, he was often home, immersing himself in wrestling footage.

"I'd been studying wrestling from all over the world, going through stacks of tapes," he said. "I'd get off work at 7 in the morning, come home, and be like just watching wrestling for hours, then go to training later that day and try to implement what I learned that weekend."

By 2004, Ambrose -- then working under the name Jon Moxley -- was a real-life pro wrestler on the independent circuit. He became one of the most successful indy wrestlers in the U.S., but it was a far cry from the glorious life he had imagined when he was a teen. The paychecks were modest. The travel was brutal. Instead of performing in spacious arenas in big cities, he sometimes wrestled in high school gymnasiums in the middle of nowhere. Ambrose's tenacity and refusal to quit saw him through...More?

source: cbssports.com