TNA Impact Wrestling star and Bellator MMA fighter Bobby Lashley recently spoke with Sports Illustrated.

On how wrestling helped his MMA career: “Pro wrestling has absolutely helped my fighting. For starters, I’ve seen the ratings, but the one thing pro wrestling really helped with is being in front of such big crowds. I was a part of the largest WrestleMania ever, so I know how to feed off the energy from the crowd in my fights.”

On working with Donald Trump: “I wanted to see how Trump conducted himself behind the scenes. He’s the real deal. He understands success, and everything he did was top notch. A lot of the success from that WrestleMania was because of him.”

On his time with TNA and their future: “TNA and Bellator were both on Spike, and Bellator approached me about fighting for them. We were both interested in each other, and I was able to work out a contract to do both. TNA is incredible. Dixie Carter is a huge MMA fan. She’s pushing my career as much as I am. She’s like, ‘You need time off? Take time off.’ The way it’s set up in TNA is we don’t do TV every week. We do blocks of TV. The last time I really had to work was the end of July, and we put together 14 weeks of TV. I’ve been training since then. I have the security of my body being healthy and I know I can fight for the duration of my career. I’ve also built my name up in wrestling enough where I have a little bit of security in that genre. If TNA is not around, I can still get my wrestling fix other places.”