Earlier this yr, former AEW TNT Champion Darby Allin took some time without work from pro wrestling and realized a lifelong dream of climbing Mount Everest. During an interview on “The Ariel Helwani Show,” Allin expressed what it meant to him to scale the highest of the mountain and what he actually desired to prove to the world and himself by doing it.
Allin, interestingly, expressed that he doesn’t just like the culture around pro wrestling and called it a “15-minute” ride. “A number of people imagine their very own hype, but at the top of the day, another person is [in] control of your destiny. They’re either going to make you the champion or make you the guy at the underside,” he explained. “In order that’s an enormous reason I desired to climb Mount Everest, is to essentially prove to myself that I’m able to anything.”
The wrestler further explained that he doesn’t like ego, and adds that the wrestling world can chew you up and spit you out. “When you imagine your hype and it spits you out? You are literally living your life for any individual else; that is like my whole thing,” he added, noting that with AEW, nevertheless, that is different because the promotion allows people to live their lives inside and outside of the ring. “The proven fact that they let me climb Mount Everest in, essentially, the height of my profession? It’s like, you never get that.”
Moreover, he expressed that he has no ego in relation to wrestling, and if the industry needed to spit him out tomorrow, that will be the top, and he’d be at peace with it.
‘I’d die on that mountain before I turned back’
When asked if the climb ever pushed him to his mental breaking point, Darby Allin interestingly claimed that this was never the case, and that is why he made his climb such a public ordeal. “At the top of the day, all you have got is your word. And if I say I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do it,” he explained. “So, once I said I used to be going to bring the AEW flag on top of the world, there was no turning back! I’d die on that mountain before I turned back.”
Mount Everest has been notorious for the number of people that die while trying to succeed in its peak, and Allin claims that he saw several dead bodies on his solution to the highest. “They ask you, right whenever you first get there, ‘Are you willing to die for this?’ ‘Cause when you’re not? Go. Leave. Go home!” he added, expressing that being willing to die is the last word definition. “The way in which I live my life, I feel like I actually have lived more in a single yr than people do of their whole entire life.”
Allin further expressed how grateful he’s for his journey climbing Everest, and described it as a self-journey of discovery. “There’s nothing more humbling than sitting there and searching at these bodies, and knowing that could possibly be you… And every single day you are just fixated on surviving.” Throughout the same interview, Allin further opened up in regards to the climb and the way he realized he felt nothing during milestones in AEW.
When you use any quotes from this text, please credit “The Ariel Helwani Show” and supply a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.