The University of Texas football team got a surprise visit during practice this week. Thankfully, he didn’t try to steal their souls.
In a rare out-of-character appearance (or kayfabe, as it’s known in WWE), Mark Calaway, aka The Undertaker, gave an inspiring speech to the Longhorns thanks to their new coach, Tom Herman.
From the very beginning, Calaway’s admiration of the Longhorns was apparent: “It took me almost 52 years, but I finally made a Longhorns practice!”
Calaway went into detail about the genesis of his career, and how he almost skipped sports entertainment in favor of joining a basketball team abroad. He recalls his oldest brother telling him “you gotta live your life for you, because ultimately you’re gonna be the only one you have to answer to for the decisions you make in life.”
He then left school (which, of course, he tells the team to absolutely not do) to pursue sports entertainment. It took him months of working as a bouncer and living in a truck to get his first break, which he admits was only because he was in “the right place at the right time, and my perseverance paid off.”
Ultimately, Calaway wanted the Longhorns to know that you need to be motivated in order to succeed, and to stay determined: “What it boils down to is the passion and desire to be great, and you do it every day…You wanna be great, you can be great. You have to separate yourself from everybody else. Don’t say ‘I can’t,’ say ‘I will.’”
You can listen to ‘Taker’s entire speech here, courtesy of the Texas Longhorns twitter account:
