"The kid pulled me out on the lawn" - Gurdarshan Mangat on having a 24/7 WWE Hardcore title in his childhood

Gurdarshan Mangat has taken so much inspiration from WWE that him and his friends tried to live it during their childhood.

ONE Championship's rising flyweight contender has talked in length about how he loved the WWE’s Attitude Era during his childhood and that him and his friends had their own version of the Hardcore title.

In an interview with Dylan Bowker for Sportskeeda, Mangat said that their shenanigans happened practically everywhere and they did everything following the WWE Hardcore title’s 24/7 stipulation.

Mangat said that the most bizarre time that he “defended” their makeshift title was when one of his friends, who brought another one of their buddies to act as a referee, dragged him from his house to get the pin count.

Gurdarshan Mangat said:

“So I came back from school and my dad was sitting in the living room and he can look out to the front yard. Some kid came in and knocked on my door, the kid pulled me out on the lawn and beat me down, had a ref with him and pinned me down, he took the belt, and my dad was going ‘what the hell was going on?’ and it was just things we did.”

Their antics came to the point of being so reckless that their teachers had to talk to them about stop these acts.

Mangat added that it wasn’t just him and his friends who wrestled. He recalled a story wherein he trapped his brother inside a freezer when they replicated a WWE casket match.

The stipulation of such a match, made famous by The Undertaker, was to trap your opponent inside a casket to earn the victory. He added:

“My brother and I actually got into a lot of trouble. We used to do it at home and we created something like the Freezer Match. I don’t know if that match actually existed but I believe we created that, and coffin match where they bring in the coffin and lock it. You had to put the person in the freezer and I locked my brother in a deep freezer and I dropped the key and he was stuck in that freezer for a while, and I forgot about it. That would’ve been a pretty bad situation. We did a lot of dumb stuff like that.”

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Gurdarshan Mangat recalls learning English through WWE

As a child of first-generation Indian immigrants to Canada, Gurdarshan Mangat grew up with English as his second language.

Since his parents had a limited grasp of the English language, Mangat looked for other sources to teach him his new tongue. As an impressionable kid, one of his first sources was the WWE's intensely-popular Attitude Era.

Gurdarshan Mangat said that he tried emulating Shane McMahon, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, and Triple H’s cohort team called D-Generation X.

“I used to give everybody The People’s Eyebrow and D-Generation X’ ‘suck it!’ to everybody. That got me into a lot of trouble and the teachers who are teaching me said that the English that I’m using is not [the] proper [one] anyway.”

He added:

“I was doing Shane McMahon’s hand signals, The People’s Elbow, the eyebrow, I was doing it and I was pretty brainwashed by it.”