WWE superstar Drew McIntyre: the skinny Scot who wrestled his way to global stardom

Tonight, Drew McIntyre, 35, from Ayr in Scotland, will pull on his black leather wrestling trunks, lace up his boots and touch up his fake tan as he prepares to try to regain the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Championship title that he won (and lost) last year – the first ever Brit to do so.

He was christened Andrew McLean Galloway IV, but wrestles under the ‘more chantable’ name ‘McIntyre’. At 6ft 7in and weighing 19 stone, with long (dyed) black hair, beard, brown eyes and ‘Disney prince’ looks, he cuts a striking figure.

However, once you get him talking in his machine-gun patter, delivered with a thick west-Scotland accent that 14 years of living in the States has failed to erode, he comes across as friendly, appreciative, respectful, and delighted to be of help. Above all, what radiates from McIntyre is his sheer childlike enthusiasm and his unshakeable commitment to what he does best: wrestling.

This eagerly awaited contest, WrestleMania 37, watched by a global audience of nearly one billion fans (when you include all of WWE’s digital and social platforms), is the latest annual showcase of professional wrestling, held at the Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. WrestleMania 37 is a particularly big deal for the wrestling world: it marks the first time in more than a year that a WWE event will be staged before a live crowd, following the Covid pandemic.

McIntyre’s opponent, reigning world champion Bobby Lashley, took the title from McIntyre by slyly attacking him outside the ring after McIntyre had won a contest late last year. (In WWE, it is not unusual for the action to take place outside the ring.) ‘I was cheated out of my title,’ says McIntyre to me now, speaking via Zoom. ‘I am out to defeat the man who cheated me.’

Due to the pandemic, McIntyre hasn’t been home to Scotland since last April. He lives in Florida, with his wife Kaitlyn and their two cats. ‘My big goal is to regain the title, get back to the UK, get on an open-top bus and ride from the top of Scotland to the bottom of England, stopping off at Tyson Fury’s house to knock his head off,’ he smirks, as if this is a perfectly normal thing to want to do. McIntyre and Fury (the heavyweight boxing world champion) have been enjoying a ‘back and forth’ over social media about staging an exhibition match in the UK, as soon as Covid restrictions lift.

McIntyre’s story is as striking as his wrestling outfits. Winning the title marked the culmination of an obsession that began aged six, when he hid behind the sofa at his cousin’s house in Scotland and, spellbound, watched Hulk Hogan, Macho Man and The Ultimate Warrior on television. There and then, McIntyre determined that he would one day become WWE Champion. His subsequent rise, fall, and rise again is vividly described in his book A Chosen Destiny, out this month.

The memoir shines a light on this weirdest of ‘sports’, which features pumped-up fake-tanned boulder-shouldered hulks (men and, increasingly, women) wearing little more than underwear and hurling abuse and each other around the ring, while tens of thousands of up-for-it fans cheer and boo them on. WWE is to pro wrestling what Disney is to animated feature films. With its cartoon-like heroes and villains – such as Roman Reigns, a chiselled and tattooed Polynesian warrior; or the Undertaker, always in his trademark mortician’s trenchcoat and Stetson – storylines as lurid and skimpy as some of the outfits, and plenty of acrobatic violence, WWE is regarded as family entertainment to millions of Americans. According to McIntyre, ‘Forty per cent of WWE’s fan base is female.’

Vince McMahon, a former wrestler himself, founded WWE in 1982 and still runs it. He takes credit for uprooting wrestling from high-school gyms and smoky bars and flipping it into people’s homes via pay-per-view, transforming it into mainstream sports entertainment and a global phenomenon.

And the scripted storylines are as important as the actual wrestling. As McIntyre says, ‘However technically superb the execution, unless the action is aligned to an emotionally resonant story, interest will pall.’ A wrestler has to ‘win over the crowd; he has to have a spark that transforms the skills in the ring into a mesmerising alternative reality’.

Mad? Probably. But that’s part of its appeal. Beamed to 800 million people in 28 languages, WWE has turned its leading wrestlers into household names and earned them millions, through fees, sponsorship and merchandise. One of the most successful modern wrestlers, the Undertaker (aka Mark Calaway), retired last year after 30 years with WWE, with an estimated net worth of more than £12 million.

Drew McIntyre stands at the pinnacle of the scene. He has come a long way from wrestling in front of six people in a bleak church hall in Ayr.

A shy, skinny child, McIntyre hardly seemed marked for WWE glory. He grew up in a two-bedroom 1970s flat in Ayr, the son of Angela and Andy Galloway. Before she married, his mother had worked in the local supermarket; his father had a job at a furniture company (but now works as a manager at Kilmarnock Prison, where he and the inmates swap news and gossip about WWE).

In the early 1990s, the Scottish wrestling scene was almost non-existent, and the British wrestling scene as a whole still hadn’t recovered from the era of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. McIntyre thought that British wrestlers looked like ‘my dad and his friends in their underpants. I was much more enamoured by the exciting US presentation.’

Watched by an audience of their teddy bears, McIntyre and his younger brother John taught themselves to wrestle by improvising contests and imitating the moves of the American heroes whom they’d seen on TV.

‘Even the sort of people who say things like, “You can do anything if you set your mind to it,” told me I was nuts,’ says McIntyre, ‘and that WWE was an unattainable goal. America seemed so far away, like somewhere only accessible via TV. It seemed almost ridiculous to everyone except myself and my family.’

His mother was glad to indulge her son’s fantasies of WWE glory. McIntyre describes her as ‘the kindest, happiest, yet toughest, most selfless person I have ever known’.

Angela suffered from cerebellar ataxia, a degenerative neurological disorder that impaired her sense of balance. To move around the flat she had to hold on to walls and furniture. But she brushed off her problems and prioritised supporting McIntyre’s dreams of becoming a pro wrestler.

While at school, McIntyre, John and a friend devised their own ‘tournament’ –Xtreme Scottish Backyard Wrestling. An old double mattress served as the ring. He trained by running on Ayr beach and using plastic bottles filled with stones as dumb-bells. At 10, he joined the Frontier Wrestling Alliance in Portsmouth, 450 miles from Ayr, going as often as he could, staying for the weekend or for week-long training camps. He learnt holds, counter-holds, joint manipulation, footwork, how to fall safely and how to hit the ropes.

His fledgling years sound more like a low-budget comedy. At his public debut at 16 in Linwood, Renfrewshire, just outside Glasgow, he wore the ‘most horrible outfit – skin-tight electric-blue PVC trousers and a black fishnet vest’.

McIntyre was involved with setting up British Championship Wrestling (BCW). Unabashed by the heckling in draughty village halls throughout the UK, he found that doing what he loved in front of a crowd, ‘even 10 men and a dog’, brought him alive like never before.

But his parents were appalled when they saw him somersaulting over the ropes and crashing out of the ring. In order to placate them, McIntyre applied for university. A ‘big fan’ of The X-Files and documentaries about serial killers, he got a degree in criminology from Glasgow Caledonian University. He found that his student loan paid for gym membership as well as protein supplements. Meanwhile, he says, ‘Dad wanted a university diploma to put on the wall and say it was his son’s.’

An essential part of wrestling is the role-play. McIntyre’s early ring persona, ‘Thee’ Drew Galloway was a full-of-himself ladies’ man who cruised into the ring to Chesney Hawkes’ I Am the One and Only. After wrestling at a Butlins Holiday camp as a summer job, McIntyre attended a WWE try-out in London in 2007. He was signed up and invited to America. He was ecstatic.

Two weeks later, after McIntyre arrived at the WWE development centre in Louisville, Kentucky, WWE sent him ‘on the road for television’, a potentially transformational moment. Having only ever wrestled in front of 100 people max, he was being asked to leapfrog the queue of aspirants and walk out on a prime-time television slot watched by millions. After his winning debut, he spent two hours accepting friend requests on social media.

He submitted to a weekly sleep-eat-gym-wrestle regime. Every match was followed by ‘skull sessions’ – de-briefings. ‘The comments were never about the execution of moves,’ says McIntyre. ‘They were about how to best project the drama of the story.

‘Wrestlers are sportsmen, improv actors, stuntmen and entertainers wrapped up in one charismatic package,’ he says. ‘It’s soap opera in spandex.’ You not only have to learn the moves, you also have to stay ‘in character’.

What does it take to be a top-flight pro wrestler? The ideal candidate has world-class athletic abilities based on strength, flexibility, agility, telegenic charisma, a coachable temperament, and an immense work ethic. It probably helps that McIntyre comes from a part of Scotland where ‘the people, including myself, are unafraid to make a fool of ourselves – traits that are very useful in my job’.

In September 2009, in Oklahoma, McMahon hailed McIntyre as a future heavyweight world champion. It was official. From then on, McIntyre was The Chosen One. But his anointment ruffled feathers. Rivalries and antagonisms chafed. Whispers grew louder. McIntyre was ‘difficult’; he hit people ‘too hard’. When he got to hear about these rumours, McIntyre was dismissive. It was, he says, ‘their problem, not mine’.

But it was his problem. And in May 2010, McIntyre lost the Intercontinental title to Kofi Kingston. He was no longer The Chosen One. He wasn’t training hard enough, and he was drinking too much; soon, his rivals began to put the boot in. Suddenly the phone went dead. ‘When you are not doing so well,’ he says, ‘no one wants to know you.’

Worse, McIntyre’s mother fell ill. She hadn’t been looking well on Skype, but when McIntyre heard of her ‘cancer-related hysterectomy’ he felt ‘overwhelmed with unbearable sadness, thinking of Mum going through painful radiation treatment, while I was thousands of miles away.’

Inside the ring, McIntyre could block out his sadness. Outside, alcohol numbed the pain and kept reality at bay. ‘I was unable to deal with the horrible things that were going on,’ he says. ‘I was going out a lot, not putting in the gym work. I tried to shut everything out and pretend it was fine.’ He was also getting divorced from Taryn Terrell, a WWE wrestler who performed as ‘Tiffany’. They had been married for only a year.

Wrestling was no longer the most important thing in his life. ‘I could not bear to think of my mum’s ordeal; I could not imagine the prospect of losing her.’

Touching down at Glasgow airport in October 2012, he went straight to the hospital to find his mother heavily medicated. When she died a few days later, at the age of just 51, McIntyre fell to pieces. In wrestling, you learn to bounce back from a fall, but he was unable to bounce back from his mother’s death. The night before her cremation, he slept next to her casket, ‘to keep her close for as long as I could’, he says. At the funeral, McIntyre arranged for a horse and chariot, ‘so I could make sure her last ride was fit for a queen’.

Hungover, distracted, hostile, fed up, McIntyre was no longer in a position to ‘represent’ WWE. He was demoted to a ‘rock band’ brand, 3MB. He had plummeted from potential leading man to comedy sidekick. The drinking got worse. He was still staying out too late. ‘I wasn’t burning the candle at both ends. The whole candle was on fire,’ he says. ‘I just missed Mum being in the world.’

McIntyre believes that his late mother ‘sent’ Kaitlyn Frohnapfel to get him back on the straight and narrow. They met at a bar in Tampa in 2013 – she was a 21-year-old biology student at South Florida University.

The following June, WWE sacked McIntyre three days after he and Kaitlyn had moved in together. ‘I avoided talking to her,’ he says. ‘I’d go for a drink in the evening, which turned into days at a time. Kaitlyn would have no idea where I was. I was in the deepest funk. And it terrified me.’

At a loss, he finally looked in the mirror and asked himself, ‘What would Mum do?’ The answer was: ‘Pick yourself up, push on, never quit.’ He and Kaitlyn sat down and drafted what they called the Drew McIntyre 2.0 mission statement. It involved returning to the UK, rebuilding his career and reputation in the independent (non-WWE) wrestling scene and, hopefully, re-signing with WWE and winning the world title.

McIntyre returned to Scotland and got back on the indie circuit of tiny venues, and a ‘rougher, adult-only vibe created by small crowds fuelled by a lot of alcohol’. The first step in the relaunch took place at a nightclub in Glasgow in July 2014. Fired by the Braveheart spirit, McIntyre made an emotional comeback speech to the 1,500-strong crowd who ‘nearly blew the rafters off the building’. The video went viral.

McIntyre soon discovered two things. Firstly, the power of communicating directly with his fans through social media (he now has 1.2 million followers on Instagram, and 843,700 on Twitter). Secondly, the independent wrestling scene had exploded, with numerous overlapping companies and championships around the world. He no longer needed the ‘machine’ of WWE behind him.

He began picking up titles. ‘At one stage, I held five championship titles. I used to travel with two suitcases – one for my stuff, the other just for the title belts.’ He also made more money than at WWE, enough for him and Kaitlyn to buy a house in Tampa.

But life on the road took its toll. For almost two years, McIntyre and Kaitlyn were lucky to be together more than five days a month. On the indie scene, most of the business gets done at the bar – ‘I had all these catch-up parties, seeing old buddies’ – and going out drinking became more important than staying at home with Kaitlyn.

The lowest point came one day in December 2015. Kaitlyn’s mother had been diagnosed with colon cancer. On the day she heard the news, McIntyre went out and failed to show up until the next day. ‘It reminded me of what happened to my mum, and I couldn’t deal with it. I’m horrified at myself,’ he says now. Kaitlyn delivered her ultimatum: ‘Reform, or I walk.’

‘I realised I had negatively affected all the people I love,’ he says. ‘I really wanted to change and to make that difference. And I did, immediately. I cut out the negativity.’ He gave up his hellraising lifestyle, but there were other setbacks. In 2016, McIntyre heard a sickening ‘Snap!’ when an opponent dropped him on his head in a match in Newcastle. MRI scans revealed ‘non-displaced fractures of the T2 and T3 vertebrae’. His convalescence marked the turning point in his relationship with Kaitlyn. ‘We fell more in love than ever,’ he says. ‘She’d been through hell and yet here she was, patient and loving, doing everything in her power to help me get better… I don’t recommend a broken neck, but it certainly put me on the right path… Without Kaitlyn, there is no Drew McIntyre, world champion.’

One day in 2017, McIntyre got the call asking him to join NXT – not so much a diffusion brand of WWE as a ‘niche showcase for wrestling aficionados, fans with an appreciation of the physical art of wrestling rather than those looking for mainstream entertainment’. The aim was to work his way up to world champion.

The Drew McIntyre 2.0 playbook called for a new image: hairier, bearded, louder, bigger and meaner: a Scottish ‘badass’ whom people love to hate. It was even said that Drew McIntyre 2.0 looked like he’d eaten Drew McIntyre 1.0.

He also needed a new finish. Every wrestler has one – a big payoff move that can knock out an opponent. He hit upon the ‘Claymore kick’ by accident when he went to kick an opponent while wearing trousers so tight that the force of one leg going up sent the other leg into the air, too, leaving him sprawling on the ground. It was suggested that, performed with more finesse, this kick could be a ‘really cool finish’. McIntyre modified and developed his Claymore into a fail-safe trademark move. Devastating when correctly executed, it demands speed, agility and perfect timing.

Meanwhile, McIntyre was discovering that the following he had acquired on the indie circuit were not WWE fans, but fans of wrestling in general. ‘When I went back into WWE, the same people started tuning in.’ McIntyre’s popularity soared.

The big milestone on his comeback trail was the 2020 Royal Rumble, a fan-favourite spectacular held every January in which 30 superstars vie to toss each other out of the ring. Every two minutes, a fresh superstar piles in. The last man standing wins.

The aim was to eliminate Brock ‘The Beast’ Lesnar, the muscle mountain and reigning world champion, billed as an ‘unstoppable behemoth’. For 24 minutes and 24 seconds, Lesnar was on fire, until McIntyre’s turn loomed. McIntyre likens his entrance as his now-or-never Star Is Born moment. ‘People think every match in wrestling is planned out, move for move, like a movie,’ he says. ‘It’s not. You’d be amazed how little planning goes on.’

He hurled himself into the ring, unleashed his Claymore kick and floored Lesnar, knocking him right out. He then took on the rest of the competitors, and became the first Brit to win the Royal Rumble. More importantly, he had won the right to challenge Brock Lesnar for the world title at WrestleMania 36.

When Covid struck, WrestleMania 36 had to take place behind closed doors. It took three Claymores for McIntyre to defeat Lesnar and lift the world title belt to become the first Brit to taste WWE glory. The match was recorded and then streamed on WWE 10 days later. ‘Those were the longest 10 days of my life,’ says McIntyre. But after holding the title for 203 days, McIntyre lost to Randy Orton, who then held it for 22 days before McIntyre grabbed it back from him. Then he lost it again to Bobby Lashley.

This weekend at WrestleMania 37, he is determined to regain it.

‘My journey in wrestling has been complicated,’ says McIntyre, ‘a series of struggles and disappointments, like a game of snakes and ladders… but my story shows that if you want something, you don’t just knock at the door, you kick it off its hinges.’

Watch WrestleMania 37 this weekend on 10 and 11 April on WWE Network, with WWE Champion Bobby Lashley vs. Drew McIntyre match scheduled for 01:00am, Sunday 11th April

A Chosen Destiny by Drew McIntyre is published on 22 April 2021 (Ebury Press, £20)