Never challenge John Bradshaw Layfield to a street fight—especially on Wall Street, or when he’s offering valuable investment pointers to help bulk up your portfolio.
Our fans watching JBL every week on WWE programming think he’s more “bull” than “bull market,” but consider the following: He didn’t clothesline his way to a senior vice-president position at a major investment bank. Analysts respect his appearances on Fox News Channel, CNN, CNNfn, MSNBC, CNBC, and C-SPAN as a financial advisor, not a “wrestling god.” He didn’t need a degree in Finance to line people’s pockets with cash, or provide common-sense management tips in his bestselling book Have More Money Now. And “The John Bradshaw Layfield Show,” a weekly radio program in which he champions his views on politics, sports, and entertainment, is now syndicated in more than 150 radio stations across America. Face it: JBL is saying something the people want to hear.
Not bad for a banker’s son from Sweetwater, a Texas town that JBL claims is renown for its annual “Rattlesnake Roundup.” (He still laughs at the time the Humane Society picketed the event—“We weren’t cruel to the snakes. We just caught ’em and killed ’em.”) Snakeskin, however, is no match for pigskin in Sweetwater; football is the town’s prime pastime, and the sport that fueled two of JBL’s three teenage aspirations (“playing football at Abilene Christian University, going pro, and becoming rich”). He’d earn impressive All-American honors as an offensive tackle at Abilene, though lingering knee problems would limit his second dream to less than a year with the NFL’s then-Los Angeles Raiders, and two seasons as part of the World League’s San Antonio Riders.
JBL was down to a 1980 Chevrolet step-side pickup truck and $27 in his bank account when he invested his energies toward a career in wrestling—and not opponents like the eight-foot, 800-pound brown bear he faced at a local cowboy bar on a college dare. More important, he realized that he needed to wrest control of his financial future; as he states in his book, “I decided that being poor ain’t fun, and staying that way is stupid.”
Getting physical in the ring has netted JBL a career wealth of championships, while his “fiscal” approach to the stock market has made him a very bankable resource in shareholders’ eyes. Perhaps the one drawback from his economic success is that it affords him the luxury of saying whatever’s on his mind—mainly because he can put his money where his mouth is. And since his return to in-ring competition in early 2008, JBL has also put his boot where his opponents' mouths are.
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