Maven was a middle school teacher when he won the inaugural Tough Enough reality competition in 2001, earning a WWF contract. His biggest, most iconic moment as a WWE Superstar came when he eliminated The Undertaker from the 2002 Royal Rumble.
He won the WWF Hardcore Championship but was ultimately released by the company in 2005. Maven competed on the independent scene for a short while, but in recent years, he's become a popular YouTube personality, recounting stories from the road and interviewing his fellow wrestlers.
Maven also has plenty to say about the current state of WWE, and didn't hold back during a recent interview with TMZ when the site brought up a $38,000 WrestleMania 42 ticket package and the rising cost of being a wrestling fan.
"It’s one of the things that angers me the most," he stated. "You can say what you want about Vince McMahon, but Vince knew that the everyday family was where his bread was buttered. He knew that in order to create generational fans, he was going to have to make his product accessible, accessible on a weekly basis, accessible on a monthly basis, at an affordable rate."
"I remember the day when guys would be scrounging together, you know, you’d bring six to eight people together, you know, here I got $12, and then you could buy the pay per view. It’s not like that anymore. I remember also going to my first show when I was, I think, seven years old. I asked my dad, you know, how much that cost?"
"He told me it was about $300 for everything, for the tickets, the parking, the food, everything, $300 for everybody, that was his whole investment," Maven continued. "That right now, you’re not even getting one good ticket for that. They’re pricing out fans."
WWE ticket prices have risen astronomically since TKO took over, though it's only recently that it's started having a noticeable impact on attendance (Saturday Night's Main Event, for example, was far from a sell-out).
Still, Maven was quick to acknowledge that high ticket prices aren't solely a WWE problem. "Wrestling isn’t the only one doing it. Football is doing it. Baseball is doing it. I used to work for the Brooklyn Nets and they encouraged us to sell to corporations. 'Don’t call families, because they’re not the one.'"
"Regular people don’t have that kind of money for as disposable income as corporations do, and it’s sad, it’s sad that we live in that society," he added. "But I’m a firm believer that the answer to every question is money."
While the cost of tickets has pretty much doubled since the merger with TKO in 2023, WWE is still hugely successful—particularly when it comes to those all-important stock prices—and it's unlikely that anything will change in the near future.
You can hear more from Maven in the player below.