For a guy who was body-slammed out of teaching in city schools after his double life as a pro wrestler was exposed, Matt Kaye couldn't be happier.
The scandal last summer cost the 31-year-old social studies teacher his job at Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens, but landed him a contract with World Wrestling Entertainment, which promptly cast Kaye in a familiar role.
In the ring, he's known as Matt Striker, an insufferably cocky and preppy schoolteacher hailing straight out of "the classroom."
"Some people, they love to hate me," Kaye said with classic bad-guy bluster. "And I love that they love to hate me."
The 6-foot-1, 237-pound grappling fanatic resigned from Cardozo after city investigators learned - from his own Web site, no less - that he had been moonlighting as a wrestler when he should have been teaching. Kaye also was accused of having his mother call in sick for him while he donned tights to pile drive opponents in Japan.
But Kaye, who worked five years as a teacher, picked himself up off the mat in a hurry.
"I pinch myself every day," he said. "I was born to do this."
Kaye is a regular on WWE's "Raw," where he hosts the "Striker's Classroom" segment, in which he stands before a blackboard and talks down to a lustily booing crowd. In one of his promotional photos, he wears a blue-and-white argyle sweater and impeccably pressed gray pants.
"I am witty, I am pedantic, I am a touch condescending," he said. "If that's my true personality, then that's what I bring to the program times 10."
Infamy has been good for Kaye in other ways, too. He appears in the latest issue of GQ magazine, striking poses among kids in a classroom while wearing yellow wrestling trunks. On a recent WWE show, he strutted into an arena holding the magazine while trash-talking the crowd.
"Not only am I ridiculously good-looking, not only am I brilliant, but I have style," he crowed.
For all his macho on-air bravado, Kaye said he still misses his students at Cardozo, and regrets being unable to say goodbye to them when he was bounced from the classroom. "It's kind of like being pulled away from your family," he said.
But Kaye said he hopes to spend the rest of his career getting booed and pummeled inside the ring, rather than lecturing in front of a blackboard. "I am a 7-year-old child every day, living my dream," he said.
