“I’d love to have been a No8,” says John Layfield, with a laugh. “Oh, man, I’d love that, a big No8 coming off the back of the scrum. I never had the opportunity to play but I’d have loved to give it a go.”

At 6ft 6in and close on 300lbs, the towering Texan is more than big enough for No8. But he’s 51 now and though he played college football and flirted with the NFL probably the main reason he never played rugby union was that he was busy being an all-time wrestling great.

In a picaresque career he made his name under another one: JBL, the longest-running WWE Smackdown champion, a cowboy-hatted villain. Before that he was Bradshaw, half of the Acolytes Protection Agency, and variously Bad Santa, Death Mask, Johnny Hawk and someone or something called Vampiro Americano. You can see him on the internet, throwing John Cena through the windscreen of a car.

Such exertions cannot go on forever. In retirement, Layfield made successful forays on Wall Street, worked as a WWE commentator and Fox News analyst – a rare “centrist” on the channel, he says – and authored a self-help book called Have More Money Now. He has also found rugby, by a route that like our interview involved a few increasingly sociable beers.

“It was 2010,” he says, “the football World Cup in South Africa, I went back to a bar after a game in Cape Town to try to get the vuvuzelas out of my ear. And apparently I agreed to go to a shanty town with Nick Keller the next morning.”

Keller is the British founder of Beyond Sport, a nonprofit that seeks to use sport to tackle social problems.

JBL hard at work, with John Cena, during WrestleMania 21 in Los Angeles in 2005. Photograph: J Shearer/WireImage for BWR Public Relations

“You know how you get that phone call the next day and you think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve done something again, something stupid’? I told Nick, ‘I know I’ve promised you I will do something, whatever it was I will do it as long as it’s within reason.’”

The ensuing visit, to a programme seeking to use athletics to help children out of poverty, didn’t really work out: it was raining so no one was running. But just by talking to the organisers Layfield was converted to what he calls “the power of sport for good”. Back in Bermuda, where he lives most of the year, he looked for a sport and a cause.

He found them. Bermuda has a flourishing rugby scene but it is not just a comfortable home to the expat bankers and shipping insurers who typically play the game. It has impoverished areas and disadvantaged communities. Layfield cites a 2011 Columbia University study which found a 50% high-school dropout rate for black Bermudan males; according to the US state department, travelers on the island “should be conscious of the presence of gangs and illegal drug activity”.

Layfield thought rugby would be well-suited to helping keep young Bermudans in school and away from gangs, not despite of its often brutal nature but because of it. With help from the Bermudan rugby union and the Family Centre, a charity that manages the educational side of things, Beyond Rugby Bermuda was born.

“I had seen the ethos of rugby and I was very much an admirer,” Layfield says. “For us it’s a beautiful sport, what I guess what Pele called soccer in Brazil. It’s so simple, it’s easy to understand, you can play five on five or 15 on 15. I would be so much better coaching American football, but you need 22 on each side and all the equipment and everything. With rugby you just need a mouthpiece and grass.

“We have issues with gangs and with drugs in Bermuda but we want to attract the most hardcore kids. We want the gang leaders, because they’re going to be leaders either in a gang or on the rugby pitch. And we’ve had a lot of success.

“We have super-tough kids who grew up in super-tough environments and they enjoy getting out there and knocking each other around and having a piece of pizza and going home.”

Layfield at training on the field he mows and marks himself. Photograph: John Layfield

There are now “about 350” boys and girls “playing rugby every week”, out of every public school on the island and with “about 100 in a very intensive programme”. Every week, Layfield happily mows the grass and marks the lines. The players know him as “Coach JBL”.

‘We need to be able to keep up with these kids’

Layfield was speaking to the Guardian at a New York fundraiser for Memphis Inner-City Rugby, a programme from one of the most impoverished American cities. Mark Griffin, founder of New York-based Play Rugby USA, was also in attendance. “Sport for good” is spreading and Layfield is well placed to consider its future challenges.

“We’ve done a great job keeping kids in school,” he says. “The problem we have is that we get with the kids really well until they’re 18- or 19-years old. The integration with senior rugby has been a problem. It’s a real gap for us.

“I would like to create an island team and my partner Gareth Nokes, who has really saved youth rugby in Bermuda, has the idea that you create a team that is Under-23 and is just island kids, and then they go into a draft for the main teams. I think that would be very helpful.

“You know there’s not much similarity between a black kid who grows up in a disadvantaged area and a 36-year-old accountant that’s white and from the UK or New Zealand or whatever. It’s just tough for the integration process and we need that because we need to be able to keep up with these kids in later life.”

That future may also contain more visits from English pro teams, Layfield having brought Harlequins and Saracens over already. There may also be a stronger connection with the US: in his own words, Layfield is “part of the organisation that is going to bring professional rugby to New York, as part of Major League Rugby”.

To wilfully misuse Faulkner, though, Layfield’s past isn’t even past. He recently stepped down as a WWE commentator but as we speak wide-eyed New Yorkers constantly ask for selfies. He obliges, happy to apply his celebrity to his newfound cause. He also tells stories of his career in the ring, in all its surreality and swing. Most are very funny. Many are not printable. With care, one might be.

JBL gives his signature cowboy hat to a service member in Iraq. Photograph: Alamy

It’s about a USO tour in Iraq and it reads like something by Joseph Heller or an outtake from an update of Apocalypse Now or M*A*S*H. In his wrestling persona, at a combat base somewhere near Baghdad, JBL joined a prominent celebrity who is now – how shall we put this – soon to be a former senator. In front of a crowd of hardened fighting troops, the wrestler and the future politician performed a comedy sketch. The future senator was dressed as Saddam Hussein, Layfield says, and handcuffed. Then the base was mortared.

Everyone scattered to the nearest bunker, JBL and Celebrity Saddam skittering for their lives over sand. But the guy with the key went the other way. The shells rained down and the future senator dressed as Saddam lay face down in a concrete hole, handcuffed and terrified, scrabbling for cover in the dirt. Next to him lay JBL, cowboy hat askew, creased in hysterical laughter. Fortunately for all involved, the base was not overrun.

It’s a great story. The morning after telling it, perhaps through a slight hangover, Layfield is on an early flight to Bermuda. There’s grass to cut, lines to paint and rugby to coach and play.