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August Wrasslin |OT| The Sunday of Summer

S

Sweeney Tom

Banned
Rey interview

Triplemania XXIII will be the first AAA pay-per-view shown in America since your breakout at When Worlds Collide more than 20 years ago. Does it feel like your career has come full circle?

Rey: It does. It almost feels surreal. It's something that I would imagine AAA would have always wanted, and now that it's taking place, I haven't been able to talk to the rest of the locker room about it, but I'm extremely excited. This is a very big step to promoting AAA worldwide.

You left WWE about five months ago. What have these past five months been like for you?

R: I don't regret any steps that I take in life. This is something that I've been looking forward to for a while. I really wanted to have some time off, without feeling any sort of commitment to be on a certain schedule. Now, I'm doing things my way, under my terms. I'm dictating my pace towards retirement. I'm not on the grind. I was constantly competing. This is a good thing for me. This is something that my wife and I thought would be best for my body and for myself. I get to be a husband and a father again. I get to enjoy time with my kids now. I was a workaholic for so many years. I've missed so many birthdays and anniversaries. Now that my kids are a bit older, I want to be around and I want to enjoy it. I want to send my kids off to college if that's what they want to do. I want to do all the family things I've missed over the years.

Would you say that was the biggest reason you left WWE?

R: Family was the biggest reason. If anything, I'll probably do appearances. I'm not trying to stay busy. I'm trying to enjoy my time at home and be around my kids. I want to vacation. I'm a big family guy. I want to do more with them. That was the primary reason that I stepped away. Opportunities are starting to arise. After 15 years, I didn't know what was out there. I had been wrestling with WWE all that time and wasn't focusing on anything outside of that. I'm realizing that there's a lot of opportunities there. The question is just whether I want to take them.

Looking back on your WWE career, is there anything you wished you had accomplished?

R: No, I accomplished so much that I never thought I'd be able to accomplish. Of course, I won the World Heavyweight title. I enjoyed being there, and getting to wrestle the people that I wrestled. I cherish every moment that I was there. When I wrestled Shawn Michaels for the first time, my first match with The Undertaker – I never thought I'd be in that position. I've done more than I could have ever imagined. I'm blessed that I've had the career that I have.

You've wrestled with such a high-energy, high-impact style throughout your career, and you've had your share of injures. People wonder just how much you have left. What do you say to them?

R: It's really hard for me to answer that. A year ago or so, I probably would have said that I didn't have more than three years left. After being at home for some time, and being able to train and rehab and strengthen my quads, I really feel rejuvenated. I feel great physically. I think that sometimes, you just have to give your body time to heal. Sometimes wrestlers are stubborn about doing that; we're on the road constantly. I think this rest has extended my career another couple years. At the pace I'm going right now, I'm not on the road four days a week, [and] that definitely helps heal all my injuries even more. I will leave my career up to God, but I definitely think I can go longer than I would've expected a couple years ago.
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E

Etrian Oddity

Member
NXT is coming to Austin and tickets are the same price as Raw. XD

Raw isn't on the tour dates right now tho. :( Maybe for October, but then again they'll probly be cycling out of their Texas tour by then.
 
D

Downhome

Member
VastOrnateAmethystsunbird.gif
 
S

Sweeney Tom

Banned
From Bryan's book

We had an interesting dynamic because Miz was everything I wasn’t. He was good on the microphone and carried himself like a star. We both thought the concept of Miz—this arrogant, overbearing Hollywood egotist—trying to turn a bland independent wrestler into a WWE Superstar would be a great story to tell. I even tried to make myself look more generic to fit in. I cut both my beard and my longer hair and avoided using my nicely designed ring gear, instead wearing plain maroon trunks and gear. As it turned out, WWE decided not to leverage any of that detail in the story, and I just made myself look uninteresting. Chalk that up as a lesson learned.

Initially I felt lucky to have that entertaining contrast with my Pro, but I was also fortunate that Miz actually wanted to be there participating in NXT because, when we came in, most of the other Pros didn’t. At the time, WWE Superstars didn’t typically work on both Monday (Raw) and Tuesday (SmackDown). You were typically on one or the other, not both. The selected Pros who were used to going home on Tuesday after Raw were pissed because they had to spend an extra day on the road, and the ones who were there for Tuesday night’s show were already aggravated because it took them away from focusing on their own segments for SmackDown.

The Miz didn’t complain at all. Instead, he saw it as an opportunity and spent time with me to find ways we could make our partnership stand out. He genuinely wanted what we did to be good. The more I saw how hard he worked, the more I respected him. I also learned a lot from him on how to navigate the political waters in WWE. He’s also somewhat of a perfectionist; if he wasn’t content with what we were doing, he would talk to as many people as he could to get it changed. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes he wasn’t. But watching him handle it all was really helpful in familiarizing myself with the world of WWE.

Although he didn’t have as much wrestling experience as I did, I recognized all that he had been through. He was mildly famous for being on MTV’s The Real World, which helped him get signed with WWE, but hurt his reputation among fans and wrestlers alike. When he first started, Miz went through a period where he was almost exclusively relegated to hosting various WWE segments like the Diva Search. Backstage, he was kicked out of the locker room because, supposedly, he accidentally spilled crumbs over someone’s bags and didn’t clean it up. His gear was literally thrown out into the hallway, and he wasn’t allowed to change in the locker room for months. Despite all this, he didn’t quit or give up. Even though there was a portion of the locker room that still felt he didn’t belong, Miz’s hard work and ability to get under the crowd’s skin was making the right people take notice, and by 2010, he was really on the rise.
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R

Raw64life

Member
Eanan said:
Is Paige as big a pain in the arse in real life or is she hamming it up on this show?
Click to expand...

It's painfully obvious that Vince and Kevin Dunn just tell Paige "You're British and judging a reality show. Simon Cowell is British and judges reality shows. Act like Simon Cowell."
 
S

serenewarfare

Banned
The entirety of Tough Talk was just Bryan being done with this bullshit. You could just see it in his face. Paige saving GiGi sent him over the edge.
 
D

Data West

coaches in the WNBA
Inafune is too successful at it to be a carny. Eventually you evolve from carny to businessman if you do enough deals.
 
S

Snowman Prophet of Doom

Member
I miss Sami Zayn. Moreover, I regret that he has to go up to the main roster when he gets back, because we've seen that HHH is obviously unable to protect "his guys" from Vince and Dunn's backward-looking prejudices, so he'll prob be hung out to dry, like Neville and (seemingly) Owens.
 
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