WWE stars LA Knight, Sami Zayn, and AJ Styles appeared on The Ringer Wrestling Show to talk about WrestleMania weekend. The interviews were conducted before the Styles-Knight fight at the media junket.
LA Knight on if it helped or hurt him between the time the audiences started cheering for him and when he started getting a bigger push in WWE:
“Yes and no because there was a lot of frustration in that time because I’m getting these big reactions and then there’s still weeks where it’s like, there’s nothing for you to do. I’m like, is anybody listening? Is anybody watching? There was all this hesitation and, you know, this might not be real. This might just be a fluke or anything like that. There was one time I blew up a year ago. We were in LA. It was SmackDown the night before WrestleMania. I was in an Andre the Giant Battle Royal and I had already been getting some pretty big reactions for the last probably three weeks to a month going into there, but now we were in LA and the place was all for me in that in that Battle Royal. I came to the back and just passed straight through Gorilla. I didn’t say anything to anybody. I wasn’t shaking hands. Nothing. I ran into one of the social media guys back there and he was like, ‘You’re over out there.’ I was so happy with the reaction that was out there but simultaneously pissed off because it was so big and I felt like nobody was listening. I got back there and when that guy said that, I was like ‘You better F’n tell somebody.’ I walked off and just started pacing the hallways like a tiger. I just went to the most empty part of the hallway I could find because I didn’t want to come up to anyone. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. This was April and so you know things didn’t really even still start to go anywhere until July. So it was just months and months of me just being like, I swear nobody is paying any damn attention. Nobody is listening to what’s happening every time I go out there. I don’t get it. I can remember even being at Money in the Bank and just saying like ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea. I want to do this and this and this’ and I remember somebody saying like, ‘Yeah, but you have to be over to do that’ and I’m like, ‘Are you not paying attention? How are you not noticing?’ Yeah, so I mean, we get to Money in the Bank, the reactions were nuts, and we move on from there. Finally, it’s like, okay, yeah, I guess we’re gonna have to do something with this. Finally, it starts moving in that direction.”
If he felt at the time WWE was waiting to long to give him the bigger push:
“I was also thinking like, you’re gonna make them wait so long that they’re gonna stop caring. I’m pulling the curtain back too much and people are probably gonna be hot. There was a point in time where I was like, alright, we’re gonna wait too long. I understand the idea of milking it and not giving people things too soon because if you do that, then you get the Superman treatment of, ‘Oh no. This is the handpicked guy’ and then they rebel against that.’ I definitely didn’t want to go too fast in that regard, either, but I’m also thinking, holy sh*t. We are really dragging our feet right now. We’re gonna lose them.'”
Sami Zayn talking about when Vince McMahon noticed he can be a good actor in wrestling:
“If I trace back the domino effect of all these good years, it really comes down to one time I was a guest referee. I wasn’t even working a match. I didn’t even have a promo, nothing. I was a guest referee for a match that I want to say was between Kevin Owens and Seth Rollins. I was Kevin’s friend and I was a bad guy. I was the guest referee. I was patting down Seth or something and I was doing some banter with them in the corner. I was like, ‘What have we got here? You got a knife on you somewhere’, just whatever, I’m not even thinking. Whatever it was, they took something out of that. They thought I was so funny. I didn’t think of it. They were just so entertained by whatever I was doing. I got more out of being a guest ref that night than probably the previous three years of wrestling on the main roster and having good matches and stuff like that. It was the first time that I think it really opened Vince’s eyes like, ‘Oh, this guy is not just a wrestler. There’s something else here.’ I think that’s what made them make the decision to put me alongside Nakamura or something like that for sure. All of a sudden when I’m doing that, I’m getting all this television time to just talk and flex my chops and stuff like that.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit The Ringer Wrestling Show with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. Quotes were transcribed by Jim for WrestlingNews.co.
