WWE Hall Of Famer Booker T is the guest this week on Corey Graves’ “After The Bell” podcast.
Booker talked about ring psychology, his training school, the cancellation of WWE Backstage and several topics related to the current wrestling scene.
Here are some highlights:
What are some things you look for in your students that might make you think we can feed them to NXT: “It’s really about psychology. I watch a lot of the young guys today go out there and do it. They are awesome performers. They can go out and do anything under the sun as far as moves go, but, as far as psychology goes, they missed a whole lot of that because we lost a lot of carpenters along the way. For me, I try to teach the small things, the in between things. One thing about wrestlers, they want to go out and do every move. At the end of the day, fans still get that same feeling. If they can go out there and get into their head, from a psychology standpoint, Romeo and Juliette, Phantom of the Opera perspective, they could be awesome workers as well as working at the top of the card. That’s what they need to learn more than anything. They can go out and perform, but working at the top of the card is where your main goal should be because that’s where the money is at.”
Booker T talked about the cancellation of WWE Backstage: “I wanted to talk about independent wrestling. That’s what I really wanted to talk about. I knew it was called WWE Backstage but we could have talked about certain guys out there that were good enough to talk about that people knew that brought relevance to that product. I thought there was so much out there that we were missing from a newsworthy perspective. I thought doing something like that would have drawn more eyes on the show. My thing was I was always worried weekly just because the ratings were not what I wanted. With my star power and all the rest of the guys on the panel, our star power together, we should have had no less than 500,000 viewers per week. That should have been on the low number for us. For me, I don’t think there was enough thought going into something like that. I thought we have to get these numbers up. I thought stuff like that would intrigue not just the casual WWE viewer, but people that were thinking, what is this business truly all about.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit After The Bell with Corey Graves with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription
