By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Bobby Fish
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
Video available at Chris Van Vliet’s YouTube Page
On AEW: “Man, they’re hitting home runs there. When you’re making contact with almost every pitch, it’s just a good time for them right now. Opportunity is what it is, it’s opportunity. And you’re either going to do something successful with it or you’re going to fall on your face and learn from that mistake.”
On his MLW debut: “I’m excited. It’s an interesting place to get out there on the indie scene and kind of doing this thing freehand. When you spend a good amount of time in this business, you experience… Every place is different. No place is better or worse, just different. It’s certainly different getting back into the swing of things with where I am now and in a place like MLW.”
On becoming a singles competitor again: “I think it’s like, you get your bearings, you’ve got to give yourself that time. But I think when you have done it for this long, transitioning between the two, I don’t want to say it is easy, but you know it’s going to happen. You just have to be patient with it sometimes. They both have pros and cons to them, just like anything else. But towards the end of our Ring of Honor run, Kyle [O’Reilly] and I stopped tagging, I did mostly singles. Then transitioning to NXT, it turned into a couple of years of mostly tagging. I don’t know how to categorize the tail end of my run, but now I am back to kind of a singles route, and I am happy about it.”
On his time in NXT: “As a whole, I would say that it was one of the highlights of my career. Obviously the Tokyo Dome and New Japan stuff were highlights as well, I don’t rank things above or below necessarily. But debuting in the Barclays Center, standing next to two of my best friends, and getting that reaction that is now somewhat estranged to us, because of the lack of crowds recently. There’s all that, and as a whole, I think when we found out that it was going to be Adam [Cole], Kyle and I, that was NXT’s idea. It felt like we were just waiting for someone to come into the room and go ‘Ah! We were just screwing with you.'”
On The Undisputed Era: “From that point all the way to when they added Roderick Strong, who at the time if they had suggested anyone other than Roddy, we would have been unsure. It was just kind of serendipitous in it being four legitimate close friends. It made it feel like we were not going to work. Even when we were running hard and we were the workhorses of NXT. I will say wholeheartedly and with confidence, we loved it, because it was what we went there to be, and it wasn’t hard. You were just hanging out with your buddies and it didn’t seem real.”
On possibly ending his career in NXT: “I mean, I was just trying to be present with it and not think too far ahead. There was definitely a time in my career where I thought the standards required in WWE would have ruled me out at that point. Let me put it this way, I am far from the prototype. And at that point in my life, even further from the prototype. So to get the opportunity that I got, for Triple H and Shawn Michaels to roll the dice on us and give us an opportunity to end up in this great group that was compared to DX and The Horsemen. It doesn’t get any more humbling.”
On the WWE release: “It was a phone call, the same one that everybody gets. It’s just that it is what it is. The beauty of it is that now there are all of these opportunities, and it’s about figuring out what ones are worth taking and see where it goes.”
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