By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Tyler Breeze
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On his role in WWE: “I work for ‘Up Up, Down, Down’. So
Up, Up, Down, Down’ obviously, as you know, WWE’s YouTube channel, strictly for gaming, myself and [Xavier] Woods are on there. We just kind of get into all sorts of stuff. There’s not really like, you can say gaming, but like we just did ‘Up Up Down Down Summer Games’ for example. And it was basically just a bunch of people having fun and you know, running around like they’re kids again. And that’s work. That’s work.”
Advice for aspiring wrestlers: “Please prepare. This is, so me and [Shawn] Spears have, once you start coaching people, you kind of end up in like these endless loops of the same thing. We’re going on four-plus years now. And we’re, it’s funny because we’re gonna let the secret out. And then we’re all of a sudden, we’re gonna break the streak. We probably won’t, because this is just how people are. So we tell them day one, again, when you come in, we give you the talk of what you’re getting into. And we go, just so you know, we will be doing promos. Please prepare a promo. That doesn’t mean sit in your, you know, apartment, car, whatever and think about a promo.
“This means pull out your phone, because everybody has one, film yourself doing it. And then watch it back and do it again and write the promo out and actually prepare and try to do this. Again, we’re not doing it off the top of our heads. We’re not just feeling it, we’re not doing that. We are preparing it and then doing it to the best of your ability when it comes time. We can’t stress that enough. Every time that we get to promos, we go did you prepare that? And they go? No. We go, Why? Well, you know, I thought about it a couple of times. Hmm, cool, man. Like it just doesn’t compute in my head of like, why am I begging you to prepare for what you told me you want to do so badly? It doesn’t add up to us.”
On his early years in WWE developmental: “I felt like [my days] were numbered, like every week. It was a crazy time. And again, it’s just it’s just how it is. It was 2010. And it’s a way different time. This was pre-NXT, FCW was still kind of like you’re a part of WWE but WWE is here and FCW is like over there. It’s like around the corner and like you don’t really see it. But you’re there and again even just looking at the hiring cycles that they do, so when I came in, it was right at the end of like, where they wanted everybody to be really big and really jacked. So me obviously, I’ve never been a gigantic guy. So I got hired and it came in and I went, oh my god, like, there’s no way I’m gonna last here because these guys are huge. And like, how am I supposed to compete with this? But you’re hired for a reason.
“And all of a sudden, you see those people and they’re kind of going and they drop off here, or they go up or they do whatever they’re doing. And now all of a sudden, they started to hire a lot of people who knew how to wrestle and they wanted to wrestle. And that was when all of a sudden you see Cesaro come in. And, you know, Bryan Danielson has come in, [Jon] Moxley, and Seth [Rollins] and all those guys, that kind of, you know, got away from that, that look or more into the work kind of hiring site. Again, same thing, like you’ll see that lasts for a while, and then all of a sudden, they go, man, we should probably get some big guys in here. And all of a sudden they’re back in you know, I mean, and I saw that cycle go a bunch of times.
“So when that happened, again, you just kind of have to be realistic with yourself and not live in the delusion of like, I’m here. I’m safe. Like you’re never safe, you’re never safe. And the second that you think you are, you’re out. So you have to be proactive to where I made sure that I was building connections. And again, a lot of this was just imprinted on me by Lance [Storm]. He was the one who out kind of said, Hey, man, like when you’re there, this is when the work starts. This is when you need advocates in those meetings that you’re never going to be in. You need people to speak up for you if they go I don’t know, I don’t really see it with this guy. You need someone to go, I do. Or hey, just give him a chance or hey, he actually had this. Otherwise, that’s the new perception of you. Like someone says it and if nobody shoots it down, that’s you.”
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