By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Josh Alexander
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On becoming a free agent soon: “February 15th I’ll be a free agent. I mean, TNA announced they extended me, picked up a year extension on February 14th last year. So yeah, heading into free agency for the first time. [I’m] equal parts nervous, equal parts excited. Obviously, there’s the one end of the spectrum where you’re like nothing might come of this. You have to be realistic. I have kids, I have a wife, I have a house I pay for and stuff like that. I can just do wrestling because I love it, because that’s all I’ve ever really done. That’s what kind of what’s led me through this business the entire time, just getting fulfillment out of it is the most important part to me. As long as I get to do it at some level, I’m happy. I do indies, still to this day, get tons of fulfillment, very happy to do it. And that might be it. I might just be doing indies. Might be back doing construction to feed my family and stuff like that.
“But every so often you gotta bet on yourself. Five years ago it was Santana, one of my very good friends, and he was finishing up with TNA, at the time Impact Wrestling. We had an indie date, and he actually debuted the next night, but I didn’t know that. He never told me anything like that. So we’re just chilling out of the hotel. It’s just like, ‘What made you want to leave or really look at it as an option?’ Because he’s very happy at Impact, very successful, obviously. And he was like ‘We just didn’t know what more we could do. We’ve held these Tag Team Championships this many times. We’ve had this many amazing matches with this tag team and this tag team. It’s just like, every once in a while you got to think about what’s coming next and what’s going to excite you.’ Because he kind of alluded to the fact that he hadn’t been excited in quite some time. And I was just like, man, that really hits. Because now I’m thinking about my own thing. I’m just like, I’ve done so much in TNA over the six years. I’m very grateful for it because opportunities are the one thing wrestlers need, and TNA has given me tons of countless opportunities to prove myself and show what I can do, but I’ve also done everything and worked with the bulk of the talent that’s in that company right now. So it’s just all about what’s going to get me excited beyond this point?”
On what’s next: “I’m looking at everywhere right now. Both my sons are wrestling nuts, especially my six-year-old. So, Monday is Raw, Tuesday is NXT, Wednesday is Dynamite, Thursday is Impact. I’m watching everything with my kids all week long, which is awesome, because I get to share this passion with them. But at the same time I’m watching the product, looking at NXT being like, man me and Ethan [Page] could tag up and we can face that tag team, that’d be awesome. I’d really love to have a match with Pete Dunne or Gunther, the list goes on. Then you watch Dynamite, and I’m just like, man, I’ve torn it up with Will [Ospreay] and [Konosuke] Takeshita in the past, I would sure love to do that on a bigger stage. One bucket list thing I might have, a wrestler that’s still out there wrestling that I would really love to get a chance to wrestle is Edge. He’s in AEW, you know what I mean? And there’s Japan, Shingo [Takagi] is the one guy on my bucket list, this is doable, I’m gonna make this happen. Him and [Tomohiro] Ishii were neck and neck, and I made the Ishii match happen. Shingo is the other one. So I just look at the landscape of it, where I can go and where the talent is I want to work with everybody’s kind of stacked, roster-wise. To be able to tell stories and stuff like that with these people, the options are all open.”
On his short TNA World Title reign when Moose used the Call Your Shot trophy and beat him for the title: “I remember the phone conversation, and as I was speaking I was like Oh, this all sounds great. Yeah, no problem. Cool. All this stuff. And you hang up the phone, part of me was like damn, I really wish it wasn’t like this, because I think I can do some really good stuff, but I didn’t see the forest from the trees. On the flip side, it was you’re gonna main event against Christian at Bound For Glory and a year ago you were in a 4-way tag match. In a year span, you have gone from here to the main event, AEW, former WWE star, TNA legend for the World Championship, to be the wrestler who brings the TNA Championship back to this company. I was like absolutely, this is an opportunity again. I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a small part of me that was just like, man it’d be cool if you didn’t do the Moose thing and I could just show what I can do, because you never know if that’s going to come back. I didn’t know that I was going to go on to beat Moose at Rebellion six or seven months later. I’m sure management kind of had an idea to see how it would get over. But anything can happen in wrestling, I could have gotten hurt, Moose could have gotten hurt, and then that match would never have happened, or anything could have happened that didn’t make it transpire. But luckily, everything does happen for a reason, and we got there eventually. I remember the day I got to my hotel room and I checked Twitter. People are posting clips of the match and saying all these great things, and then they’re just hammering TNA for this terrible booking decision. ‘We’re back to the Vince Russo era’, all this stuff, and I’m just reading just like this is kind of nice, because I guess they wanted me to be champion.”
On being a Joe Hendry parody song: “No [I didn’t know what the song was about]. So I had been ripping apart Joe on Twitter pretty heavy, just trolling him, because I’m the wrestler’s wrestler guy, right? So I’m just like this guy’s the complete opposite of me. I’m just going to play into this and lean into it. So I’m making fun of him. He puts up a thing saying ‘NXT has been great, they have me down to the Performance Center training every day.’ I’m like, ‘You need more training dude!’ We go into that TVs, and it’s before the TVs. I go up to him and go ‘So what do you got?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know. I kind of looked at you, and I was just like, what do I really make fun of him about? There’s not much.’ And I go, ‘Oh, you’ll find something, dude, don’t worry.’ I watched it live, I didn’t want to know because I wanted to be out there reacting on the spot. With my promos and stuff like that, I find if it’s just very off the cuff, rather than predetermined and premeditated, I’m way better at delivery and stuff like that. It’s more natural. People enjoy it more. So I watched it live, and I’m just like, holding back like this son of a bitch. [You kept a straight face] Yeah, it was tough. I was biting my lip pretty hard, Kurt Angle from Wish, and that’s the line right there. Man, you can do the Walter White thing all day long. That’s fine. But the Kurt Angle from Wish thing, that was August and I am still hearing about it today, for better or worse.”
It’s a really bad sign that a wrestler is in a “major’ company for just 6 years and thinks, “man, I’m bored and there’s nothing more I can do here.”.