Former WWE star Adam Scherr (Braun Strowman) did his first post-WWE interview with the Control Your Narrative YouTube channel and talked about his issues with certain fans on the internet:
“When I started hating myself and realizing I wasn’t happy [is when I knew I needed to leave WWE]. And a lot of it boils down to just what I mentioned earlier about having to be on all the time. And the criticism from the f**king fans, and it’s not even the fans, the fans aren’t the ones. It’s the dorks on the internet that opinion and couch cushion book shows, and do all this stuff, and just non-stop talk s**t about what we’re trying to do. I didn’t see any of you guys getting cast and thrown into the deep end of the pool, you know, in the middle of a pandemic when the whole world is in a frenzy not knowing what was going on.
I jumped on a jet and flew back. I had no idea they were putting me over to beat Goldberg. I came back because people need an outlet, people need a way to check out from reality, and by me going to work and me being selfless and putting my health, my risk on the line while not knowing what was going on – I knew in the back of my mind, yeah, I’m not going to make everybody happy. You can’t make everybody happy, but there are people sitting at home that are scared, they don’t know what’s going on in the world and if I can take them out of that reality for three minutes while I’m out there wrestling, then I did my job. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. People watch wrestling to get caught up in it and forget about the bulls**t that’s going on in their lives. And having to listen, and hear, and read all this crap about this sucks, and this, and blah, blah, blah.”
Strowman also brought up the swamp fight with Bray Wyatt from the 2020 Extreme Rules PPV:
“Like, I would love to see any of you get handed a f**king 1500 word script on a piece of paper, get 15 minutes to 30 minutes to try to memorize it, then go out and do it on live television in front of no one. You can hear your heartbeat standing out there, and it was just – that’s when it got to the point where like, I don’t know. And I know that’s part of what comes along with all this stuff, but just the non-stop negativity that there is in the wrestling community, it’s so toxic. And it made me hate going to work, it made me hate this stuff.
And I know I shouldn’t read this stuff, I know I shouldn’t care but I do because I care about my work. I care about what/how I’m projected. I want to be the best at everything I do and it’s a fault at times, but it’s like the fact of listening to these guys bury and just crap all over the match – the cinematic match with Bray Wyatt. They say it’s the worst match of the year, the worst they had ever seen, this, this, and this. People don’t have a clue what went into doing that! I worked for 28 hours straight trying to get this out to our fans, get a product out to try to get people to take their mind off what’s going on in the world. I went to work the next day after filming it and wrestled on television. I got home that night at like, 12 o’ clock at night, and was taking a shower and collapsed in my house. I had to get an ambulance come get me from my house because I collapsed from dehydration. I went into full-body cramps.”
