Baron Corbin recently spoke with Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, “The Lone Wolf” revealed how his return to NXT came about, and how he has the freedom to reinvent himself and work with younger up-and-coming talents on the brand.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On having the freedom to reinvent himself in NXT: “I think that’s something I’ve always had as well. They put me in the ring with Kurt Angle. They put me in with Cena. They put me in with The Rock because they trust what I can do. They know whatever I do, it’s going to be 110%. So the free agent [status], same thing. I was like, ‘What is this? What does this mean? Am I out of a job? What are we doing?’ They were like, ‘No, we just don’t know what story we want to put you in yet, so we don’t want to pigeonhole you and have you on Raw or Smackdown. That was kind of the way it was originally told me. ‘We want you to be able to float because when we figure it out —’ because the character was coming off the JBL stuff, it wasn’t working, obviously. So it was like, ‘Okay, well, what are we doing?’ It kind of came up at Draft time, and they did that. So then I was asked, ‘Hey, would you be interested in going to NXT and working?’ I said, ‘ Absolutely.’ It’s an hour and a half up the road from me. I’ll be able to go do the show, go home, and get my bed. So when they presented it to me, I just saw it as an opportunity. I didn’t know what the opportunity was, but when I went down there, Shawn [Michaels] is going, ‘Hey, what do you want this to be?’ I go, ‘Well, here’s what I would love to do. I would love to not be on Raw or Smackdown.’ Because I was also working at Cameron Grimes at the time on SmackDown, so I was doing NXT and Smackdown. I said, ‘I would love to just be here, and let’s redo my character. Let’s let me tell you what I think I am.’ He’s like, ‘I love that. Let’s do you. You have full control, essentially, on what you want to do, and they keep me in parameters, obviously, but they’re letting me just kind of reinvent myself as me, and I think we’re presenting a really cool thing to the fans in NXT.”
On the benefits of working with younger talent in NXT: “It’s also elevating those guys, you know? It gave Ilja [Dragunov] a guy to work with from the main roster. Trick [Williams], who I think is an amazing superstar with Carmelo [Hayes], and they, think, are going to try to do their own thing a little bit, and then Melo. I want to bring them to that next level. I think going and working with them. They understand there’s a different speed, a different way, a different crispness. There’s a different promo with the main roster to NXT. When you can go down and do that, and they feel it because they’re not going to know until they experience it. If you take a guy from NXT and you just drop them into the main roster, it’s like sink-or-swim, like, are they gonna make it? But if they’ve worked with three or four proven Superstars, they know they can transition.”
Check out the complete interview via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.
