Ken Anderson, formerly known as Mr. Kennedy in WWE and Mr. Anderson in IMPACT Wrestling, recently appeared as a guest on The Kurt Angle Show podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, the pro wrestling veteran spoke about preparing Gable Steveson for his future in WWE.
“He’s really taken to it,” Anderson said. “He’s one of those guys, I remember, he took his first bump, and I told him, ‘Get up this way,’ and he got up the wrong way. Before I even said anything, he just went, ‘Oh–‘ reversed himself back down and did it almost perfectly the first time. People will often say that Kurt took to the business like nobody they’ve ever seen before, that he got it immediately, and you got not only the athletic side of things, but you got the showmanship, the storytelling, and the character stuff.”
Anderson continued, “I feel like Gable is on that path. He can do great things. He’s young. He’s very young, but he’s already a man. You know, he’s very young, but when I’m talking to him, he seems you’re talking to an old soul like he’s in his 30s.”
Also during the interview, Anderson spoke about being the trainer early in the careers of some familiar faces to modern wrestling fans, such as Top Flight and Julia Hart in AEW and Von Wagner and Tiffany Stratton in WWE NXT.
“[I trained Tiffany Stratton],” he said. “I did, yeah. For the first six months that she started. There’s a couple of other people in WWE, too. Von Wagner, Javier Bernal. There’s a couple. Then in AEW, Dante and Darius Martin was our first graduate actually at The Academy, Dante Martin, Julia Hart.”
Check out the complete interview at Apple.com. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.
