Sometimes criticism helps.
Nick Aldis knows this first hand.
The pro wrestling veteran recently appeared as a guest on the Hitting The Turnbuckle podcast for an in-depth interview, during which he recalled Billy Gunn once being critical of a bad performance he had, which he says is something that actually ended up helping him improve as a performer.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on this topic with his thoughts.
On recalling Billy Gunn being very critical of a bad performance he had, something that he appreciated because it helped him get better: “I was having this conversation with a couple of veterans the other day at Slammiversary actually, where I was like, ‘You know how many times in the early days of TNA, I would just have a rotten match. Just absolutely stink up the place on a house show and I come back and Billy Gunn, Bubba or I don’t know, Al Snow, anyone would be like, that was sh*t.’ Billy Gunn especially, would be like, ‘That was the drizzling sh*ts. You need to get better at this.’ Not in a mean-spirited way. As in like, you need to know this and he was right and it’s like… is that sort of happening anymore?”
On if veteran wrestlers are still being critical of younger talent, as he thinks it can help them grow both as wrestlers and as people: “Is anybody coming back when they had a sh*t match and being told that was sh*t? Because I don’t see it and I think that quality control is something that should be done in private in pro wrestling and I think there are a lot of people who are way too sensitive to be in this business who at the first sign of any sort of criticism, they run to Twitter to get everybody on their side and gaslight the other person. ‘Look, he’s being mean to me’ or they label it as a generational difference or they label it as a sort of — ‘they haven’t evolved’ and all this sort of thing and I just think back and I go, no, I absolutely needed that.”
Check out the complete interview at Spotify.com. H/T to POSTWrestling.com for transcribing the above quotes.
