“Allow me to reintroduce myself …”
His name is Shane.
Shane Taylor.
The former ROH Television Champion recently appeared as a guest on the Knockouts and 3 Counts podcast for an interview promoting Saturday’s ROH Final Battle 2022 pay-per-view, where he is scheduled to team up with JD Griffey to take on the “Swerve in our Glory” duo of Shane “Swerve” Strickland and Keith Lee.
During the discussion, the pro wrestling veteran spoke about Saturday’s Ring Of Honor year-end special premium live event being a chance to reintroduce himself to the mass pro wrestling fan-base, calling it his “Jay-Z moment.”
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on this topic and others with his thoughts.
On how his appearance in AEW/ROH was just a matter of timing and doesn’t blame him for not bringing him on immediately: “This is the thing about wrestling. You can’t really blame them. They’re going with the best options that they feel they have available at the time when you have a situation like when ROH closed down, there was a bunch of releases from WWE as well. It’s this surge of talent that you didn’t expect to have fall into your lap, and you sift through however you can. You go with the best options that you feel as though you have available, as with any group, any company, any sport. You have a whole bunch of free agents that come in, you’re gonna go with the most notable first, and then work your way through the whole group. So it was a matter of timing, it was a matter of opportunity. It just so happens that it’s lining up right now. To sit here and think about what could have been, what should have been, makes nobody any difference. It doesn’t do anybody any good. It doesn’t make anybody any money.”
On his upcoming matchup at ROH Final Battle: “My job now is now that I have this, now that we’re in this tag team match, myself and JD Griffey against Swerve in Our Glory at Final Battle, my job now is to go out and do what everybody who’s been a fan of me for years knows that I can do, and to now show whoever doesn’t know who I am, like we said before, this is my Jay-Z moment. Allow me to reintroduce myself. Let me show you why I am Shane T, the baddest champion you’ve ever seen, the baddest of all time, why I am every bit the guy that I say I am.”
On how he’s excited to face Swerve and is interested to see how things play out with Lee: “Now for me, it’s like that team that traded you. You get to play them again, and you didn’t think that you were gonna get that chance. So now we’re here. Now we’re at a point to where we can get the matchup that people have been talking about for years, that nobody thought was actually gonna happen, and now we get to deliver that live on pay-per-view. So I’m incredibly excited. I’m incredibly motivated. I am looking forward to not only stepping in the ring with Keith, but stepping in there with a good friend of mine in JD Griffey and stepping in there for the first time with Swerve Strickland. For whatever reason, we’ve never competed against each other, so now we get to do that. There’s so many emotions in this match, there’s so much to draw from, there’s so many great stories to tell, and I’m excited, man. It’s an opportunity to open a lot of eyes and close any mouth that has anything to say.”
Check out the complete Shane Taylor interview from the Knockouts and 3 Counts podcast by visiting Apple.com. H/T to Fightful.com transcribing the above quotes.
