Tommaso Ciampa recently appeared as a guest on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Ciampa commented on his original plans for teaming with Johnny Gargano:
“We pitched them weird stuff. We were like the Panda Express or something. Whatever we pitched, we kept going back to we just wanted a panda to be our mascot. When you think to the early DIY, we were just doing skits, glorious bombs. To us we’re like, we’re just a funny tag team. It was Jobelle Castro as far as I know who came up with DIY and hashtag DIY thing, but yeah, I mean, so easy to chant and got over super well. We’re talking currently about like because we don’t know if it’s going to become a thing on the main roster or not. I know people are hoping for it. You always have your fantasy booking and your own plans, but we’re doing a lot right now with the whole concept of DIY of like how to, because, with the main roster, you quickly realize there’s this whole other world of marketing and presentation and just a lot of stuff that for a guy like me specifically who is a ring the bell wrestler, I’ll do it in the ring, I’ll do it on the promos, they want a whole different thing, you know, on the main roster, which is great. It’s why the guys become global stars, but it’s just not who I am naturally. So like both of us have been, how do you make DIY something that is globally attractive and dream-inspired unify type of things? We’re doing a lot right now on our end hoping that if the time comes, we can present something to them, that’s like, okay, yeah, we can run with these guys, but who knows?”
The misconception that he didn’t want to go to the main roster:
“When we were in NXT, there’s this false, awful narrative that has now since been created that drives me crazy because people will look back at some of the NXT stuff and just be like, ‘Yeah, well, they didn’t want to go up’, or ‘They didn’t want to get called up’ or like, ‘They were scared of this.’ It’s like no. We were creating, like, that group of guys. NXT blew up when it came from like Sami Zayn and Claudio, Cesaro, to the Kevin stuff to Bayley and Sasha and then our group coming in with Finn and Shin and then into like Johnny and I and Undisputed. If you were in that room at that moment, you knew how special it was. It would be like going to ECW and saying, ‘Hey, Tommy Dreamer and Sandman and Raven, you guys don’t want to leave this place and go, you know, because WWE, that’s where the big stars are. Do you want to go do like WrestleMania? Yes, but I want to see if we can make this WrestleMania first. That’s literally what it was. It was like, can we get 10,000 people? Can we get a million-dollar gate? Can we do that multiple times? Can we get TakeOver to be equivalent to Mania? Can we do 20,000? Like our mindset was like, Oh, we’re gonna get TV now. How far can it go? It wasn’t like it was a weird us against them and it wasn’t like we don’t want to go there. It’s the same company, same umbrella. We’re not stupid. We know. We want to make this thing bigger than that.”
You can check out the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
