WWE Hall of Famer Edge and Former WWE Superstar Christian recently interviewed New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) Star and Internationally Decorated Pro Wrestler Kenny Omega on their podcast E&C’s Pod Of Awesomeness. Below the highlights from the interview:
On problems with WWE’s old developmental territory Deep South Wrestling: “Even coming in to going to developmental, my end goal and the place I always wanted to be was Japan still, so I went into developmental wishing I could be in Japan or at least having experienced that first. Looking back at it now, maybe I wasn’t mature enough or I couldn’t… I mean, I loved wrestling and it was such a passion of mine to… and I mean the artistic and creative part of wrestling and actually the act of doing it. I didn’t love the business part of it, if that makes sense.”
On feeling like his attempts to showcase his personality was sabotaged: “I felt like any attempt to show my personality was sabotaged in a way a little bit. I would have a move, for example, and then, I’d have somebody tell me exactly why it makes no sense, but really, nothing makes sense. It’s so easy to say that. So I was kind of mindf*cked a little bit and I started to, not lose confidence in myself, but just kind of lose confidence in the system.”
On the reason why he decided to leave WWE’s developmental system: “I wrote some stuff out and I didn’t hear anything back. They didn’t even go, ‘that sucked’ or ‘it was okay’. I heard just nothing and at that point I thought, ‘wow, there really is no light at the end of this tunnel and I really don’t want to be this guy that is miserable sitting on the sidelines wishing he could contribute more.’ And so I thought I still have this faith deep in myself. I do believe there’s something more I can do. So I just wanted to show WWE that I could be someone that could make wrestling a lot of money and be a major player as myself, and I understand at that point in time the broken down 170-pound [version of] Kenny Omega was worthless, so what I wanted to do was build myself back up from the bottom again, actually refined that confidence that I once had, go back to the drawing board and come up with something to make me me, and head back at it.”
You can listen to the entire episode of E&C’s Pod Of Awesomeness featuring the interview of Kenny Omega at Stitcher.com.