VIKTOR INTERVIEW w/ LOVE WRESTLING: HIGLIGHTS & LINKS
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Official Site: https://lovewrestling.ca/love-wrestling-interviews-viktor/
HIGHLIGHTS
Growing up on Stampede Wrestling (1:22)
“It was pretty huge, actually, I’d say. When I was a kid - I was born in Edmonton, but I was only there until I was about five. Five or six years old is when my parents moved, and we moved north to Grande Prairie, Alberta, a small town up north there. My neighbours were super into WWF wrestling at the time, so I learned about it right away. I was watching that Saturday mornings, and then Sunday afternoon, we’d get Stampede Wrestling all the time. I’d see such a huge difference in the two shows, but I really loved Stampede Wrestling. Then, one of my dad’s friends used to always go, because Stampede used to come up and travel to Grande Prairie, Alberta when I was a kid. I got to see a few shows live when I was very young. I can’t remember if I was in - I think grade two kind of thing was the first show I went to. Guys like Chris Benoit were on that show. I don’t think Owen was still working back-and-forth back back then, but there were all the Hart brothers. I remember seeing Bad Company there at the first show. Jason the Terrible, Davey Boy Smith at the time was there. It was all super influential on me. I was into wrestling from a very young age, and exposed to it very young.”
NXT Tag Team Championship Reign (13:37)
“It was very frustrating, honestly, but to say that is kind of pigeonholing it. Even to explain how the system was working, and how things fell into place. The one thing, it never felt how it looked to me and Konnor, that’s for sure, in comparison to how things came about on TV. Behind the scenes, we weren’t favourites by any means. Bill DeMott spent a lot of time pushing for us, and working with us. I don’t think we were favourites, and we never felt like we didn’t have something to prove every time we went out at the time. In retrospect, to me, that was really good, because I think I work really well under that pressure, unfortunately. Creatively, it just kind of went with however they wanted it to go. We would just kind of do what they wanted to do. Once they jumped on board with both me and Konnor being in Ascension, and everything started to roll - like, even the day we won the titles, the way it was presented to us was honestly terrible. There wasn’t anything nice about it that day, and to go into it is kind of a long story. It was kind of a thing of like, nobody believed in us. We were kind of given an ultimatum. But, like I said, I always felt like that ultimatum was always on the table, no matter what. By the time the end of that reign came about, and we started doing that stuff with Finn and KENTA, it was kind of a relief feeling, because by then there finally seemed to be some trust and faith in what we were capable of doing, and that type of thing. It was a big change in that aspect.”
“I remember being really tired a lot when I was working with them, because they had us doing a lot at the Performance Center as well. Mine and KENTA’s first match, he knocked himself out at the end, and he almost knocked me out at the same time. I can just kind of remember sitting in the back and being like ‘wow, I’m really tired.’ We’d probably spent all day at the Performance Center doing something that day too, I think. It was just really stressful. It was always really stressful, and you didn’t really feel the magnitude of how things appeared to the fans and stuff like that. It took a long time for any of that to set in. When it came to that ‘holy crap, we’ve been champions almost a year,’ it didn’t feel like that was something we were working towards. The fact that it’s still there now is just kind of funny to me. I’ve said this in the past, but WWE’s never taken the time to invest in somebody the way that they actually took
time to invest in all of us at that point in NXT. Unfortunately, Vince screwed up with just about everybody that had evolved in that way, because he thought it needed to be presented differently on WWE for some reason. I always use Randy Orton as probably one of the best examples, or even Cena. You watch what they started as on WWE, and not that Randy Orton has been somebody different than Randy Orton, but he’s still had a hell of an evolution in 25, 30 years or something now. John, when he started, he didn’t come in as what they have now, or what we’ve had for the last decade. NXT was supposed to be all about finding our steps to be able to get up that next step. It kind of got screwed up with Vince, or as far as I know, Vince being like ‘okay, I think I get this, but let’s have this department we just suddenly created called Creative Services come up with something for these guys and change things,’ and it just didn’t work. The evolution wasn’t something that any one of the talents had anything to do with, whereas in NXT they kind of did. For us, in NXT, it was one of those things where you kind of just understand, I guess. That’s just the best way to put it. When the writers have an idea, they’re like ‘we understand who you guys are,’ so we don’t have to say ‘oh, we’ve got this great idea for you guys to be like this’. They will just say ‘this is how we’re going to shoot this, and this works like this, okay? Cool’. It’s a no-brainer, because we’ve already evolved to that point. They evolve with you, that takes that time. That jump to the [main] roster, at that time, was suddenly throwing on ‘hey, this team that hasn’t worked with this team before, just make up something for them for when they come up here, and we’ll see what we can do’. It was kind of what happened with a lot of people. Instead of just being like ‘here’s what you already know,’ they thought fans weren’t watching the same show.”