During his recent appearance on NWA Extra , the NWA's own Aron Stevens shared his thoughts on the current state of pro wrestling training. Check out the highlights below.
On the "perverted system of professional wrestling":
“People are teaching a perverted system of professional wrestling, or a perverted version of what pro wrestling is, in my opinion. There’s, in some many positive ways, the athleticism is through the roof, and there are so many talented people. You can’t debate, like this era there are more athletic men and women in the industry than at any other time, and things are great. But I think with society, our attention span collectively is getting shorter. 20 years ago, you had to sit and watch Monday Night Raw and watch Nitro. Now, you see things on a little 15-second Instagram clip, like someone going and falling down the stairs on a skateboard and lighting themselves on fire, or a wrestling thing where a guy goes through a table or does a cool move and stuff. What’s missing in my opinion is the investment in the characters. At a wrestling school, you can learn how to bump, you can learn the moves, and that’s great. But to truly be good at this in my opinion, and when I say good, I mean, look, if you get a push, it’s one thing. If you are friends with the right people or the right person likes you, you’ll get a push, and a push is great. But when the push goes away, a lot of talent do not know how to sustain themselves.”
On being a versatile performer:
“People have criticized me like, ‘Oh, you’ve gone comedy and this and that.’ Well yeah, because you know what? When you’re in the spot you’re in, sometimes you have to do what you have to do to stay relevant. I would have much rather had the career I’ve had and be a featured performer, and one of the things about me that you can never say, the office never had to repackage me. If you look at me, like my last run in the WWE, from the time I came in to the time I left, my character followed a linear pattern. They never had to repackage me or do vignettes because something wasn’t working. I went from being a smart guy to wrestling the invisible man to dressing as Randy Savage and all the other crazy stuff, but what it was was a belief in myself that no matter what, I can come out of any situation and get the crowd to be emotionally invested. All kinds of people do it, right. Like Santino was comedy, I was comedy. I was serious in the beginning. I went through the whole spectrum. Brock Lesnar does it by being Brock Lesnar. The top guys, they do that, and it shows. I think no better example, Paul Heyman, who has continually kept himself relevant. That in my opinion is what’s missing. Some of the kids we talk to today, they don’t know what this is. They have no idea.”
