Jade Cargill recently appeared as a guest on the "Excuse Me" podcast with Vickie Guerrero for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling
During the discussion, the TBS Women's Champion spoke about her AEW television debut promo being a case of "baptism by fire."
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where she touches on this topic with her thoughts.
On her AEW debut promo on Cody Rhodes: "I was lost [when I first arrived to AEW and began my first feud]. I was lost, I knew I was in over my head, I was nervous. I remember I practiced with everybody, Brandi [Rhodes] had to pull me off to the side and tell me like, ‘Calm down. It’s okay’ because I’m just being thrown with people who are on TV who know what to do, who’ve had years of experience and here I am, ‘Hello. Hi everybody.’ You know, even with my first promo that I cut, I didn’t rehearse that in front of anybody. Nobody… nothing. I got on stage one time, that was to make sure my heels didn’t puncture the mat. That’s it, that’s it. I never once held the mic, I never once — legit, when I held the mic for the first time when I said, ‘Cody’, in my mind, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I sound so awful’ when I said that because I had never held a mic, I had never — I’ve done press conferences before in college, I’ve taken a class. I’ve done that but, national TV is something you should prepare for and national TV is a whole other monster, you know? This is live, you know? I think — honestly, I was just proud of myself that, one, I didn’t stop. Two, I didn’t just pause and stare into the camera and like lose myself. I was proud of myself because of that more than anything because I think anybody else would have probably stopped, paused, got nervous, start stuttering, everything and I didn’t stutter, I didn’t stumble over my words. Regardless of how slow I was going, I was just happy I completed it but yes, I felt like I was very much baptized by fire, but, I’m always up for a challenge and I think it’s making me become the person who I am and in wrestling, as we know, things are always thrown at you last minute. Anything can happen so it’s prepared me for the uncertainty of what wrestling is."
On the women in the AEW locker room being inviting and helpful when she first joined the company: "I felt like the locker room was very inviting [when I first came to AEW]. They didn’t have to be, nobody didn’t have to be inviting, especially you Vickie [Guerrero]. Nobody had to be inviting because who am I? You know? Who was I? Where did I come from? I didn’t know not one single person from the locker room at all and the majority of girls, even the extras that come in, they at least know somebody from the indie circuit and I didn’t know anybody but again, everybody in the locker room was so inviting. If I didn’t do anything, they sat there and they spoke to me about it because I was very naïve to a lot of things coming into wrestling. I didn’t even know the lingo of wrestling at all and I’m still learning the lingo."
H/T to and transcribed by Post Wrestling)
