Seth Rollins recently spoke to E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness. Among other topics of discussion, he talked about his chemistry with Dean Ambrose, how WWE wanted to split up the Shield earlier.
On his chemistry with Dean Ambrose:
Our careers sort of paralleled each other in the sense that we both came up around the same time. We’re about the same age – like six months apart. We worked in a bunch of similar places, just never at the same time on the independents. I remember that we were in developmental and it was kind of an interesting situation. We got down there and they weren’t hiring guys from the indies that much. They were hiring ex-football players, or ex-athletes, or Jerry Brisco recruits, or body builders, or just these big guy that were not necessarily athletic and didn’t really understand or appreciate what we we do. I was one of the first guys to come after that phase. I was there and I felt kind of alone and after the first year they hired Joey Mercury on as a producer and Joey was like, ‘We’ve got to fix this. We’ve got to change this. This culture down here sucks and we’ve got to bring in guys who are passionate about the business. That’s how we get better.’
One of the first people he reached out to me about, to ask if I had any opinion on him was Ambrose. He had seen his promos on YouTube and Ambrose – if you go back and watch some of Ambrose’s promos, as Jon Moxley on YouTube, they are just captivating. He had kind of a Joker-esque thing to him, a Heath Ledger thing to him. They were so raw and guttural and his voice was one of those where you couldn’t not listen to him. I was like, ‘Yeah, dude. I met him once or twice and he’s great. He’s a full sized human being. He’s not 5’2” or whatever….give him a shot. Let’s do it.’”
When Joey brought him in and he got hired, we started working together and you’d think we were in the womb wrestling together. It was so easy and so perfect. It was like one of my wrestling soul mates. You know how it is. Sometimes you get in there and it’s like pulling teeth with somebody and you’re like, ‘This sucks.’ Sometimes you get in there and it’s like, ‘Holy crap! That’s what it’s supposed to feel like.’
We were having matches down in Florida that nobody down in FCW were even capable of. That’s not a nock on them, but we were so ahead of the curve, as far as what we were doing. We started to get a lot of attention from sort of the internet fans because of what we had done before and this was the first time they were gonna get to see Tyler Black vs John Moxley work together and it was so good that people couldn’t help but notice.
On WWE wanting to split up the Shield earlier:
That [split] was not our idea and we were not ready for that. We had just done the heel stuff and we came off this program with Punk where it was like Punk against The Shield. We did this 3 on 1 handicap match at TLC and we lost to him. They were ready to split us up then within the next month. That was the plan. We were gonna break up, and Ambrose was gonna turn, and it was gonna be like almost thrown away. I remember we went to Hunter, or Vince, or somebody that makes decisions and were like, ‘Listen, we can’t do this. This is not the right time. We’ve got so much more to offer. This is not the right time. We need to pull back on this a little bit.’
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h/t to Wrestle Zone for the transcription.
