MLW’s Restart is coming up this week and they have their stars out promoting the big return of MLW Fusion. One of those is MLW’s National Openweight Champion, Alexander Hammerstone.
The 29-year old has been one of the bigger homegrown stars of the promotion as part of their Dynasty faction with Richard Holiday and formerly MJF and was the company’s first Openweight Champion and has kept it since defeating Brian Pillman Jr. in the finals of the tournament.
However there was a possibility this never would have happened if he had given up on his dream, something he almost did and he discussed that with Chris Van Vliet. After a third tryout with the WWE, things seemed to not go the way he had been expecting.
“It ended up being like ‘Hey, well I think we want to bring you in. We’re going to start the hiring process’. And I remember, I was on the toilet at work when I read that email and I had to read it four times over and then I started crying because I was like ‘Holy crap! Dream come true! It’s happening.’ And then I literally burst out of the bathroom and knocked on my boss’s office. It was just like an involuntary reaction, I was like ‘Jeff, read this!’ and he was like ‘Oh my God!’ and he legitimately called a staff meeting to tell everybody what had just happened and everyone congratulated me. This was probably the end of November, 2017. The conversation with WWE was basically like be ready to move out to Florida by May or maybe June. So I start getting all of my duck in a row to move and we’re going through a couple of steps like sending in all of my paperwork and doing my background check. The next step is my whole medical test and it’s not happening, it’s not happening, it’s not happening. And then I start pestering them to see what’s going on. Then in April, and keep in mind in my head I’m moving there in May, so in April they say ‘Sorry to inform you but we’re just way too full right now, we hired too many people this year and we can’t bring you in’. And it doesn’t say like ‘Give us three months’ or ‘Give us this’ it just says ‘We can’t bring you in’. And that was it. And I was like what? And for the next couple of months someone every once in a while would be like ‘Hey, when are you going to Florida?’ and I’d have to explain the whole thing to them. I had to explain this so many times and every time it was like a punch in the gut, you know? So it was rough, man. It was a rough time and literally that experience almost made me quit wrestling. I was very close.”
Hammerstone didn’t give up on his dream and now here he is. You can watch the remainder of the interview below.
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