Austin Aries Talks His WrestleMania 32 Experience, WWE Changing Their Philosophy After Samoa Joe
Recently, NXT's Austin Aries was a guest on ChicagolandSportsRadio.com's Fightclub Radio to address a number of topics including who he is looking forward to working with in NXT, his WrestleMania 32 experience and in-ring debut for NXT at NXT TakeOver: Dallas, and his short and long term goals in WWE.
According to Aries, he is looking forward to working with Samoa Joe, Finn Bálor, and many others while he is with NXT.
"Every time Samoa Joe and myself have stepped in the ring, we've always created a little bit of magic. I think one of those guys, kind of like Bobby [Roode] that I just kind of clicked with and Joe has always been a guy like that, even with Finn Bálor. We've just never crossed paths and I think from a stylistic standpoint, we match up pretty well to be a pretty exciting encounter. There's so much talent in NXT. There [are] a lot of guys down there, and girls down there, obviously, I'm not going to be wrestling them, but there's a lot of talent down there that hasn't even really come to the surface yet because you can only put so many people on television every week, so you've got guys like Rich Swann and Chris Girard. I just wrestled Manny Andrade on the house shows, live events, this last week and he's an amazing talent and he was formerly known as La Sombra down in Mexico and I think you'll be seeing him very soon."
'The Greatest Man That Ever Lived' called his WrestleMania 32 experience "mind-blowing" and went on to say that his NXT TakeOver debut was "special".
"To sum it up in a word, it's kind of mind-blowing and just taking it in from a perspective of seeing how big an entity WWE is and then how much work and thought it put into the presentation that they put out there. There [were] over 100,000 fans that convened in Dallas [Texas] for that week." Aries added, "the [NXT] TakeOver [Dallas] show was special. We had 10,000 fans in there and rabid fans, passionate fans. And from top to bottom, that card was phenomenal."
Although Aries claimed that he could have looked at his professional wrestling career as a success without a WWE run, he admitted that WWE is the pinnacle professional wrestling promotion in the world and the proving ground for the best.
"WWE is the biggest entity in professional wrestling and if you want to prove yourself to be one of the greatest or one of the best, then that's the only place you can do it. And so, there was a point in my career that I had to accept that it might not be in my cards as an active wrestler. Whether it was a timing thing, or things didn't match up, or what they were looking for at points when I was a free agent didn't quite match up, I had to be okay with that. It's just I was getting older. Honestly, man, in the last two years the landscape changed. Everything changed. When Samoa Joe came to NXT, it kind of blew the doors wide open and they kind of ushered in a new thought process [or] philosophy on guys who had made their own name for themselves in other places."
As for short term and long term goals, Aries said he would like to move up the ladder at NXT before eventually making his way to WWE's main roster.
"I think it's always good to have realistic short term goals and then lofty longer term goals. Right now, I'm just really focused on the job that I need to do in NXT. A big reason why they brought me in was to help that brand [and] have some name recognition now that we're touring outside of Florida. We're selling out 2,000+ seat arenas every time we go on the road, which is a big accomplishment for that brand. And so right now, my initial focus is I need to make my name in NXT. I need to go from, say, the second match on TakeOver to the main event. I mean, that's the short term goal. Looking long term, yeah, I'd love to be a part of WrestleMania 33, or 34, or 35. And if being called up to the main roster at some point makes sense and is in the cards, that would be another challenge I'd gladly accept."
Click here to check out the interview. If you use any of the quotes that appear in this article, please credit ChicagolandSportsRadio.com with an H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
Source: Fightclub Radio