Wrestler

Just sitting in a steam room, you can't breathe. When you're doing Hindu squats in one and you get past 100, your whole body feels numb and you keep going. You start to find your limits and push your body past those limits, making new ones.

If you take a look back at my body of work in the ring, I'm so happy that I had that NXT run... It sucks that my in-ring career came to an end, but I'm glad that I had that full-year body of work.

The respect from your peers - I don't know if it's because I grew up in the business, I don't know if that's why - but to me, that became the biggest thing.

I lost feeling for about five seconds. Everything. Head to toe. Times ten. You just sit there in no control. I was in no control, I was at a higher power's mercy. You're just sitting there, all of a sudden your body feels like it weighs like two million pounds.

The main thing is that everything is taped at Full Sail. It is kind of like competing on home turf every time in terms of the tapings and specials. The main roster travels, I am in Hartford for live Smackdown, then head to Edmonton and Calgary and Denver. It is travel travel travel. NXT is more stationary.

There's an unwritten protocol when you hurt somebody. And when I say you hurt somebody, obviously it's not on purpose, but it still happens. I know I've rocked guys before where I checked on them after to make sure everything's cool.

You know, if you read a book, once you get to chapter five and stuff starts stepping up, it doesn't mean chapters one to four didn't happen. They happened, but now we're on the next chapter, and that's how I'd like to be perceived.

My tryout match for WWE was against Kofi. I was unsigned, and then I got signed by working the dark matches. I wrestled with Kofi in my first TV match at Deep South Wrestling. We've done single matches, tag matches, all the way to producing.