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When I moved to Orlando, it was my first time moving from Cleveland. You never know what to expect. But to be able to go and work with Shawn Michaels and learn from him - it's just mind-blowing.
I try to be very current. I try to take something from everywhere I've been. I've wrestled in Japan, Singapore, China, Germany, and England. I try to bring a mix of different styles to the table.
I think NXT is kind of like the Cleveland, Ohio, of professional wrestling. We're that underdog whose hungry, who's always out to prove people wrong, and that's kind of what our locker room represents.
It started with Dragon Gate USA, where I started as a guy on the pre-show and wasn't promised anything. I kept coming and doing what I do and ended up on the main show and eventually won their championship.
For the longest time, I was horrified to hear the word 'failure,' but I've come to realize that we all fail. It's just a part of life. We all fall. It's how you rebound that shows the type of person you are.
Johnny Wrestling, to me, isn't just a cool nickname or a fun thing for the crowd to chant. To me, it's a state of mind, and it's just who I am. I first stepped foot in a wrestling ring when I was 8 years old.
I do believe that Raw, SmackDown, and NXT are the three brands, and I think that people can come from Raw or SmackDown to NXT, and I think that people from NXT can go to Raw or SmackDown. It's very interchangeable.
I kind of watch a guy like Aleister Black go around, and he does whatever he wants. He Black Masses whoever he wants. He beats up security guards; he threatens general managers. Tommaso Ciampa does whatever he wants.
When I was Cedrick Von Haussen, the champion of Liechtenstein, I was only 18 years old. I was super, duper young. I started traveling around for wrestling when I was 16, so I had only been wrestling a few years at that point.
I've said many times how big a wrestling fan I am, but all my bias aside as her husband, I'm a huge Candice LeRae fan. I was a huge Candice LeRae fan before we started dating. I was a huge Candice LeRae fan before we got married.
I was a socially awkward 8-year-old kid who fell in love with wrestling when he felt like the whole world was against him. That's the key word: love. I don't do this for revenge; I do this because I love it. That's Johnny Wrestling.
Growing up, I was a socially awkward kid who didn't know where he fit in, and I didn't have many friends, but I always had wrestling. I always had what was in between those ropes, and that always put a smile on my face no matter what.
For me, Philadelphia was always kind of that city you traveled to as an independent wrestler. I traveled there once or twice a month, doing that seven-to-eight-hour drive from Cleveland to Philly just to try and make a name for myself.
I get a lot of comparisons to Daniel Bryan, and trust me, I am flattered by all of them because we mentioned New Orleans and WrestleMania; I watched it at home and watched Daniel Bryan in the main event of WrestleMania achieve his dreams.
In the grand spectrum of things in WWE, you are wrestling for that camera and that camera and that camera - and all the cameras they have - and you have to make things work that way because, through that camera, there's a million people watching.
The fact that I'm still able to wrestle on the indies and yet still do my stuff in NXT, and the fact that I wrestled in front of 15,000 people at the Barclays Center at TakeOver, and then, the following weekend, I was still doing indie shows, is wild.
We've got a bunch of guys who have been travelling around the world for over 10 years, scratching and clawing, fighting, just trying to live their dream, just trying to prove people wrong, just trying to show that we belong, and that's kind of the essence of NXT.