Enzo Amore spoke with Keeping it 100 with Konnan podcast. Here are some of the highlights:
“I don’t want to be in a box. I think a lot of times, especially in the wrestling world, you get put in a box. They tell you what you can and cannot do. I have always been about embodying what you can and cannot do and trying to prove everybody wrong,” said Enzo. “I was 5 feet, 10 inches, 185 pounds, I was on a frickin’ moving truck here in New Jersey when I was discovered in a YouTube video and next thing you know I’m going to the WWE having no business, just thrown right into the fire. I don’t know how else to explain that. It’s like being taken off from the streets and being in WWE.”
Enzo said working in NXT was a great learning experience for him and it allowed him to find himself in the business before NXT became a big thing.
“I was blessed to have been there at the inception of that with a crop of new talents like Big E, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns. New episodic shows that came out on Hulu and were aired overseas, then the birth of the WWE Network, and to have a cult following of NXT fans that started in Florida through marketing mechanisms that were literally FCW,” stated Enzo before adding that he was putting up flyers on telephone poles all over Florida.
“To build that brand and hear Hunter come in and say that we are going to take this brand on the road and we are going to put them on TV; we thought that he was blowing smoke because we were wrestling in gyms with no showers or air conditioning, driving for $600 a week, putting flyers at 7/11’s at local towns to get people to come to local shows.”
“Through that process I was the guy that sold t-shirts at those local shows. I shook everybody’s hand; anybody who ever bought merchandise. I built my brand before I was Enzo Amore and I just saw the writing on the wall and the light at the end of the tunnel by the time they built the Performance Center I was thinking, ‘holy sh**.’ When you understand that the lifeblood is the talent because without talent there is no show inside a wrestling ring, there is none of this without the wrestlers. So, they needed to invest in the wrestlers, so I was looking around at the Performance Center and say to myself that if somebody under this roof isn’t the next John Cena, The Rock, Hulk Hogan or Steve Austin, the lifeblood of the business is shot out.”
Enzo Amore is one of the most unique and colorful characters in recent WWE memory and more fans would like to see more like him. But Enzo says that the WWE creative team limits some Superstars but he found a way to avoid that.
“It is really hard to take matters into your own hands when you are one of the boys, you have to fight tooth and nail and they are not going to let you,” revealed Enzo. “If you ever watched that interview with Vince McMahon and Steve Austin where Vince McMahon says that he won’t let anyone take the brass ring, but you have to know how intelligent Vince McMahon is. He is really intelligent. He wouldn’t say that if he didn’t believe it.
“I just think that there is a lot of chefs in the kitchen. There are a lot of writers, and I think week-to-week a lot of the talent have no idea what they are getting themselves into up until they show up to the show. So many times I was handed a script and the script would change an hour into the show and I would try to remix it and some of the writers hated that. But when Enzo Amore goes out there and goes off script and he comes back to the curtain he forgets the script.
“The only person that really mattered was Vince McMahon so I never gave a f*** about the writers. If a writer adds something terrible to the script and I wasn’t feeling it, I’m sorry bro. I didn’t ask for permission, I asked for forgiveness and half the time I went out there and just said what I felt was better because who better than the guy that says ‘My Name is Enzo Amore’? I wrote that and I hear everybody saying that with me.
“If you don’t have to hold the microphone and say those things in front of a million people each week; if you have never been laid on your back and had your teeth knocked in or taken a bump and risk your life, had your mother crying at home because you were knocked out cold, having an MRI and you had your leg broken in the ring; I went to the ringer to hold that microphone and to hear those people say that s**t. So, if I’m not feeling it, I am not saying it. So, when I cut those promos it was oftentimes how I spoke and people don’t want to hear that.”
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