AEW’s Blackpool Combat Club Manager William Regal joined Renee Paquette on the latest episode of The Sessions to talk about his release from WWE in January.
As one of the faces of NXT for the past eight years, Regal mentioned his thoughts on the transition from NXT to NXT 2.0, and the issues he had with some talent at the WWE Performance Center.
“When I heard last summer that we wanted to revamp, I was like, ‘Great!’ When I actually heard what Mr. McMahon wanted, I was all for that,” Regal said. “When it comes to athletes, the PC, at the end of the day, people had these nonsense ideas of it being the biggest wrestling school in the world. And it is an incredible wrestling school, the PC works if you put your time into it. If you come in there, you turn up and do your class once a day and you go home, it’s not going to work unless you are the one, the magic one who can just do everything.
“You have to put your time in, and I know this personally. Sometimes a talent who was getting paid there, who aren’t doing well, perhaps they need to look themselves in the mirror and realize instead of spending time on their phone, they should get in the ring and get better.”
Continuing to talk about the transition from NXT to NXT 2.0, Regal talked about being very hands-on with current top talent in NXT 2.0 and how excited he was to work with them in the future. The former WWE King of the Ring says he holds no ill-will towards WWE for letting him go, and he enjoyed spending the last 20+ years of his career with the WWE.
“Whatever your style of wrestling is, there are people you can learn from in this day and age,” Regal said. “I was all for that and all for the change, but then I also get that if you’re trying to make a complete change, you might not think that I’m quite up for that. I don’t know if anybody knew that I was open to the fact that I wanted to be a big part of that because I was. I was very hands-on with The Creed Brothers and very hands-on with Bron Breakker. I had an incredible run on the main roster and the absolute greatest run possible in NXT. If nothing else, the time came when it was time to go now so it didn’t become something I didn’t like and move on. That’s the way I look at it.”
