What were the key things you learned in OVW that you hadn’t learned in your UK training?
I was actually only in OVW for about two weeks before I appeared on television, when I was 22, so I had a bit of a crash course in American wrestling and what’s required to be on TV. Wade Barrett was brought out only three weeks after me and by the time he got there I was already on TV! I had to learn on the road rather than in OVW and it turns out the cameras are very important. Having thousands and thousand of people in the arena, that’s pretty crazy to begin, but the reality was there were millions of people watching and home and I had to quickly learn to maximise my face time on camera to try to get over.
How did you adjust to switching back and forth between TV and house shows?
What I found the best way to do it is pretty much treat the house shows like you would treat TV. Don’t half ass anything: you have moments you mess around a bit for your own entertainment or the boys in the back’s entertainment, but at that point I wasn’t trying to pop the boys or pop myself. Generally the camera was always on the same side, so I would find myself practising playing to that side, even on house shows. I’d say when you start, you’re on the job 100% every night until you learn to differentiate [TV and house shows].
What did you learn working on the road with WWE that you didn’t or couldn’t learn in a training school?
Working with guys with that level of experience, you can’t possibly learn the same by working in the UK. Taking your time at the right moments was one thing. Not doing things like they’d do in Britain, and I did it myself, of just randomly raising your hands as a bad guy during matches at the wrong moment, or the good guys being happy just slapping hands, trying to get the crowd clapping and stuff before the match starts, trying to get them chanting “we want more” when they haven’t actually seen anything yet!
I found in America that rather than going out and begging for [a reaction], you wrestle and tell a good story and be aggressive. There’s nothing more rewarding than when you earn the reaction rather than beg for it. You learn the right time to slow it down, the right time to play to the crowd but not overly play to the crowd. With a simple head movement you can get as much reaction as waving your hands like I did back in the day.
What did you learn from specific wrestlers on the roster?
The Undertaker taught me you learn not to play wrestler. When you’re younger you go out and you try to remember a bunch of moves rather than conveying with your facial reactions, which are so important. With all the cameras around, I didn’t understand for a couple of years that rather than be a wrestler I was playing a wrestler. Once you learn to relax, you learn to tell the story with your face and you do the moves: you can have it all together. That’s when you’re feeling it, you’re feeling it, you’re being a wrestler.
Ricky Steamboat taught me about relaxing. He and I went about 30 to 40 minutes on house shows every single time. I think myself and Jericho had the most matches with him that he’d had in the past 20 years at the time, which is pretty insane as I was 22 at the time. He called it all and then after a couple of matches he started letting me call matches. It was just crazy considering he retired when I was nine years old. I was learning the right time to do things, but the biggest thing was just relaxing. You’ll never truly enjoy being a professional wrestler unless you learn to relax. You’ll just be tense all the time, thinking about the next spot, things that don’t matter. The only thing that matters is emotion, and the only way you can learn that is to relax. Once you learn to relax, there’s nowhere better than being in the ring.
Finlay taught me to think outside the box, while thinking on the fly, making yourself different from everyone else. For example, when I was doing the ‘Chosen One’ run, I was trying to think of something different moves-wise. Characte-wise, that’s all [Vince’s] idea, so in ring what can I do to be different? Finlay and I had worked together for about three months, and I said I’d like to do something using the ring to be different. Him and I used to go to the ring every week before TV and start trying to come up with things that had never been done before. My gimmick became “Drew uses the ring like a tag team partner.” One of my favourite ones that Finlay came up with was when we were stood outside and I was trying to work out how I can use the frame of the ring. He said “Why don’t you sell and go under the ring, wait for the guy to lift up the apron and reach through the frame, then you pull him against it?” We did it and everyone was blown away and that became my gimmick — I use the ring as my tag team partner — and then you’re only limited by your own imagination. These days I just think “What would Fit do?”
You’ve been a guest trainer for several seminars. How did you decide what to cover?
Honestly, I went in with zero plan. I looked around the room and thought “Wait a minute, I’m not going to show these guys any moves. They can watch a video tape and learn that.” Any trainer, no matter what experience they’re at, they can put a video tape on and break the move down. Moves don’t mean shit. You don’t get over by doing moves.
So I ended up just talking about the most important things in wrestling. For instance, you can do a bunch of highspots, cool, you do a bunch of highspots but when people leave, you ask them who was favourite wrestler and they say “Oh, I don’t know, there was this guy who did this, this and this” but they don’t remember you, the person. You’ve got to learn to get yourself over as you the person. That’s when they buy your merch and leave the show and remember who you were, talk about you and your name and your face.
I’d also break down small things, like I’d get people to shoot somebody off the ropes. I hate when people shoot somebody from one rope to another rope, that’s a bad habit of people. That and stomping their feet. That’s one of the things people always say when they knock “fake pro wrestling”: they’re giving you a demonstration [of what’s ‘fake”] so why do it?
Another thing is strikes. People in wrestling think strikes are the least important thing, but strikes are the most important thing. People throw these shady looking punches when they’re about to throw somebody off the ropes for some high spot which means dick. If you’re in a bar and you go to the toilet and then you come back and somebody’s fingering your bird, you’re not going to grab them and shoot them off the wall and give them a big boot. You’re going to punch them in the face. People get punches, they’ve been punched, they’ve given punches, that’s the one thing people actually get. They don’t get moonsaults, they don’t get shooting star presses, they don’t get shooting people off a ropes. I talk about things like that and I go off on different tangents: it all comes to me as I go along. I’m obsessed with the intricacies of wrestling.
What’s the most important thing a wrestler needs to know or do when they go to a school or a seminar?
Prepare some good questions about things you really want to know. There’s no such thing as a stupid question, no matter how ridiculous it may seem to some people. I always tell people if something’s going over there head, don’t be afraid to ask because it’s the only way you’re going to learn.
