A different demographic of people watch NXT compared to Raw and Smackdown; NXT is followed by the real knowledgeable, hardcore internet audience, whereas the main shows have a more family feel.
I've been Intercontinental Champion lots of times, Television Champion. One of my favorites has been the Hardcore Championship because it reflected my favorite style, and I feel that the X Division belt does that, too.
My dad had a habit of giving me the Abdullah the Butcher matches as well as the ones with tables and chairs - basically, the matches that went all over the building.
I love a match like Money in the Bank; I love a hardcore match, and that's what the Money in the Bank ladder matches are. Throw the rule book out and let out your imagination.
Extreme rules, hardcore wrestling - whatever they want to call it - was born out of a necessity to survive.
I would love to have a Divas Hardcore championship. If we had a hardcore cage, we'll just paint the cage pink or something and make it extra girly so it's so, like, Diva.
The WWE is the big company and the one the mainstream audience is watching, but I feel like if you were a hardcore wrestling fan, you were watching TNA.
In the '70s and the '80s, what wrestlers were doing back then, yes, they're taking bumps, and they're busting up their bodies and things like that, but now, we got these cages: they're falling off.
I got my break in the business with the now-defunct Bill Watts' TWF, the old Mid-South. Which was really, in many ways, the predecessor to ECW in its time, in that age. It was a really cool, high-impact, snug type of product.
The Attitude Era was something special.
The Attitude Era had the crazy rock & roll girls and stuff.
When I was first started, when I was eighteen, I wrestled for a company that had a very hardcore fanbase and demanded a lot from its wrestlers. So, every single match, I would do every move possible. I would land on the concrete floor; I would land really high on my head just to try to impress the fans.
Hardcore wrestling like CZW is just nonsense. There's no story there. You've got guys jumping off of houses onto barb wired tables, and that's it. They don't know how to work. CZW is trash.
I think it's good to have different styles, though. I think it's good to have a lucha on a show, some Japanese flavor, I think MMA is a good thing, a little bit of the hardcore and the blood and guts is good. That is what makes a show for me.
In ECW, hardcore wrestling wasn't done just for the fun of it. It was done for a purpose, for a reason. And for me, it was done to exist and produce a revenue for my family.
I can speak for myself personally, I loved ECW. I loved everything about it. I loved the crew, I loved the fans, the style, working there.
NXT fans are hardcore wrestling fans.
