Indie Wrestling Quotes

If you're a fan of Indie wrestling at all, you can go back to, I think, 2007-2008, and you can see me wrestle CHIKARA. And you can see me wrestle in a tank top, and you can see me wrestle in a tank top that doesn't look like the one I have in WWE. But it's the same one.

When I was a little kid, WWF was all I had access to. After a year or two when I found the indies and could watch wrestling live, it was just as big a deal to me as WWF.

When Jeff and I were first starting out and trying to make a name for ourselves, we were doing indy shows, and would take whatever we could get just to have as much in-ring time as we could.

The indie shows are tons of fun. And for the fans, having that up close and personal experience is so different to watching wrestling on television at home.

I kind of miss that whole NXT thing. When I was there, it was Florida Championship Wrestling with Seth Rollins and the other guys who were there. I wrestled on, like, local-access Florida TV in front of 30 people. It was a tiny little situation.

Promoters saw the potential in me and the value in me. It was because of companies like Evolve, PWG, Progress, and Beyond Wrestling. Those are the big ones that gave me a push and made my name worth something on the indies.

I did a year and a half of independent wrestling before I got into the WWE. It was nothing really. I didn't make the towns. I don't even say I was an indy wrestler.

I was probably one of the top three or four wrestlers in the world on the indies, just killing it. Nobody really saw me going to a bigger company because of my past and just how people view me.

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.