RYZIN Interview: AEW, Career Journey, Being The Elite, Matt Hardy, More

It's only inevitable before you guys interact on AEW programming, right?

RYZIN: Absolutely, I agree. There have been little teases for those that focus on everything AEW and those that really pay attention to BTE, things like that. There was a moment when he was Broken that I had approached him in the hallway on an episode of BTE where he was thinking of Sammy Guevara and he strangled me. A few weeks later, he actually used Maxel as a voodoo doll and was messing up my body. I was kind of demanding my essence back and that was what happened at the end of “Free the Delete” because he had taken that from me. There have been little droplets throughout and with Dark and everything, I did compete against the H.F.O. on an episode of Dark, though there wasn't much action. I was isolated outside of the ring. There is definitely unfinished business between Matt and I. He knows it and I know it and I think it is just a matter of time before that crosses over into AEW.

Your complete character overhaul in recent years has been really cool to see, especially for those who remember your appearances in NXT and elsewhere. What was the idea behind your reinvention and how it got you to where you are today?

RYZIN: I appreciate that. As I alluded to, I had basically done all I could on the independents. I had wrestled a lot of the key names in independent wrestling and a lot of whom are my peers today at AEW: Colt Cabana, Kazarian, I went on a Canadian tour with Jake “The Snake” Roberts. Abadon is from the same part of Colorado as well. There's a lot of peers here at AEW that had already seen what I had done. In order to make myself a success, I'm a huge believer in using the law of attraction every day to manifest what you want but you also put in some work as well. When it came time, I had done extra work for WWE and put it on my own accord to pull William Regal and say, “Hey, what would it took for a guy like me from Denver, Colorado who drove 12 hours to get here to get to that next level, to be seen, to be noticed?”

I believe at that time FCW was just transitioning over to NXT and moving from Tampa to Orlando. He said, “To be honest with you, if you want something, I would head down to a coast, I recommend Florida because that's where you're going to be the most seen.” A year and a half later, we packed up and we moved to Orlando and I've never looked back. That was five or six years ago. As soon as I got onto the scene, it only took a couple of months for people to see my desire and what I could bring to the table. I was doing extra work on a pretty regular basis for NXT. I had wrestled Baron Corbin, TM-61, Tommaso Ciampa, Johnny Gargano. I was there on an almost weekly basis as well, so I'm very fortunate in that regard.”

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