You don't make a statement unless you make noise.
When you're an independent wrestler, committing a lot of time and effort into honing your craft as much as possible in as many different places as possible will catch the WWE's interest as far as the independent level goes.
Fortunately for me, I discovered Ring of Honor. And I saw guys who were much smaller in stature but were putting on these amazing matches that I had never seen in WWE before. So I thought, at the very least, I'd love the chance to be able to wrestle in a company like that someday.
When you look back at the former Ring of Honor world champions, whether it be Daniel Bryan, CM Punk, Samoa Joe, Nigel McGuiness, the list goes on and on. These are the guys that built the lineage and importance of the Ring of Honor world championship.
Aside from ROH, just getting a taste of Wrestle Kingdom at the Tokyo Dome with NJPW has me really excited at the prospect of furthering and developing my career in Japan.
I started training when I was a senior in high school. I trained at the Combat Zone Wrestling Academy in South Philadelphia.
My grandmother played a huge influence in my life and helped raise me, and she and my mother saw how much I loved pro wrestling and how much I wanted to go after it.
There are good wrestling journalists and bad wrestling journalists. That's for sure.
Regardless of who leaves and who stays, Ring of Honor is going to continue to be a healthy, growing, successful pro wrestling promotion.
I do feel in 2018 that pro wrestling has gone in such a different direction. Before, things were so black and white; now, it's shades of grey. It's not so much good guys and bad guys: there are people who are put in situations who do the right or wrong things, but people react to them like they are stars.
So when you're following guys like Kyle O'Reilly and Bobby Fish or The Young Bucks or Jay Lethal or The Briscoe Brothers, and you're going out and trying to really stick out and have a very memorable, talked-about main event, or the match of the night, like the main event should be, it's really challenging.
My two main trainers were John Dahmer and DJ Hyde. DJ Hyde mainly taught me how to be tough: I mean, the beatings that he used to give the students as far as wrestling initiations go were as tough as they come, and I'm thankful for it.
When you say the word 'undisputed,' what do you think of? You think of something that is untouchable, undeniable. Myself, Bobby Fish, and Kyle O'Reilly are all of those things.
Any time guys move to 'Raw' and 'SmackDown,' I think that is what has kept NXT so relevant and has kept the fans so invested because they are now conditioned that whoever leaves or comes in, NXT, as a product, is going to give really exciting sports entertainment every time.