WWe Intercontinental Champion Bad News Barrett recently spoke with ThisIsInfamous.com to promote WWE Payback. Below are some highlights:
How his current gimmick will be better than what we’ve seen from him before:
“I think there’s two things. I think number one, the way I’ve been involved in storylines and the way I’ve been incorporated into the show has really been a method of highlighting me, certainly my strengths. I think you can look at previous incarnations of what I’ve done and I think some of the positions I was used in on the show maybe weren’t the best vehicle in which to highlight me as a performer. I think that the Barrage stuff I was doing had a lot of potential, especially when we had those really cool vignettes that were airing a couple of years ago when I came back from injury. But unfortunately I wasn’t involved in any serious storylines or any angle on TV that the fans could get their teeth sunk into and very quickly I was used in an enhancement role for the better part of a year and a half. I think in my situation where I wasn’t getting any mic time or getting anything storyline wise that the fans could care about, it was always going to be difficult for me to kind of get any momentum. So definitely since I’ve come back this most recent time with the Bad News Barrett stuff, I think the creative guys have done a great job of highlighting me and allowing me to be a performer and take the spotlight a little. The other thing is, I think me as a performer, I’ve really been enjoying this Bad News Barrett stuff. I get stuck over in the UK with some visa problems at the end of last year and had to be off TV for a little while, and I kind of made the decision when I was out there that when I came back I was going to go out there and start enjoying things a little more. I think I got to a point in my career where I was focusing a little too much on the wrong things. Trying to impress people. Management and people on the creative team and trying to do things that I thought they’d want to see in order to get myself higher up on the card as opposed to going out there and really just entertaining myself and having a good time with it, which is what I started doing with Bad News Barrett. I think fans can really see when a performer is enjoying himself and I really have been since I’ve been Bad News Barrett. I’ve been having the most fun of my entire career. I’ve been wrestling 11 years and I can say that the past… six to eight months when I’ve been on TV and being Bad News Barrett is the most fun I’ve ever had and the most relaxed I’ve been out there. That’s definitely an aspect that’s helped make the character and the storylines work.”
Being Intercontinental Champion again:
“I can only speak for myself, personally. I’ve held that title, the Intercontinental Championship, and this is the fourth time I’ve had it, and it does feel, of the four times I’ve had it, this does feel like the time that the creative team and the management at WWE are actually getting behind me now. The strength of a championship, far from being about the performer who is holding it, is just as much about the kind of storyline and the blocking and the kind of segments he’s involved in on TV. You can put a title around somebody, but if they’re used as an afterthought on the TV show, then it really doesn’t matter who’s the champion. This time it feels like there’s a lot more going into it. Obviously we had the big tournament of who’s going to be the challenger, which I won. It feels like I’ve definitely got a lot more momentum this time so that definitely helps. I also think that something that helps elevate the two secondary titles, the Intercontinental and US, I think because we have the unified WWE title and the World Heavyweight title, that’s now just one title, I think it leaves a lot more room for people to wanting to be fighting for these secondary tier championships.”
