Brian Kendrick recently spoke to The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling. You can download the full episode here and read some highlights below.
If NXT will kill the independent scene:
“I don’t think it’s going to kill it. To me it’s genius that they took a style, the “indy” style which is very high paced, high risk, high intensity style of match and are seeing how it works in front of a WWE audience. As far as I could tell, anyone who watches NXT is a repeat viewer, they can come back and watch more because they enjoy it. I don’t know if it is going to hurt Ring of Honor when people learn that Kevin Owens was a Ring of Honor superstar so if people have this knowledge I’m sure it can help Ring of Honor in a bizarre way. I think if Ring of Honor markets itself as a “stars of tomorrow” I think it could be unbelievable because all those stars that came out of Ring of Honor that move on to NXT are hot stuff.”
Eva Marie’s progress:
“She’s not the only one, they’ve sent a few women and they’ve sent the hopefuls to me but she’s the only one contracted. Having somebody that like her knows the system, where also she’ll be able to go on and wrestle, what you saw in NXT that was her first match since going to wrestling school. As proud as I was of it, hopefully people in the next few months will become a big fan of Eva Marie’s work and so the fact that they can come out of my school and go directly to TV for me on a selfish level I get more instant gratification that I get to see them come up quicker. At the same time, if I get to see one of my students, like a kid who came off the street who never knew anything about wrestling go onto to success I guess I would feel a different kind of pride since I saw them when they were wide eyed.