Balor opens up about how he was feeling prior to his second NXT run.
In October of 2019, to kick off NXT’s stretch on the USA Network, Finn Balor made his return to the brand and stared down then-NXT Champion Adam Cole. Prior to Balor returning to NXT, he fell in defeat to ‘The Fiend’ Bray Wyatt at SummerSlam.
Balor joined NXT UK’s Mark Andrews on his ‘My Love Letter to Wrestling’ show on BBC Sounds. He expressed that being back at NXT rejuvenated him in the ring. While he was on the main roster, Balor felt worn down by writers, exhausted and that he was becoming stale. As of the interview recording, he feels that his prime has yet to come.
I think it’s yet to come [his prime]. I feel like, I had got a little bit stale and I was just kind of like — I was tired, I was exhausted. I was kind of like worn out by dealing with the politics and the office and the writers and all the everything that goes with it and I just had enough and when I returned to NXT, I really feel like that rejuvenated me in the ring and one thing I feel that helped in all the negative effects of the pandemic. Taking the fans out of the equation in wrestling makes you kind of change the cadence and the tempo of the match because you’re not trying to perform for a large audience. You’re literally performing in a one-on-one environment and you can really work more on the details of the match. You’re not so reliant on hearing that audible response from the crowd so you know, I would produce a match to get a, ‘Yay!’ Or a ‘boo’ or a, ‘Oh! Holy sh*t’ and then when you take that element out of it, you can get back down to the nuts and bolts of like what I actually learned in [NWA UK] Hammerlock and what I learned in Japan and just gritty wrestling and I really feel like that, you know, despite all the negative things that the pandemic brought us, you know, [it] brought me that one positive thing that I can really get back to wrestling for me and the way I like to wrestle and it’s now kind of finding that balance of how can I keep that art form of the way I like to wrestle in front of big crowds when you’re on a limited time frame with TV wrestling, you know? So it’s just trying to find that balance. I feel it’s gonna be the most difficult thing.
Balor is currently a member of the Monday Night Raw brand. He was in action on the 1/17 show and lost to Austin Theory. When his time in NXT was coming up, Balor pitched to join the NXT UK brand but was told that he was needed on the main roster.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit ‘My Love Letter to Wrestling’ with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
