WWE Producer and official Adam Pearce recently spoke with Stephanie Chase of Digital Spy and talked about how he approached training rapper Bad Bunny for his recent run with the company.
Pearce was among a group that trained Bunny at the WWE Performance Center, which included Drew Gulak and others, and said he treated Bunny like he would any other potential WWE Superstar.
“I approached [training Bad Bunny] and, it’s funny people will hear this and probably not believe it, but I took the same approach with Bad Bunny that I’ve taken with every single newbie that’s come into the Performance Center, whether they had experience or not,” Pearce explained. “You have to get a sense of what their athletic ability and passion is before you really delve into what we do and it just so happened that Bad Bunny loves what we do.
“You knew instantly there was a passion for what we do beyond, ‘I’m a fan, that watches Raw and Smackdown’. I never heard the word ‘no’ come out of his mouth and we put him through every single pace that we put anybody else through, and I pride myself on that. Yes, it’s Bad Bunny, yes he’s a worldwide superstar, yes, he’s a Grammy Award winner, yes he’s a celebrity and yes, he did every single thing that every other trainee, whether we knew who they were or not, did and he should take a lot of pride in that.”
Pearce said he knew early on that the rapper had what it takes to perform like a WWE Superstar.
“I had a good sense pretty early on that he was going to do whatever he could to make sure that he delivered at WrestleMania,” Pearce said.
Pearce said Bunny and his team had a lot of ideas coming into the company, but safety was number one for Pearce and the WWE crew. Pearce also talked about how eager Bunny was.
“They had a lot of ideas, him and his people and obviously, we had to make sure that what we were going to do in that match, number one was going to be safe,” Pearce said. “I had a good sense pretty early on that he’s going to be able to pretty much do whatever he wants to do because he had it in his heart. I didn’t have to push him, ‘Hey, why don’t we try this?’
“He was always wanting, ‘What if we do this? Hey, do you think I could do that? Does this work?’ And when you have somebody who wants to, and I say this as a coach all the time, I want as many people with a ‘want to’ attitude, not a ‘have to’ attitude. Every day he wanted to, he wasn’t there because he had to be. He was there because he wanted to be and that makes life easy.”
Bunny ended up teaming with Damian Priest for a win over The Miz and John Morrison at WrestleMania 37. He expressed interest in working with the company in the future, and WWE indicated that the door will be open. The rapper is currently preparing for his 2022 tour, which quickly sold out right after WrestleMania.
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