Alex Koslov looks back on his time in WWE developmental over ten years ago.
The current NJPW of America commentator spoke on this topic during a recent interview with Developmentally Speaking. Koslov says he was never really mentally prepared for the WWE machine, adding that when he became somewhat famous in Mexico he stopped working on himself.
It was rough, it was rough (Koslov said about his transition into WWE). I don’t know. In Mexico, I was a professional already. I felt like a professional, I was looked (at) as a professional, I was on TV and nobody questioned me. Rarely did people question my skills. In fact, my skills were respected, and when I went to WWE developmental, FCW, it was the opposite. I was completely broken down, like picked apart, which is understandable because it’s kind of — WWE is like the Hollywood of pro wrestling. It’s a major multimedia entertainment organization and everything needs to be perfect. But I was not ready for that at all. I wasn’t ready to be micromanaged and picked apart and to be honest with you, I was not ready, I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready for WWE for mentally… It didn’t work out for me because I wasn’t ready mentally, I wasn’t fully prepared for that and also, skills-wise, I wasn’t prepared either. When I became kind of famous in Mexico, I kind of stopped working on myself, working on my craft. Really all I cared about was just being a guy on TV and being famous and I didn’t really train. I mean we worked a lot, we worked five-to-seven days a week. When it was busy, we traveled every day. That was, I suppose, my training but I felt like I could have done more to be better I suppose or at least, let’s just say, there’s certain skills that are required in WWE, I did not cultivate them in Mexico and so in that sense, I wasn’t prepared.
Later, Koslov recalls briefly getting paired up with Rusev (now Miro in AEW) before his eventual release from the company.
The only ideas, the only path I had over there (in WWE developmental) was me and Rusev. Me and Rusev started tagging but it was kind of towards the tail end of my time there… It was actually the most stressful time of my life over there when I was in FCW. I wanted it so badly but I was not able to, I don’t know, do a good enough job that was satisfactory for them it felt and so I asked for my release and Johnny Ace told me to take a little vacation so he sent me home for a couple weeks and I came back energized and I started to do better work but at that point, it was already too late but they were thinking of putting me and Rusev on the road at that time but, they had to release people and had to make the cuts and I was one of ‘em.
You can check out the full interview below.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)
