The legendary Brian Kendrick recently participated in a virtual signing with K & S WrestleFest, where the former NXT cruiserweight champion spoke about his next steps after some old conspiracy videos surfaced and derailed his run in AEW before it even began. Kendrick hopes to open his own wrestling school, then discusses his experience training Eva Marie in NXT. Highlights are below.
Has no plan to return to WWE or AEW and wants instead to open his own wrestling school:
I don’t have a goal or a plan to make it to either of those companies [WWE & AEW] like I have in the past, you know, driven to… my hope and my goal is to have a successful wrestling school. To be able to do that, to be able to teach kids and be able to sustain through that financially for my wife and I, to be able to just train kids wrestling, that’s where I find myself to be happiest. If I can get independent bookings throughout the week to go out there and perform, that’s what I’d really like to do as well. Those jobs, they’re demanding, those contract jobs and the jobs that they would want me for, probably backstage, it’s a fantastic job but I guess if I had my dream, I’d rather teach my own students at home. But I’ll see where the world takes me, yeah.
On training Eva Marie during his NXT days:
I will say it was an absolute pleasure [training Eva Marie] and the way I attacked it… yeah, so when I first met with Eva Marie and talked to her, I said, you know, ‘Please don’t try to convince me that you love professional wrestling. Let’s take this for what it is.’ What I don’t like hearing with any of these students is, ‘Oh! This is my passion, this is my’ whatever and — but I know you’re lying. If this was your passion, this is your dream, you would have pursued professional wrestling instead of acting and modeling. So my approach was, ‘Let’s lean into what you are. You’re here because you’re beautiful’ and so I wanted that to be the deal, because you’re not gonna get as good as Bayley. Bayley’s been obsessing about this since she was a child, she’s been working on it since before she was 18 and she’s off and doing it so, ‘You can be the girl who’s here because you’re beautiful and that’s the nasty nature of this business is Bayley, you had to work so hard to get good at this and all I had to do was be pretty’ and I thought there was legs with it and stuff like that but, I think she started to put together some good matches, you know, for what that was. She isn’t gonna be Bayley, but then ultimately, sh*t hit the fan backstage with her and wellness policy and stuff unfortunately. Whether she got the raw end of the deal or whatever. It’s just that she got chewed up and spit out and that’s where she’s at now.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling
)