NJPW star Clark Connors recently joined the Shining Wizards podcast to discuss a wide range of topics, including his thoughts on replacing Tomohiro Ishii at Forbidden Door, and how his recovery from injury is going. Highlights from the interview are below.
How his injury recovery is coming along:
The rehab’s coming along great. We don’t necessarily have a window yet for when I’m coming back. But hopefully it’s gonna be sooner than later and yeah, the goal is to be back as soon as possible so I’m just fixing up this whole deal, doing P.T. every day so, I’ll be back soon.
On replacing Tomohiri Ishii at Forbidden Door:
After that [Tomohiro Ishii’s injury], I didn’t hear anything and then I got a call. They’re like, ‘Yeah, Ishii’s hurt so you gotta get on this plane’ and I’m like, ‘Yes, okay, sign me up.’ So I found out I think maybe 20 minutes before they announced it. Yeah, yeah, I think so [Forbidden Door four-way is the biggest match of my career thus far]. I’ve had a lot of cool opportunities I think, but I think just to be on that big stage in front of that many people and it’s a four-way so there’s a lot of really big names in it. So I was like, once again, just like with Ishii, I had to pick my spots of trying to make an impression with people but, it was kind of cool because I was playing with house money a little bit because I was like, you know what? If they weren’t expecting me to come out anyways, most people don’t know who I am who are watching this so I’m just gonna go out there and just have fun and so yeah, it turned out well I think and I mean, I didn’t win, that sucks but, other than that, I think it turned out well and it was definitely the biggest match of my career but, in terms of nervousness or anything, I never really get nervous before matches and this one was the same where I wasn’t even thinking about the — I wasn’t worried about the match at all. I was just worried about making sure I got there in time. I get on a plane and just hustle through a bunch of stuff but I hope my baggage got through TSA. I didn’t really have time to process it until afterwards. I was like, okay, that was pretty cool. That was a big match so I’m glad I performed in it.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)