NJPW star Fred Rosser (fka as Darren Young in WWE) recently spoke to Fightful about a large number of topics, including him sharing advice that he gave to WWE Chairman Vince McMahon about yoga, and how he pitched McMahon the idea to be paired up with the legendary Bob Backlund. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
What Titus O’Neil taught him about Vince McMahon:
“Once I was done teaming with Titus, nothing lasts forever, but one of the big things I learned from Titus is the most intimidating thing about Vince McMahon is his office door. Once you get to his office door, you have a game plan and the sky is the limit. Titus was very bold and just opened the door to say, ‘Boss, we’re not on Raw, what do you have for us?’ That’s when we would make moves on the app and it would become popular. I remember once we [Titus & I] were done teaming, I proposed to him the idea of Bob Backlund being my life coach.”
On sharing advice with Vince about Yoga and pitching him the Bob Backlund life-coach gimmick:
“I had it all written out and had visuals, I remember walking into his off and sitting down to talk for about 20 minutes. We talked a lot about yoga. We were face to face sitting down and he asked me, ‘Darren, how do you get such a big barrel chest like that?’ I said, ‘Yoga.’ Yoga has helped with my posture, instead of being scrunched over, it makes you upright, and we talked for some time about the benefits of yoga and then the Bob Backlund gimmick, which he ran with.”
Says he needed a week to recover from his match with Tom Lawlor:
“I don’t know if Vince (ended up doing yoga), but he definitely needs it at his age. I think anyone benefits from yoga. That’s the longevity for me, staying healthy and not wrestling as much. When you don’t wrestle as much, it does take a toll on your body. The match I just had with Tom Lawlor, it took me a week to recover. That was probably one of the longest matches in my career, we went over 25 minutes and it took me about a week to recover. Yoga is so important and that’s probably my closest non-physical interaction with Vince McMahon. I’ve seen him backstage tussle with people, just not with me. “