As noted earlier this week at this link, WWE reportedly has no plans to do a Tommaso Ciampa vs. Randy Orton match after the two had a back & forth on Twitter, which Orton’s wife got involved in.
Orton participated in a WWE media call earlier today and was asked if he would go to WWE NXT for a feud with Ciampa. Orton said he would be interested if Vince McMahon asked him to, adding that he does think Ciampa is talented and there are some things he can help him with.
“Yeah, as I was saying earlier, whatever Vince gives me to do, whatever my job is in that particular situation, I’m gonna do it,” Orton said. “If it’s working with a Tommaso Ciampa, then I’d be all for it, because I think he’s very talented and I think that there’s a few things that I can help him with. Mainly, to help him get a little more out of his career, because I know he has been plagued with injuries, but I also know that he loves and respects this business.”
Orton also discussed why the NXT talents worry him.
“The NXT guys worry me because I see them doing such highly physical things during their matches,” he said. “It’s almost like they do so many impressive physically impressive things but those things are dangerous and they wear and tear on your career. I’ve been doing this 20 years and I’ll do it another decade. I just turned 40 and my plan is to just keep going until my 50th birthday and I think I would be able to do that and I would be able to support my family for 30 years of wrestling under Vince McMahon because of the way I tell stories in the ring. The facial expressions, the little transitional things that you do on the fly or you ad-lib so to speak during a match, those are the things that people remember.”
He was also asked about how the NXT wrestlers work a train-wreck style that doesn’t allow fans to invest in their matches.
“I watched a match the other day, and I’m not going to name names, and a lot of the NXT guys work like this, and it was just train wreck after train wreck after train wreck, and it’s all very impressive, but when it’s all said and done and the match is over, I couldn’t remember anything that happened, because it was just movement, it was just car crashes,” he said. “And when you see so much of that back to back, and you don’t see how that effected the talent, meaning they didn’t sell that move or that wasn’t enough of a delay between high spots that I was able to see facial expressions, and see that, ‘Oh, this guy hurts, oh, he hurt his neck on this spot, and he just tried to pick up the other guy because he couldn’t because his neck is hurt, oh, I think he’s really hurt,’ you don’t get to invest into these matches because they are just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one thing after the other. And even though it is highly physically impressive, I wouldn’t be able to do that style, a lot of the things these guys do, I’m not capable of doing, but they’re gonna have very short careers.”
Ciampa talked more about Ciampa and how he especially worries him.
“What I worry about Ciampa in particular, is that with all these big injuries he’s had, and we’ve all had injuries, we’ve all worked hurt, we’ve all woke up stiff after a big fight, but he needs to learn how to tell stories and slow it down and not think that the fans want to see him kill himself,” Orton said.
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(H/T to 411mania for the quotes)