NXT producer and former superstar Road Dogg was a recent guest on the After The Bell podcast with host Corey Graves to talk all things pro wrestling. Highlights from their interview are below.
On being guilty of micromanaging talent in the past:
Look, I would love to come up with the story or the angle and let the talent fill in the blanks, but there’s very few talent — I’m not saying there was more back then. I didn’t know about this part back then. I didn’t know about the part where they either let you go and give you some rope and you either zip line to the other side or you hang yourself, and so I didn’t know about all that. But there are some talent nowadays that you can trust to fill in the blanks and there’s definitely some talent that you can not trust. So as far as the micromanaging goes, I was guilty of that for sure. People up the ladder from me are too, but it’s because of that. There’s so few that you can just go, ‘Yeah I can let him go and he’s not gonna say the wrong thing and he’s not gonna do the wrong thing. It’s actually better if I let him be him. If I let her be her.
Says Dexter Lumis could be a main event player in NXT:
Well I think Dexter Lumis. I think again, he’s right out of the gate but right out of the gate interesting as a character and people wanna know more about him and as a human being, he’s a great guy with a lot of really cool talents and so we’ll be getting into those. But again, it wasn’t me. It was a team effort of how — so I had a class before the TV started. I had a class down there, and of course we didn’t do much in-ring stuff because I wasn’t an in-ring guy. We watched a lot of tape, talked about a lot of characters and he was one I got really interested in and I went too far with and I had him in licking people in a rear-chin lock and lick their cheek and just go way too far and then you see what works and what doesn’t work, t’s easy to reel it back in. The hard part is getting them out of their comfort zone and get them to go that far and then you can kind of reel it back in and control it a little bit. But he was one that was definitely a team effort, but his character alone has already got people talking and his character alone [has] already got us thinking, ‘Main events’ and stuff like that, and this guy, he wasn’t even on TV three months ago and now we’re talking about putting him in that picture.
Praise for Adam Cole:
But Adam Cole is the most professional, most talented — he gets it, he gets every aspect of it. He could cut a promo — he’s one of the guys when you go, ‘I need you to do a minute’ and that’s all you say to him, and he gives you a minute of hiccup-less verbiage that just makes you go, ‘Okay that was perfect. Thank you.’ Every single time. That’s Adam Cole in a nutshell. But he’s also a great worker. He has a great psychology. Man, if he was Karrion Kross’ size, he would be the Universal Champion right now, and if he wasn’t, I’d be wondering why. That’s the kinda guy he is, that’s the kinda human he is, that’s the kinda talent he is. Incredible, and so he’s probably my favorite guy but from a guy who’s now on this side of the fence, having to work with that guy, he gives you everything you could ask for and more and you don’t even really have to ask for it. It’s just like a dream. He’s a dream superstar.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)