The Shining Wizards podcast recently conducted an interview with Sam Adonis, who spoke about his experiences in the National Wrestling Alliance, and how much he’s enjoyed the promotion due to the locker room have a deep passionate love for the industry. Highlights from the interview are below.
Thoughts on working for NWA:
I love NWA. Anybody that knows me and knows my story, my dad was an indy promoter, so I grew up around wrestling since I was 4 or 5 years old. I have a soft spot in my heart for old school wrestling. NWA is doing something completely different than everyone else. If you’re going to compare it to anything as far as the modern scene or what somebody else is doing, there’s a good chance you’re not going to like it. But if you understand what wrestling is, what it’s supposed to be, and where it came from, you’re probably going to love NWA, because its no bullsh*t. It’s not about the storylines. It’s not about the crazy moves or angles. It’s about wrestling as an athletic competition. It’s two people in a ring trying to win a match. It’s wrestling. I really like being a part of it. Everybody there is cool. It feels very, very professional. That’s the one thing I really like about it. A good portion of that locker room was signed to WWE when I had my WWE developmental contract back in 2012. But when you’re in WWE, there’s a lot of other circumstances that you have to deal with, so you might not have been best buddies with everyone. Now, coming into that same lockerroom 10 years later, seeing the same people, we’re all kind of on the same page. A lot of us are still here ten years later because it’s in our blood. It’s what we do and what we love. After the experience that I’ve had as well as all the other wrestlers have had, you kind of have that same general mutual respect. I think it kind of goes back to the essence of what NWA is. They’re not trying to set the internet on fire. They’re not trying to get the newest, young, coolest superstar that does the best double moonsault. Most of us are kind of on the same page of what wrestling is, what it was, and what’s expected of us and it makes for a hell of a locker room. Just great talent working together and respecting pro wrestling.
On NWA’s raw production value:
Most of the talent there has had TV experience, and usually tv experience itself doesn’t stray too far off. There’s always going to be a hard camera. There’s always going to be three or four mobile units. They’ll tell you if hard cam is to the right of the entrance. There’s a lot of that. Once you do an XYZ taping once, you’ve kind of got the formula. NWA kind of keeps it to that. It’s not too far out of that realm. I think for my personal experience, and I debuted for NWA a little after the pandemic started so as far as a far intimate setting with a very limited amount of people, I have done a few of those shows before I even came to NWA just because of the Covid restrictions so it was really a natural fit to me. I was able to get right in and feel comfortable and I think at the end of the day, a lot of us are comfortable because there’s a certain respect that we all have for each other. Because I know Tom Latimer from 2010. I know Tyrus from FCW. I know this guy was in IMPACT. I know this guy from Japan. You have that sense of respect and it does make everything a little bit easier to adapt to. For me personally, I like it a lot because its almost like a night off. I’ve made most of my career in Mexico, and I’ve spent a lot of time all over the world representing Mexico and doing the Lucha Libre style which couldn’t be further than what the NWA style is. But, in my opinion, I love it because I was taught the basics. I was taught to learn how to be a professional wrestler and do the basics, the holds, the moves, follow the rules, the way it was 25 years ago. That’s how our generation and our lockerroom was taught. Now wrestling has evolved so much with so many schools and so many people don’t learn the basics. They don’t know what it is. I’d say there’s a good 30% of the wrestlers that you know whether they’re on tv or not, would come to NWA and maybe make a fool of themself. Because they can do XYZ sequence and do what they saw somebody do, or what the latest internet trend is, but they never learned the basics. You can’t pull one over on us at the NWA, because when you don’t have those basics, you’re going to make yourself look like a fool. So it’s definitely cool. Everything about it is so different. Adapting to it has been nothing to me because its basically old school gritty wrestling.