Zach Gowen reflects on his time in WWE.
The former WWE, TNA, and ROH star spoke about his stint in the big time during a recent interview on Insight With Chris Van Vilet. Gowen had quite a career for the fed, which included him wrestling Vince McMahon, Big Show, and Brock Lesnar.
You have to think about this. I had less than 20 matches before I had that match with The Big Show, which was my first official WWE match. I have one leg. I’m 20 years old, less than 20 matches before I have my first official WWE match. So what you’re watching is a live experiment of like, can we make this work? Do we have enough WWE magic? Is Zach enough? And can we come together like peanut butter and jelly to make this thing work? And so it was a wild time. I wrestled Vince one-on-one on PPV. A 53-year-old non-wrestler, okay, versus a 20-year-old kid with one leg who has been in the business about a year at this point. And Vince is catching Asai Moonsaults to the outside, you know, in the match, and he’s bleeding all over the place. And it’s, it’s something that you will never ever, ever, ever see again. Because now they have a system. Right now they have the NXT in Florida and you come up and you learn. You learn how to work, you learn how to work the cameras, you learn what production, there’s a lot that goes on when you’re a wrestler on TV, right for AEW or WWE. You have to think about the lights, you have to think about the crowd, you have to think about your time cues, you have to think about where the cameras are, you have to think about what commentary is saying about you. You have to you have to do something that you have gone over before in the production meeting. And you have to allow commentary to talk about it, allow it to breathe, while not getting the live crowd bored. You have to do all of this. And so they have a great system now with NXT right? You do the exact same thing you’re gonna do on Raw you have the same cameras, you have the same commentators the same setup. I did not have any of them. They said go out. And like the clip you just posted they said cut your forehead with a razor blade and have Brock Lesnar F5 you in front of your mom twice, Like and figure it out live, you know, and so there was no coaching. There was no like, hey, why don’t you do this for six months or a year, whatever. We did it live and all of that considered, it’s kind of hard to look back and watch those matches, because I’m like, man, it would have been so much better if we did this, this that and the other hindsight, you know, but considering all of those variables, I think we did a very, very good job. And I’m very proud of myself. And I thank WWE to this day.”
Gowen wrestled for WWE between 2003-2004. You can check out his full interview with Van Vilet below.
