WWE NXT Champion Adam Cole was recently a guest on Lilian Garcia’s podcast, “Chasing Glory,” to talk about several professional wrestling topics. Cole discussed his NXT TakeOver: Toronto match with Johnny Gargano, who produced the match, and what the reaction was coming back through the curtain.
Here are the highlights:
His NXT TakeOver match with Johnny Gargano:
I’m definitely incredibly sore from that one. I don’t know how many of those I have in my. This trilogy with Johnny was so important to me and him. We’ve known each other for 10 years. So we had talked forever about getting the chance to maybe wrestle on a really big stage like NXT. And when I first came to NXT, for those first – for that first year-and-a-half, we hadn’t touched at all. This kind of – this feud started, almost, like a replacement to Tomasso Ciampa. Cause Johnny and Tommaso were in the middle of their big feud. So then, they needed a big main event for WrestleMania weekend, and were like, ‘Okay, let’s do Adam and Johnny.’ And then it turned into this crazy trilogy that had it’s punctuation mark last night, and ended all in that wrestling street fight and crazy steel cage match. It was a lot of fun. Painful, but a lot of fun. And Toronto was great. I love wrestling in Toronto.
Who were his producers for the match:
Yeah, so the two gentlemen involved were Michael Hayes and Shawn Michaels. Which, again, Michael is great. Brilliant. Normally, he’s involved in producing my matches. Shawn Michaels is involved in every one of my matches. He’s like, at the Performance Center, I go I and work with him directly, a bunch of us do. He’s kind of like a mentor for so many of us right now at NXT. So, he takes a liking or makes sure he has his hand in everything that we’re doing. And lots of times, the best thing about Shawn – it’s not like he’s going ‘This is what you should do.’ He lets us kind of come up with what we think, and he gets excited about the stuff we come up with. But randomly, if we’re stumped on something and we’re like ‘this would be cool’ but we’re not crazy about it, he in the matter of five seconds would go ‘Oh, what if you did this?’ And it’s amazing and so much better. It’s awesome to have those two there to pick their brains and kind of create – they’ve played a big part in creating what we created last night for sure.
What it was like when he came back through the curtain:
The best. Generally speaking, every TakeOver, especially that one yesterday, when we got to the back, everyone was applauding. Happy, hugs, handshakes, but the first question who anybody who came up to me asked was ‘Hey, are you okay?’ Making sure about that first. Then when I told them I was fine they said, ‘Incredible, thank you so much for doing that.’ It’s funny you say the criticism thing, cause I’m always who is like, ‘Anything that you saw?’ I look for it, yeah. I obsess on – to me, I’ve never had, I know everyone feels this way, but I’ve never had and will never have the perfect match. But I’m going to try so hard to get it. I’ll find 10 different things that I’m like, ‘Oh I didn’t like this, or this could’ve been a little bit better,’ I’m proud of it, for sure. And I’m happy with it. But I definitely don’t think I’ve ever had a match that, start to finish, it was exactly what I wanted. But sometimes that’s not necessarily a bad thing either.
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