Marek Brave recently spoke with Andrew Thompson for POST Wrestling about training Zicky Dice and his relationship. Highlights are below:
Marek on training Zicky Dice, recalls having an intense argument with him during a practice session:
“From day one [Zicky was who he is]. He was in a pretty successful band and still is before arriving, so he always kind of had that stage presence about him and he was always quite the entertainer. Sometimes to a fault. I remember — he might get mad at me for telling this story but he’ll get over it. I remember, coming to the end of his class, there was one day where just — I don’t know if he was in a mood or he wasn’t feeling it or whatnot but we were having practice matches that day and he just decided to goof off during his entire practice match and he didn’t take it seriously and he didn’t try hard and he thought it was funny and a couple of his classmates thought it was funny but I didn’t think it was very funny. I might’ve been having a bad day too and I pulled him aside — actually I didn’t even pull him aside. I just called him out in front of everybody and told him he was being lazy, he was being a fool and if he continued to act that way, he’d never have a future in professional wrestling but then he made a full-on career of being a fool so I was wrong on that.”
“And he got mad and he yelled at me and you know, as a head coach, I’m not gonna take any signs of disrespect from anyone so I yelled back at him and then eventually it got heated so much that I kicked him out of class but on his way out, he decided to do a little chirping so I followed him outside and I was like, ‘You need to get out of here’ and he pushed me and I pushed him back and we came very close to getting into a fist fight right outside the doors of our training facility at the time. Thankfully that didn’t happen and cooler heads prevailed and he called to apologize later in the evening and everything was cool after that and he ended up graduating and he stuck around for a little while and then went off and did his own thing and he’s achieved some pretty good success and I’m very proud of him. We talk all the time. That’s so far, that’s so long ago. That’s completely water under the bridge. We’re cool now. He’ll text me and call me for advice, basically once a week and we keep in touch and he’s doing great things and I’m very, very proud of him.”
Marek on the competitiveness between him and Seth Rollins while they were on the independents together/their feud in AAW:
“My persona and my character and my standing within the company [AAW] just grew from there and so did Tyler, so did Seth and we actually ended up really, at the time in a very heated rivalry with each other in storyline and kinda outside of storyline a little bit too just because we always wanted to one-up each other and be the one to have the better matches and so on and so forth and people will laugh when they watch this but Danny Daniels always said I was better than him until I had my neck injury so, maybe it’d be called the Brave and Black Wrestling Academy,” Brave laughed. “But we had an awesome feud for the AAW Heavyweight Title after he had turned on me as my tag team partner and I think that’s kind of a running theme with him I think.”
